It is hard for an empty suit to take a stand - or perhaps even to understand what it means to take a stand

Richard Cohen's sister is canceling her inauguration party because of President-elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren to bless Mr. Obama's taking the office of the Presidency of the United State. According to her brother's column in the Washington Post, what made her do this is the way in which Mr. Obama's choice to pick this pastor for this occasion serves as a special sort of condoning of Mr. Warren's views about gays and lesbians. I agree with Richard Cohen, and apparently his sister, that these views should be regarded as totally unacceptable by anybody who has any sense of the importance of civil rights and indeed of human rights. I also agree with Richard Cohen's view that as a somebody running for the office of President and who was at the time a U.S. Senator, Mr. Obama had a particular responsibility for denouncing his then-pastor's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, for giving the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan a special award during the primary season. I find it troubling that neither Mr. Cohen nor apparently his sister have not been, as far as I can tell, overly concerned by President-Elect Obama's equally eloquent silence and inaction regarding the sexism and misogyny directed at Senator Clinton and her supporters, particularly the sophomoric expression of these attitudes by Jon Favreau, the man writing President-elect Obama's inaugural address. (I shudder to think what the reaction of the Cohen family would have been if Favreau had been found on YouTube horsing around calling somebody a "homo" - maybe then Richard Cohen's sister would join us in our demand that the President-Elect fire this sophomoric bigot as his chief speech-writer. Whether a bigot is slick (Warren) or juvenile (Favreau), he is still a bigot.)

It is tempting to forget in this sort of dynamic who the real problem is. As is clear from what I have written so far, I wish Richard Cohen and his sister would be, respectively, writing about and canceling inauguration parties as much over Mr. Obama's inaction in the face of sexism and misogyny as they are in the face of anti-Semitism and gay-bashing. And yes, I wish that Richard Cohen's sister had paid attention to and given greater weight to the fact that she had the option to work to elect somebody who, both as a Senator and as a Presidential candidate, repeatedly marched in Pride parades and met with editors of gay newspapers across the country rather than working for somebody who would not even have his photograph taken with Gavin Newsome.

But I am not falling into the trap that lies that way. Just because people got it wrong before does not mean they cannot help matters now. People can learn. So despite the bit of complaining above, I am not going to point a finger at Richard Cohen's sister (or, for that matter, at Katha Pollitt for decrying the misogyny involved in the Warren choice when Pollitt, like Richard Cohen's sister, opted to support Mr. Obama for the presidency when it was already obvious that he was complacent, to say the least, about sexism and misogyny). I am just pleased that they are starting to pay attention now and apparently coming to understand better who they voted for. To quote Richard Cohen: "The real problem has nothing to do with ministers and everything to do with Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader. Sooner or later, he just might have to stand for something."

Aye, there's the rub. During the primary season and the general election a friend of mine who spent some considerable amount of time listening to me lament the Democratic Party's poor judgment in making then-Senator Obama their poster-child, kept saying to me that the real problem with Mr. Obama is that he is an "empty suit".

That term seemed to me too tepid back then. But I have come to see it as the essential problem behind the problem of Mr. Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader, and possibly any kind of leader. To be a moral leader, to stand for something means that you have to fill out your suit, your office, your position. To be an "empty suit" is to be a person who cannot draw a line in the sand, precisely because you do not have an arm and hand within that suit to use to reach out and draw that line. To be an "empty suit" is to be devoid of the weightiness that real leadership requires, including the gravitas to admit to a mistake and change one's position (drop the bigoted minister and lose the bigoted speechwriter; say you have been wrong to dig in your heels rather than listen to the concerns of so many of the people who worked so hard to elect you). To be an "empty suit" is to be a moral vacuum.

I refused to vote for John McCain for a number of reasons but among them was the fact that while I knew he had the capacity for moral leadership, I did not care for the directions toward which his moral commitments would lead my country. I refused to vote for Barack Obama because I knew he came up empty on the capacity for moral leadership.

