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The World’s Alex Gallafent looks at questions of political decorum sparked by Republican Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s speech to Congress last night.
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MARCO WERMAN: If you didn’t hear it last night here’s the moment Representative Joe Wilson interrupted President Obama during his speech to Congress. The president was countering accusations against his healthcare plan.
BARACK OBAMA: There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This too is false. The reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.
JOE WILSON: You lie.
OBAMA: It’s not true.
WERMAN: We’ve already heard about the content of this debate but the tone of that exchange is generating a lot of heat. Politicians including Vice President Biden and Senator John McCain have said that such a breach of decorum has no place in the United States Congress. Here’s The World’s Alex Gallafent.
ALEX GALLAFENT: It didn’t take long for Congressman Wilson to offer an apology to President Obama. Today the president accepted it.
OBAMA: I’m a big believer that we all make mistakes. He apologized quickly and without equivocation and I’m appreciative of that. I do think that, as I said last night, we have to get to the point where we can have a conversation.
GALLAFENT: Forgive me Mr. President. The speech last night interrupted the conversation that’s dominated the news over the last couple of months. Raucous town hall meetings and the like. Now it wasn’t the speech of a member of Congress – a debater. This wasn’t in the style of say a British prime minister standing up in parliament and expecting flak from the backbenches. It was the head of state leaving the safe harbor of the executive branch behind and heading into the foreign waters of the legislature. All this reminded Elihu Katz of another political moment. Katz is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. It was 1977. Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, made a historic visit to Israel’s parliament. Katz says Sadat went in armed only with rhetoric.
ELIHU KATZ: Their arrangement was that he would speak in Arabic and that Prime Minister Begin would then reply in Hebrew in the presence of the entire assembled parliament and it was a very dignified reverent occasion.
GALLAFENT: But Katz adds there was heckling just like there was last night. Though there the similarities end. The heckling in Israel was accompanied by a debate between Sadat and Begin – a conversation. A conversation was not the point of President Obama’s visit to Capital Hill last night. It’s not the point of presidential addresses generally. There, says Elihu Katz, conversations are held at a distance in the form of prepared responses and that explains, if not excuses, Congressman Wilson’s interjection.
KATZ: The outburst, while irreverent and unconventional, is not so hard to understand given that the opposition has no voice in the parliament at that moment on that ceremonial occasion.
GALLAFENT: And thus the ceremonial bubble was burst. In another country, say South Korea, things aren’t considered out of hand until punches are thrown. But in the rarefied air of the United States Congress all it takes is a couple of angry words. For The World I’m Alex Gallafent.
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