Human suffering abounds along the killer tornado’s path from western Pulaski County to Mayflower to Vilonia and into White County.
Today’s helicopter flyover by President Barack Obama—and his touch-down visit—ought to mean a great deal to victims.
Persons displaced by the storm and weary from tragedy should receive a clear signal and take solace. Their federal government—even if they’ve assailed it for being too big and trying to do too much—cares about them and is committed to helping them.
So this will be a day to put aside the national partisan political disease.
Alas, that will be much to put aside.
Two-thirds of the voters of this state disapprove of this president. It’s because … well, we could talk all day about that and settle nothing.
It’s partially a combination of illogic and resentment.
One reason for the resentment is that Obama wants to help people without health insurance in much the same way he wants to help people whose homes have been blown away. There is some irony there, of course, but I’d get accused of politicizing the tragedy if I took the point much further.
And I have other more personal points to advance and politicize.
It’s easier to express disdain for someone who is alien from you than for someone who is standing next to you. Obama has not been in Arkansas since 2006 when he breezed in as a rising-star U.S. senator from Illinois to rally troops on the state Capitol steps for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Mike Beebe.
It was that remoteness, that alienation, that made easier the recently outlandish expressions of egregious disdain for this president by two politicians whom the president might encounter personally today—and who, if encountering him, surely will be courteous, even obsequious. They will delay until his departure—his usual remoteness—their explanation that, in deference to the tornado victims, they shelved for a day their otherwise appropriate disregard.
They’re an excitable pair, given to emotional outpourings before the cheering grandstand.
U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin is the lame-duck Republican congressman for the heaviest-hit areas. For that reason, and because he sits for a few more months on a homeland security subcommittee that oversees disaster programs, he may well be among the few dignitaries who will greet Obama as he disembarks from Air Force One today.
Griffin is not so good in a crisis. Last September, the U.S. Capitol was put on lockdown because of a security threat. Griffin used the occasion to put on Twitter that Obama and two other Democrats—Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer—needed to tone down their rhetoric.
He later deleted the tweet, as it went viral. He tried to explain that his emotions had overrun him. He said he merely was expressing his frustration with the coarseness of our rhetoric.
Oddly, he assigned that coarseness to Obama and other Democrats rather than, for example, a Republican congressman who shouted during an Obama State of the Union address that Obama was lying. Or to himself, a former opposition researcher for Karl Rove.
To attempt to extricate himself, Griffin tweeted that only the “shooter” outside was to blame. That had him blaming the U.S. Capitol Police. The offending woman, out of her head, had crashed her car into a U.S. Capitol barricade. The only shot had been fired by authorities.
So Griffin never quite got his facts any straighter than his thinking.
Meanwhile, reports are that selected local officials will be invited to be on hand today for Obama’s meetings with victims and walking tour. That is when, perhaps, Obama might encounter Republican state Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway and Bigelow.
Just three months ago after Obama’s most-recent State of the Union address, Rapert took to Facebook and ranted that Obama ought to be impeached and that Arkansas should enact state laws nullifying his policies. Rapert said Obama was not a legitimate president, but a tyrannical despot.
Rapert was driven to these unusually high levels of irrationality because Obama had mentioned in the speech that he might issue executive orders if Congress wouldn’t go along with him on proposed legislation.
Obama has issued fewer executive orders than his preceding tyrants, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Bush issued an executive order allowing torture. Obama’s main one, so much more despotic and inhumane, was to require private contractors to pay a higher minimum wage on federal jobs.
It would be rich if Obama, in thanking local politicians for their dedicated service today, would single out Rapert for supporting Obamacare in Arkansas with his decisive vote in the state Senate for the private-option form of Medicaid expansion.
But Obama probably won’t do that. Someone surely would accuse him of politicizing the tragedy and trivializing the day’s important human focus.
Maybe he could just put it on Twitter and Facebook.
Better yet: Griffin and Rapert might seek a quick personal moment with the president to apologize to him. None of us would have to know about it, which is probably the only way they might do it.
The moral of all this is that we should always speak of our fellow men as if they weren’t remote, but in our presence. In that context, I’ve considered for this column’s purpose whether I’d say these things to Griffin and Rapert personally.
Yep. I would.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.