Restaurant owner dies a er meeting Obama

The Rev. Jesse Jackson and his son have stopped at Ann’s Place. So have several professional football players.

For Josephine “Ann” Harris, however, none came close to President Barack Obama visiting her West Akron restaurant. He was her hero.

“You know it’s great,” Harris, 70, said Friday morning, just after Obama left her familyowned restaurant.

Harris, who didn’t know Obama was coming until that morning, sat at a booth with a wet towel around her neck.

“He treated us like one of the brothers,” she said. “He hugged all of us and got his picture taken with all of us.”

Hours later Harris, who had been ill for some time, complained of fatigue and a tingling feeling. She was rushed to Akron General Medical Center, where she died about 11:15 a.m. NEW YORK — The mayors of New York and Philadelphia and the governor of New Jersey let loose with a few choice vulgarities in the past two weeks in otherwise G-rated public settings, including a town-hall meeting and a hot dog-eating contest.

And all three men knew full well the microphone was on.

While foul language has been uttered in politics before, the blue streak is making some wonder if it reflects the coarsening effects of pop culture in this reality-TV era of “Jersey Shore” and “The Real Housewives,” a decline in public discourse, or a desire by politicians to come across as average Joes.

First there was famously blunt New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie branding a lawmaker “one arrogant S.O.B.” at a town hall meeting last month.

Then New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, apparently having trouble stomaching a slew of puns in his prepared remarks for Tuesday’s contestant weigh-in before the Fourth of July hot dog-eating contest at Coney Island, chuckled, “Who wrote this s---?” to guffaws from the crowd.

Then it was Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s turn on Thursday at a news conference where he discussed a shooting a few blocks from the center of the city’s July Fourth celebration. He said he wasn’t going to let the city’s image be harmed by “some little a------ 16-yearold.”

“My sense is: Because they want to appear to be in tune with popular culture, politicians feel free to express themselves in profane ways,” said Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker. And he finds that troubling: “I honestly do believe that, in aping the coarseness of popular culture, people in public life are really dragging us into a discourse of fang and claw.”

President Harry S. Truman was criticized for his use of such salty language — for his time — as “hell” and “damn.” And many Americans were shocked by Richard Nixon’s liberal use of profanities on the Watergate tapes.

In more recent years, thencandidate George W. Bush was caught on a live microphone describing a reporter as a “major-league a------.”

The seeming proliferation of political swearing reflects changes in both social norms and the media landscape, said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. O and remarks that might once not have been reported now get captured on video and posted online.

“Politics has been nasty” for years, Thompson said. “The difference is we now have media that show this stuff.”