As you may know, in addition to my work here for the Prospect I write a piece every day for The Plum Line at the Washington Post. Today's is about the criticism the Obama administration is getting for the fact that the highest-ranking American official present at the march yesterday in Paris was the American ambassador, and not our president or Secretary of State. There were a lot of condemnations not only from conservatives, as you'd expect, but also from journalists. Of particular note is the fact that CNN's Jake Tapper said he was "ashamed" of the fact that the top American leadership was absent:
Maybe my memory's faulty, but I don't recall any other journalist committed to the ideal of "objectivity" saying he was "ashamed" about the fact that millions of Americans have no health coverage, or about the 30,000 Americans killed by guns every year, or about our ample contributions to global warming. It's precisely because those things are about real people's lives that it would be considered deeply inappropriate for a mainstream journalist to express such an opinion. But you can say you're ashamed about something entirely symbolic-and in the long run essentially meaningless-like the fact that the American ambassador attended a march when it would have a bigger deal had the Secretary of State or the Vice President been there.
That isn't to say that symbolism is unimportant. Much of politics is about the creation and dissemination of symbols. But what exactly is the damage that has been done by the fact that a (supposedly) insufficiently high-ranking American official represented our government at this event? Will the peoples of the world no longer believe that America is an advocate for freedom of speech, or that Americans abhor terrorism? I doubt it.
