BY RON DZWONKOWSKI
FREE PRESS ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Even presidents of the United States have been known to use salty language in moments of frustration — or for calculated effect.

So it was hardly shocking to hear President Barack Obama say in an interview this morning that he was trying to figure out “whose ass to kick” over the Gulf Coast oil spill. Not exactly soaring presidential rhetoric, but it makes the point that he’s angry and intends to hold someone accountable.

Had the president said “I want to know who to know who is responsible so I can inflict some pain on them,” well, the impact just wouldn’t have been the same.

Obama’s expression was fairly mild by contemporary political standards, when vice presidents go around dropping f-bombs.

George H.W. Bush, when he was vice president under Ronald Reagan, used a variation of Obama’s expression — “we kicked a little ass,” he said — to describe his performance in a debate with Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro during the 1984 campaign.

And historians would surely consider Obama pretty tame compared to some other modern presidents, notably Lyndon Baines Johnson.

"People said my language was bad,” Richard Nixon once remarked of his predecessor in the White House, “but Jesus, you should have heard LBJ."

But the American public never did. Back then, presidents were either more private or more discrete in their use of profanity — or maybe they just got away with more because there weren’t so many microphones and cameras around.

Perhaps President Obama could have set a better example for young people in his choice of words. It seems unlikely that he’d let such language from one of his daughters go uncorrected. But then, he made his point — and at a time when profanity is so prevalent in popular culture and sports this level of it will probably be acceptable from a president.
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