Clifford Orwin critiques President Obama's Tucson speech in the Globe and Mail

January 14, 2011

Whatever others may make of him, Barack Obama continues to see himself as a statesman standing above party and partisanship, one who, unlike his opponents, is actuated by a lofty civic vision. This vision was on display in Tucson on Wednesday evening. Mr. Obama rose above tacky surroundings to deliver the best speech of his career. It was the best because it was the most Lincolnian. The problem was that Tucson wasn’t Gettysburg.

The event, Together We Thrive: Tucson and America, was quite as inane as its title. Amateurishness brushed shoulders with banality, boosterism and political correctness. The preliminary speeches were all bad, as if Americans facing an occasion of mourning no longer knew what to say or how to say it. By the time Mr. Obama’s turn came, there was no occasion to rise to, only a mishmash in need of redemption.

And Mr. Obama redeemed it. He gave the best speech of his career. And he did a star turn as president of all the people.

Mr. Obama wisely refrained from editorializing about the shooting. Taken for what it was, the act of a madman, there was little to be said about it. Equally wise was the decision to postpone discussion of any policy changes that the incident might suggest. This wasn’t the time or the place to weigh in on guns or mental health care or the supposed (but wholly undemonstrated) role of inflammatory rhetoric.

Mr. Obama acknowledged that such a national discussion had begun, but rather than join in (which would inevitably have proved controversial and thus divisive), he enjoined civility in its conduct. Indeed, he presented just this civility as the appropriate legacy of the shooting, the proper lesson to be drawn from it. Not, he noted carefully, because incivility had caused the shooting, but because civility would do justice to the memory of the victims.

Mr. Obama makes no secret of deriving his inspiration from Lincoln. Without this touch of megalomania, he wouldn’t be such a compelling figure. In fact, his theme on Wednesday was the greatest of Lincoln’s themes, that of civic rededication. As Lincoln invoked those fallen at Gettysburg as models for the required reconsecration of Americans to their nation’s principles, so Mr. Obama offered the victims of Tucson.

A few dead have this advantage over heaps of them: You can commemorate each by name. Mr. Obama did so deftly, with telling and moving details. At the same time, he cast them as exemplifying the best in ordinary Americans: parents, grandparents, spouses, veterans, public servants, children. Fine people all, but no finer than we can all be. Especially touching was his portrayal of the youngest victim, the nine-year-old girl born on 9/11. Nothing is harder than to memorialize a child without bathos, but Mr. Obama mostly avoided it. The culminating exhortation, stressing his favoured virtues of civility and empathy, was also nicely done, meaning not overdone.

Yet, much as Mr. Obama aspires to be Lincoln, Tucson wasn’t Gettysburg. One was a great battle, the turning point in a war deciding the fate of a nation. The other was a minor and senseless event. Mr. Obama had to make a lot from a little. His soaring rhetoric craves a great cause; but that cause continues to elude him.

Speeches have been as much a curse as a blessing to this most eloquent of recent presidents. He has expected too much from them and has encouraged us to do the same. Can there be a partisan payoff from so studiedly non-partisan a speech? Yes, if, as Mr. Obama thinks, his lofty vision of civility and empathy will necessarily translate into support for him, given Republican opponents who are a pack of naysayers. This has always been his view of them, and they’ve not done nearly enough to refute it.

BY CLIFFORD ORWIN