In some ways, moral emptiness, especially in a President, is worse than moral wrong-headedness. The morally wrong-headed leader takes a stand, e.g. George W. Bush's legitimization of torture, and one can rally people against the stand she or he takes. The morally empty leader takes no stand. Under these circumstances, her or his silences often allow people to forget that the blank that exists in lieu of a leader is the appropriate target of criticism. After all, it seems easier to go after people who actually do take stands (Rick Warren, for example) rather than the person who silently enables wrong-headed person to gain in stature. But this is sleight of hand. The real problem is the enabler, the person who allows the sophomoric sexist to put words in his mouth, the person who lets bigoted clerics and their churches affiliate with him.

So, to Richard Cohen's sister and to Katha Pollitt, I say welcome to my party - the one that got lost in 2008, the one that expected moral leadership of a certain kind from a Democratic president. Now that you are here, I hope you can help me figure out what we are going to do with the empty suit about to occupy the Oval Office. If that empty suit thinks he can pick up sufficient evangelical money and votes in 2012, he is not going to listen to bloggers and op-ed columnists whose votes and followers he thinks he can replace with the support of the evangelicals, regardless of the detestable content of many of their views and some of their conduct. Personally, I do not think we can give the empty suit the backbone necessary to resist the lure of that support. If we cannot give this empty suit some backbone, we need, as I have written before, to start figuring out how we can have a better candidate on offer in 2012. So to the people who are canceling their celebrations, may I suggest that they use the time and effort saved to start solving that problem. We need to coalesce now around somebody who can fight for a nomination by a major Party - probably the the Party formerly recognizable as the Democratic one - who is what Obama's supporters hoped he would be and what I fear he is not.

Comments

[Sarah Davis]

Empty suit is too passive of a description for Obama in my humble opinion. Is he afraid to take a stand or deliberately muddying the waters? I think he brazenly cons and bamboozles to get ahead. He's the smooth guy that can get other people to write his papers for him. He can stand at the edge of a fight without defending either side and claim that fighting is wrong. He cooly walks away on air detached from it all. He neither offends or defends anyone. He's covered in slippery snake oil that he rubs on each morning after his 90 minute workout.
To me, to describe him as an empty suit turns him into an innocent fool packaged by handlers. There's something more going on there that I haven't quite put my finger on...but I don't like it.
My gut reaction to bush during the 2000 election was sadistic frat boy. My vague feeling about Obama is that he is a con artist but i'm not yet sure why the con.
The confusing part might be that he's conning himself as well. I'm reminded of the main character in Philip Roths Pulitzer book [American Pastoral]. I'll go dig it up tomorrow and take another crack at this.

[Mirlo]

"Sooner or later, he (Obama) just might have to stand for something"

Don't hold your breath, Mr. Cohen, he will use someone else, this way he can put whatever blame arises on someone else.

[K2]

It's frustrating for me as a lesbian to see other gay men and lesbians scratching their heads in surprise over this issue. It is particularly galling, given the flack I got for refusing to vote for Obama last month. And the reason I refused to vote for him was because--unlike many of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters--I did not go into denial about who Obama is. With Obama's use and exploitation of sexism during the primaries, along with his campaigning with Donnie McClurkin and his refusal to apologize for it, Obama told us loudly and clearly who he is.

Sexism and homophobia go hand in hand. It has been my personal experience that all too frequently many (not all) gay men forget this fact (John Aravosis anyone?). Whether they were blinded by misogyny or blinded by their strange belief that skin color equals progressive politics, many people--men, women, gay, straight, seemed to willfully ignore what was right in front of them.

Now we will all pay for that willful ignorance.

[Darren Hutchinson]

Katha pollitt really did that? Wow....Reminds me of how Huffington turned completely around on Clinton after the election.

Anyway, you might be interested in how differently Obama responded to Don Imus versus Rick Wilson. It's a very different response: http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2008/12/sorry-adam-and-steve-if-you-can-get.html

[teresainpa]

Obama gave a different answer to the same question depending on audience? I am shocked and amazed...well not really because he has never met an issue he could not stand on both sides of.

[M Sakel]

Yes, indeed! How can an "Empty Suit" (the most appropriate and insultingly true epithet attached to this farcical creature) draw a line on the ethical map that is presented him when he lacks substance.

