Politics & Power Quote by Tavis Smiley

Smiley’s line is a three-part moral contract dressed up as civic etiquette: respect, protect, correct. It’s rhetorically neat, almost liturgical, and that’s the point. By stacking those verbs, he frames presidential criticism not as disloyalty but as a required form of care. “Protect” signals the reflex of Black political leadership in the Obama era, when critique was often weaponized by opponents; you guard the symbol because you know how quickly it can be turned into a target. “Correct” is the pressure valve: an insistence that admiration can’t become complicity.

The subtext is a tightrope walk familiar to anyone who lived through the first Black presidency in public: say you’re disappointed without feeding the machine that’s eager to call you ungrateful, radical, or irrelevant. Smiley’s repetition of “we have to” sounds communal, but it’s also a defensive move, positioning his critique as consensus-minded and principled rather than personal or opportunistic. He’s not merely giving himself permission to speak; he’s preemptively arguing for the legitimacy of dissent.

The hedging clause - “since he’d been on the national stage at least” - is a lawyerly calibration that situates his respect as consistent, not newly convenient. And the unfinished, self-correcting cadence (“I’ve had - I’ve always…”) reveals the real drama: respect is easy to perform; correction is costly. Smiley is trying to keep both in the same sentence, because in that moment, separating them could make you a traitor to one side or a prop for the other.