President Obama and the Guantanamo Heckler
Hecklers of speeches — especially major ones — aren’t new. A public disruption of a speaker is meant as an attempt to embarrass the speaker and get attention for the heckler and the heckler’s cause. Yesterday, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink attended the President’s speech at the National Defense University at Ft. McNair yesterday and proceeded to heckle him 3 times during the speech. The video below (approx 8 minutes long and I apologize for the commercial) shows that segment of the President’s speech. I couldn’t hear everything she said, but it seems clear to me that she was calling for the immediate release of some number of the Gitmo prisoners. While the President was proposing a new plan to close Gitmo. What is fascinating to me about this clip is the President’s reaction to Ms. Benjamin’s interruptions. Not only did he appear to be listening to her, but he validated her concerns (or some of them) as important and worth listening to. I can’t imagine GWB managing this kind of respect towards someone yelling at him, and whoever was yelling at him would have been immediately hustled away from the event — not given two more times to disrupt. I haven’t had a chance to see the entire speech to know what exactly the President said, so I’m not here agreeing or disagreeing with what he proposed yesterday. But I am pretty proud of the way he handled this:
Tags: Gitmo, President Obama
I too was impressed by the way the President handled this. I was listening on the radio, and I kept waiting for her to be frog-marched away, but she just kept on going. In fact the audio quality improved as if somebody handed her a microphone. Or maybe they just pointed a directional mike at her.
The audience too didn’t start catcalling or loud murmuring as I would have expected, but instead kept quiet and let her say her piece.
I wonder if Obama has standing rules for how to handle hecklers?
I like the way he said “part of free speech is listening”
President Obama won the Internets for that one!!!
Sounded like a bit to me.
The President was all class the woman was no class