Word: lapeller
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...Obama now wears a flag pin on his lapel. Every...
...Such was the false dichotomy that faced Barack Obama during his April 16 debate against Hillary Clinton, when Charlie Gibson asked Obama a voter question about why he did not wear a flag pin on his lapel. The previous October, an Iowa ABC reporter had asked him a similar question, to which Obama replied that he had worn one after 9/11, but soon noticed, "people wearing a lapel pin but not acting very patriotic." He went on to explain, "I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest. Instead I'm going to try to tell the American...
...patriotic symbols has often been the difference between Democrats who win and Democrats who lose. Why couldn't George McGovern buy a white working-class vote in 1972? Partly, as the great campaign chronicler Theodore White noted, because virtually every member of Richard Nixon's Cabinet wore a flag lapel button, and no one in McGovern's entourage did. Michael Dukakis lost in 1988 because as governor of Massachusetts, he vetoed a bill requiring teachers to lead students in the Pledge of Allegiance, a veto the Republicans never let him forget...
...citizens. Liberals are more comfortable thinking about America that way: as a nation that must earn its citizens' devotion by making good on its ideals. For conservatives, the devotion must come first; politics is secondary. But for liberals, patriotic devotion without political struggle is often empty. Liberals think lapel pins are fine if they inspire Americans to struggle to realize the nation's promise. But they worry that those symbols can become--especially when wielded by people in power--substitutes for that struggle and thus emblems of hypocrisy and complacency...
...matter how they define patriotism, Americans should tremble before suggesting that any fellow citizen lacks it. Obama's original mistake was not in declining to wear the flag pin but in saying he had stopped wearing it because he saw "people wearing a lapel pin but not acting very patriotic." And that's what makes his current adoption of the symbol so shrewd. By opposing the Iraq war in the fevered year after 9/11--when some Bush supporters branded doves unpatriotic--he has already expressed an understanding of patriotism particularly beloved by liberals: patriotism as lonely dissent. Now he is expressing...