Ilargi: In the past few days, I’ve come across a few headlines like these: Where The Hell Is The Outrage? (Mike Shedlock) and Where’s the Anger, America?
At first, they made me wonder why anyone would want to ask themselves these questions today. I’ve asked myself and my readers the same questions many times, but I stopped doing so long ago.
Then something occurred to me. I do know at least part of the answer to those questions, and it’s something I didn’t realize -or put into so many words- before. That is, America doesn’t get angry or outraged because it has a political leader to whom nothing sticks.
Barack Obama is the new Teflon president, and some 26 years after the term was first used to describe Ronald Reagan (and was one of very few negative labels he couldn’t shake), Obama fits the term so well Reagan never had anything on him.
Wikipedia has this:
The phrase “Teflon president” was coined in 1983 by Patricia Schroeder, a then Democratic Congresswoman from Colorado, who said of then-President Reagan,
“After carefully watching Ronald Reagan, I can see he’s attempting a great breakthrough in political technology. He has been perfecting the Teflon-coated presidency. He sees to it that nothing sticks to him. He is responsible for nothing.”
Her characterization did stick, and the phrase “Teflon President” entered the American political lexicon. Jerrold M. Post, Director of the Political Psychology Program for the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, has written that:
“[Reagan's] followers actively ignored data that disconfirmed their idealization” of [him], thus contributing to his image as the ‘Teflon’ President.”
Although his approval numbers “plummeted” as the Iran-Contra Affair unfolded, his “immense popularity … was largely unscathed”, and when his term ended he had the highest approval ratings of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. The American political magazine Mother Jones has dubbed it “one of the most durable political metaphors of our time.”
The Washington Post said in 1992 that Schroeder had been :
“the only Democrat who ever came up with a derogatory label that stuck to President Reagan”.
Nevertheless, Schroeder has more recently expressed dismay over the impact the phrase had, and said in 2004 following Reagan’s death:
I was hoping people would say, “Yes, he is commander in chief, he should be responsible.” Instead people said, “Yes, that is a Teflon coat. How do I get one of those?”
via The Automatic Earth: October 20 2009: Nobody blames a Teflon man.
