Barack Obama came to Tucson not simply to honor the victims there. He came to recast the story.
A president’s role, in these times, is to help heal a city, to help unite a country. We’ve seen presidents do this before.
But this time, in America, we couldn’t even agree on what had actually happened, except that it was something horrible, something we tell ourselves is unimaginable — even though something like it has happened too many times before.
Six people died. A congresswoman lies in a hospital, victim of an attempted assassination. A judge is dead. Incomprehensibly, a 9-year- old is dead. A delusional man with a powerful gun, smirking at us from his mug-shot photo, is the killer.
And yet, on the day Obama goes to Tucson, we’re fighting about a Sarah Palin Facebook video, in which she charges critical “journalists and pundits” with “blood libel,” an old anti-Semitic charge used for centuries to justify the persecution of Jews. I doubt Palin understood the history of the term, which fortunately doesn’t come up much in 21st-century America.
But the fight over Palin’s words simply reinforced the notion that the terms of debate had gone wrong. There have not been many such tragedies that seemed to have pulled a nation — or at least the media part of the nation — further apart.
And so Obama came to Tucson to speak at a memorial that quickly turned into a pep rally. It was a college campus, and the arena was filled with students who were apparently looking for some reason to cheer. Obama offered them one early, when he said he had been told Gabby Giffords opened her eyes not long after he had visited her in the hospital.
And so began Obama’s story of the victims and their place in America and what, in fact, he said we owe them.
“If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost,” Obama said. “Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.”
The demand of the news cycle is an old theme for Obama, who ran, of course, on changing Washington. If Obama’s first two years have offered mixed results, his biggest failure has been in his biggest promise — to change the tone of the country.
The tone has gotten harsher. And the speed in which a tragic moment turns into another political debate was what made Obama’s speech so important.
As Obama said, it’s right and necessary to debate the causes of this tragedy and what might be done to prevent a recurrence. It’s natural, he said, to want to bring order to chaos and to bring understanding to what seems inexplicable.
It’s natural, then, that the debate about high-powered guns resurfaces. It’s natural, too, that we talk about whether government-as-the- enemy rhetoric has helped diminish faith in any and all institutions.
We didn’t need a tragedy to figure out that it’s easy to demonize the other side. We know Obama has a tendency to lecture. But it was easy, in this case, for Obama to rise above the arguments. As one pundit said, it was a low bar.
I’m sure Obama had figured on a more somber crowd, but he seemed to understand, as he began speaking, what was expected of him.
And he had his theme firmly in place. It wasn’t incivility that spurred the killer, but that didn’t mean that incivility wasn’t at issue.
“Only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way,” he said, “that would make them proud.”
And he offered 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green’s story to make his case. The story is too sad to bear. She is born on 9/11. She becomes what you hope your child becomes — an innocent believer in the things you hope every 9-year-old believes in.
And so Christina goes to see her congresswoman, seeing, as Obama said, a role model, a person to look up to. She looks to Giffords, he said, “with eyes undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.”
At this point, there couldn’t have been many dry eyes.
You couldn’t miss the unspoken fact, too, that Obama has young daughters.
You couldn’t miss the point, either, of the innocence that Christina Green represents and the tragedy of that innocence being lost.
“I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it,” Obama told the audience.
And we know that everyone in America hopes exactly the same thing.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
