POSTED BY MARTIN KICH
“Let’s not judge the president on what he says.” New GOP Senate Candidate Rep. Jim Renacci (R-OH)
In case you are wondering whether the context might somehow make the comment less dubious, here is an excerpt from an article written by Darrel Rowland and Jessica Wehrman for the Columbus Dispatch:
Ohio Rep. Jim Renacci, who dropped out of the GOP gubernatorial primary Thursday in order to run for the U.S. Senate, appeared on Fox & Friends, where he defended the man he desperately needs for his fledgling U.S. Senate campaign.
“I’ve said all along the president many times says what people are thinking,” Renacci told Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade.
It’s a line the Wadsworth Republican has used repeatedly when asked about Trump, but it’s the first time Renacci has applied it to a statement widely condemned as overtly racist.
“I learned as a business guy you have to be careful what you say because people pick everything up,” Renacci said. “Believe me, when I have a mic on I have got to watch what I say. That is a business guy going into a political career.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Renacci remarked, “I think a lot like the president.” . . .
Renacci said America shouldn’t be judging the president by what he is saying now, adding that he “absolutely” wants Trump by his side as he seeks the GOP Senate nomination.
“I always say judge the president after four years. Let’s judge the president after what we’ve done — let’s not judge the president on what he says,” Renacci said.
The Fox interview is posted on Renacci’s Twitter feed — although his remarks defending Trump’s comments were not included.
Appearing on MSNBC a few hours later, Ohio Gov. John Kasich called Trump’s comments “not helpful” and “terrible.”
Rowland and Wehrman’s complete article is available at: http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180112/renacci-defends-kasich-condemns-trumps-s-hole-remark.
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…” it’s the first time Renacci has applied it to a statement widely condemned as overtly racist.” Widely condemned? By whom? How about the virtue signaling, liberal, echo-chamber media and lefty sites like this one. Beyond that those of us who live in the real world think this is just another nothingburger that only has meaning in the perfervid racist imagination of lefties.
If you believe that the Columbus Dispatch is part of the “liberal echo chamber,” you have simply never read the newspaper.
Also, just because the remark has not been criticized in the Far Right echo chamber does not mean that criticism of it is not credible: that is, you have no more claim on the “real world” than people of the Far Left do. And most people in the country find both echo chambers much more annoying than enlightening.
Likewise, this rhetorical trick of denouncing any criticism of racism as its own form of racism is just that–a rhetorical trick that was pretty much exhausted during the eight years of Obama’s presidency. I don’t see how living in the “real world” should require making words mean the opposite of what they have always meant.
All that said, I do like the use of “perfervid.” It’s a nice change from the usual “fevered.” So, if nothing else, you have improved my vocabulary. (But, and I guess there is always a but, it’s more than a little jarring to see “perfervid” used in the same sentence as “nothingburger.”)
According to “About Academe Blog”, “Academe Blog is a production of Academe magazine and focuses on issues in higher education.” I think these squabbles would more easily be avoided if your blog posts focused on higher ed. Staying on topic is a best practice in blogging for maintaining and growing your audience. I really enjoy your blog posts about higher ed, academic freedom, and other issues relevant to the AAUP’s mission. I look forward to those because they help me stay engaged with issues I think are important and read a perspective about higher ed that I respect. With all due respect, I don’t go to your blog posts just because they’re from you, on whatever topic you decide to blog about. I will be less and less likely to click on and read the posts if I can’t be sure they will be on higher ed/AAUP topics. Thanks for considering this.
In 2011, Governor Kasich signed Senate Bill 5, which would have eliminated faculty collective bargaining rights in Ohio. We organized to fight it, and a faculty member at my campus not only resigned from AAUP but became an objector because we had never gotten involved in political issues and now we were very clearly doing so, financially. Although it is still the only instance in which my chapter has made a political contribution with member dues, it did not matter to that member that we were fighting for our right simply to exist. Since then, our state conference has twice had to mobilize to prevent insertions of language into state budget bills that would have eliminated our CB rights, and each session, there seem to be new bills proposed that impinge on all sorts of things affecting faculty, from sick leave to the selection of textbooks.
For the last year, my chapter has been trying to negotiate a new contract. At first, our administration (the third during that period) was trying to argue that the gross mismanagement of our budget required their gutting our contract of basically all of the most important things that we have gained over the last 20 years. Now, it is now very clear that those demands have little to do with the largely self-created financial issues–with any financial necessities; rather, the administration/Board would simply like to return us to where we were 20 years ago–to the circumstances that made our faculty want to unionize in the first place. The language echoes all of the rhetoric used on the state and national levels. And, not coincidentally, we have almost 86% AAUP membership in our chapter.
I do recognize that in many states, faculty cannot unionize, but the pending decision on the Janus case is important because the revenue from collective-bargaining chapters is the main thing that sustains AAUP as a national organization. So, the association’s ability to defend academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure/economic security is tied very closely to the current political environment.
I am also a professor of English, and so although I have sometimes been self-indulgent in my posts, a large percentage of the more political posts have related to the use and abuse of language, which in this age of writing-across-the-curriculum and writing-intensive course in all disciplines ought to be a topic of interest to more than English faculty. Moreover, the focus on our public discourse seems hardly extraneous at the current moment, when faculty are being disciplined and even fired for comments that are deemed offensive by the same groups that are defending the “freedom of speech” of anybody and everybody who shares their own views.
Over the last four years, I have done over 1,800 posts to this blog, and I am guessing that as many as a third of them have been on politics, on labor issues, or on topics related to language, literature, film, or popular culture. Although I am absolutely certain that the blog could have done without some of them, it is also true that some of them have attracted continuing interest. For instance, a post on “epistocracy,” which I made several years ago, gets between five and 50 hits just about every day.
All that said, the great thing about a blog is that everyone does not have to read everything.