. . . the new . . .
N-word -- something that white people are not permitted to say, on pain of betraying their racist hearts.
The Houston Chronicle, which has frequently used the word in the past, is suddenly quarantining it with scare quotes and scary descriptors.
An audience of about 600 people who had received him with polite applause, and who seemed for the most part bored, reacted with jeers and sustained booing when he mentioned, almost in passing, that the would repeal "Obamacare," the GOP's derisive shorthand for the Affordable Care Act. (Joe Holley, "Boos come as no surprise," Houston Chronicle, July 12, 2012)
The quotation marks might be excused here. Mr. Holley is quoting Mitt Romney's use of the term. But "GOP's derisive shorthand for the Affordable Care Act" is reported in the reporter's own derisive voice as plain fact. He goes on to quote, lovingly and at length, a pro-Obama critic of the term.
NAACP board chair Roslyn M. Brock, a health care expert, described Romney's remarks about what he called "Obamacare" as particularly upsetting.
"It's not Obamacare. It is the law of the land," Brock declared. . . .
Mr. Obama and his posse, blessedly, are under no similar constraint about using the O-word.
"You want to call it Obamacare -- that's okay, because I do care," Obama said at a fundraiser in Atlanta late last week. Then on Friday, the White House urged supporters of the law to tweet why they backed it with the hashtag "#ilikeobamacare." And on Sunday, White House senior adviser David Plouffe threw down the political gauntlet on the term; "I'm convinced at the end of the decade, the Republicans are going to regret turning this [into] 'Obamacare,'" Plouffe said on "Fox News Sunday."
The decision to throw their arms around "Obamacare" -- initially a pejorative term coined by Republicans to deride the Affordable Care Act and compare it to Hillary Clinton's failed "Hillarycare" effort -- is a significant shift in how the president and his team talk about the law.
. . . .
"On Obamacare, Republicans spent hundreds of millions branding Obamacare as a negative, and we believe we can turn that to our advantage," said Stephanie Cutter, a spokesman for Obama's campaign. "The term is incredibly popular with the president's supporters, who will fight to the end to defend the new law after 70 years of work to pass health reform."
(Chris Cillizza, "The Fix: President Obama embraces 'Obamacare' label. But why?" washingtonpost.com, March 26, 2012)
Someone also needs to alert white cartoonist Nick Anderson, the all-white editorial board, and any number of reporters and editors at the Chronicle.
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