PRESIDENT BARACK Obama’s speech praising the victims and heroes of the mass shooting that left six Americans dead and 13 wounded on January 8th won acclaim across the partisan divide yesterday.
Speaking in a sports auditorium at the University of Tucson on Wednesday night, Mr Obama eloquently eulogised the victims “and reclaimed the narrative of the day for them”, Marc Thiessen wrote on the Washington Post website. Thiessen called the speech “brilliant”, “courageous” and “outstanding”.
Mr Obama has always aspired to be a figure of unity. At times, his refusal to fight back angered his supporters. But by appealing for civility, kindness and compassion, by telling Americans that “for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness”, the president renewed the country’s faith in him and itself.
The New York Timessaid it was "a president's responsibility to salve a national wound", adding that Mr Obama "was right to fly to Tucson". The president's words and demeanour "were reasonble and beyond appropriate . . . among the few things I've read or heard since Saturday about which I can say that," wrote the Washington Post's Stephen Stromberg.
Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake, also of the Post, praised Mr Obama for daring to attempt such a long speech, for investing himself intellectually and emotionally in the challenge, and for addressing the issue of incivility in politics in a non- partisan manner.
Mr Obama was most emotional when he spoke of Christina Taylor Green, the youngest fatality, perhaps because he has a nine-year-old daughter himself. “In Christina we see all of our children,” he said. “So curious, so trusting, so energetic, so full of magic . . . I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it.”
"He got the tone and content right, in a way he hasn't for the past two years," the right-wing critic Peggy Noonan said on MSNBC. Pat Buchanan, also a conservative, said the president's speech "succeeded magnificently".
Mr Obama’s sensitive and elegant prose was compared favorably to the eight-minute video that his would-be rival Sarah Palin released earlier in the day.
Mrs Palin provoked an outcry by accusing "journalists and pundits" of having "manufactured a blood libel" against her for using gun-related symbols and language. Several commentators said Mrs Palin made a grave strategic error by attempting to compete with Mr Obama. In a phrase that seemed to exonerate her and other conservatives who have used combative rhetoric, Mr Obama said: "We have to guard against simple explanations in the aftermath." The conservative Wall Street Journalinterpreted this as "an implicit rebuke of those who have sought to blame [the gunman] Jared Loughner's violence on the give and take of democratic debate".
Several commentators found the lack of solemnity at the ceremony jarring. The 14,300-strong audience were mostly university students who had not known the victims. They cheered Mr Obama as if he were a rock star and interrupted his speech with applause 42 times. Mr Obama seemed embarrassed by their behaviour, clenching his lips and repeating short, sharp thank yous in an attempt to quiet the crowd.
Emotion reached its highest pitch when Mr Obama announced good news about Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman who was shot through the brain in the rampage. A few minutes after he and Michelle Obama visited Ms Giffords in her hospital room, “Gabby opened her eyes for the first time,” Mr Obama said, repeating the phrase four times. The audience exploded in joy.
Ms Giffords’s husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, was sitting in the front row between the First Lady and Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary. Mr Kelly grabbed both their hands and appeared to choke back tears.
