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Who really deserves Rahm Emanuel’s apology?
By Lauren | February 5, 2010
Hot-headed White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been making headlines again. According to news reports, Emanuel lost his cool at an August meeting of White House aides and liberal groups, dismissing as “f—ing retarded” some attendees’ idea of airing ads attacking conservative Democrats who opposed the President’s health care overhaul proposal. Five months later, Emanuel’s remark was reported in The Wall Street Journal, drawing a firestorm of criticism from disability advocates. Emanuel ended up having to make multiple apologies, first to Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver, then to a group of disability advocates at a follow-up meeting because Shriver said he couldn’t accept Emanuel’s apology on behalf of all of those who might have been offended. Emanuel has also promised to sign an online pledge to make the offensive term “retarded” obsolete, and to work toward removing it from federal law.
Good on ya, Rahm. But your critics are on the wrong track.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Emanuel’s comment was obnoxious, offensive, and all too true to the bad-boy reputation that limits his effectiveness in Washington. Emanuel definitely owed an apology to the browbeaten people in the meeting whose ideas he so rudely dismissed. But disability advocates should be demanding apologies from the meeting attendees who leaked the story to The Wall Street Journal months after Emanuel mouthed off. Those are the people who took a private conversation and made it public - and painful - to the disabled. That they may have done so in an effort to further their own political agenda makes their calculated indiscretion even worse.
President Obama made an eloquent call for more civility in Washington yesterday, and he was absolutely right. This country is facing a tidal wave of problems that won’t get solved as long as people are more interested in counting political coup than in working together. Emanuel desperately needs to take a lesson from his boss and learn to be more civil, both publicly and in private strategy meetings. But he’s still just a fallible human being who is going to speak inartfully from time to time, and so is every other public servant in Washington. It’s time for people who want to make a positive contribution to the legislative process to stop playing “gotcha” games and turning unfortunate private conversations into public political capital.
Topics: Apologies, Personal Ethics, Social Ethics, ethics |