Barack Hussein Obama, alias Barry Soetoro, as, incredibly, Sarah Palin said in her nomination speech, is "using the presidential nomination quest as a self-discovery" tool! Barack doesn't know what he represents because he still hasn't figured out who he is or what should matter to him, other than his own career advancement. As president of the Harvard Law Review he was praised by the right-wingers as being "inclusive and tolerant" to the point where Barack appointed a Republican to one of the most prestigious editorial positions! Barack's aim to please, however, is not prompted out of sincere willingness to listen and then act so as to advance progressive values. In the very process of appeasing and pleasing (it's what he's all about!), he loses his own moral compass and values in the other person's ideology. His narcissistic personality makes him vulnerable.

That's what happens when, as Heidi Li targeted it, when you operate in a moral vacuum as Barack always has. The ObaMyopics needed the "lefties, women and gays" as a base to get the nomination. The leg thrillers of the misogynist media and a corrupt DNC pushed Him to an undeserved, fraudulent 'finish line' of superdels. But now that he's Prez-elect, he cannot hide his own ineptitude, homophobia, sexism and lack of moral compass. And we are starting to see right through his Empty Suit, at last, and, alas, too late in the game! And now the Empty Suit has another "first" under his belt. Even before elected, investigators will be drilling him on his involvements with Blago whom, when asked by a commentator in 2002 if he will support his election, BHO said: "You betcha! I'll support Hot Rod"!

Could it be that the Empty Suit's does have a moral compass in him after all--but it's as narcissistic as he is and points always to self-preservation? So, really, all we can see are mere externalizations of the suit's movements to survive. But I'm afraid his inevitable moral asphyxiation will result in further deterioration of human rights--especially those of women. Zeus help us!

-0-

P.S. Will Empty Suit-elect (Bush-lite) reverse Dubya's recent Health & Human Services Regulation re medical providers' using their individual subjective moral quirkiness to dictate women's choices; and will he reverse the global gag rule that holds funds from international agencies that help women with reproductive health issues and forbids abortions, even when using their own money?!

[Warren for SCOTUS?]

I'm sure ya'll remember that we were told we had to vote for him to save Roe. The [bum] just might pick someone for SCOTUS who will overturn, either because he really is evangelical or because he is "reaching out" to other side.

Can we start the conversation about who he is going to pick now? The best offense is a good offense and I think we need to start gathering candidates and checking them twice.

[Becky F.]

I thank you Heidi Li. You have put down on paper so many of the thoughts going around in my own head about our President-elect. Or President-select, whatever. Few people have written of Obama's unwillingness to have his photo taken with Gavin Newsome. I found that extraordinarily troubling after learning of that during the campaign. If I ever had a sliver of respect for Obama, it disappeared altogether when I learned of that tidbit. It was one of those jaw-dropping moments for me ~ just who was this person and why was he getting away with this sort of behavior? What Democrat would run from a photo with the mayor of a major city, regardless of that person's sexual orientation? I am a straight woman, but this really really bothered me. Doesn't matter what my sexual orientation is, it just really really bothered me. What a slimy, slithering, snakey thing to do. And he expected LGBT votes? Or yeah, he endeavored to keep this quiet, no one would notice. And...he had the cooperation of the media to cover-up his avoidance of taking a supportive stand on ANYTHING during the campaign. Thank you Heidi Li, for calling attention to such slithering, low-down, inappropriate behavior on the part of a Presidential-wannabe. No matter how hard Mr. Obama tries, he will never ever be a moral leader, because he appears to be constantly confused about his own essential identities: Is he straight or gay? Is he black or white? Is he either? I see him as nothing more than a freak-show, and unfortunately this show will be playing in every neighborhood in our country very soon. It has already had an opening in select cities, and the opening night audiences have lapped it up, with a few exceptions. What a dismal way to begin a new year, new Presidency, and new day in America. What is new is old. I can only shake my head and find some comfort in the knowledge that people such as yourself will write about these acts of cowardice, and lead a call to arms regarding civil/human/women's/gay rights. I salute you, and join in your call. Though it may be called for, I do not apologize for the harshness of my opinions regarding Mr. Obama. He deserves no respect for his lack of courage.

[VB]

Yep, Heidi, you nailed it once again. But what else could we expect from an Illinois legislator who voted "present" over 100 times to avoid taking a stand on difficult issues?

I still can't understand why so many otherwise intelligent people became so infatuated with Obama. Some of them appear to be coming to their senses, but it's a little late.