The President’s remarks wonderfully echo those of my friend Rich Harwood, made earlier this week online: “To set a different trajectory will require that we check our own heated rhetoric when talking about ‘the other side.’ We must highlight those places where strange bedfellows have come together to get good things done. We must stand next to leaders – especially those with whom we disagree – when they act with integrity.”
I’m not over the sick problems with public discourse, the opportunism of the cynical and ill-informed. Read what Andrew Sullivan wrote about Sarah Palin’s self-serving, victim-complex video. Or David Neiwert on eliminationist rhetoric.
But, the President’s speech, like his refusal to trade jabs with John McCain when the moderator explicitly invited him to in the third presidential debate, calls on people to reach out, not lash out. That’s a better rebuke to Palin’s blood-baiting and pandering, which Obama knows. Do we?