President Obama visited Tucson last night to attend a memorial service for those killed and injured in Saturday’s shooting rampage. I hope you will forgive the departure from our usual “U.S. Role in the World” focus as I note this decidedly domestic event. As a resident and native of Tucson it’s a subject that I feel compelled to examine. How can I not? I hope that you will understand. And yes, I will attempt to connect this to our broader theme, but for the most part, these are my personal reflections.
First, I just want to say that I’m very happy that President Obama chose to visit and I thought his speech struck just the right tone. His words held the audience and he moved us to both tears and cheers, sometimes in the same sentence. I know that some national commentators objected to the tone of the event (David Gergen, for example, here) as it was not the somber memorial they expected. After days of shock, grief and mourning, this was exactly the kind of cathartic event that our city needed. I agree with James Fallows of The Atlantic that the speech succeeded precisely because it was, “hopeful and positive, even joyous, rather than morose.”
Second, I’ve never appreciated how important such a visit can be for a community in the aftermath of senseless violence. Imagine for a moment if President Obama had not visited Tucson. We would be left on our own, fighting a sense of loss as well as shame, fearing that we really had become, as Sheriff Dupnik said, a capital of anger, hatred, and bigotry. When President Obama came here to Tucson last night he came to grieve with us, to mourn with us, and to encourage us, but he also did more than that. He brought a kind of restoration, an affirmation that he knows, and the country knows, that this act of violence does not define Tucson. He brought that validation and expanded it, affirming that this act of savagery does not define our state or our country and he challenged us to demonstrate that as we move forward.
Finally, to return to our theme of the U.S. role in the world. As you know, Secretary of State Clinton is touring the Middle East and encouraging countries there to enact the kinds of reforms that will lead to long-term stability for the region. She commented on the Tucson shooting to a town hall meeting in Dubai, telling the audience that:
We have extremists in our country. A wonderful and incredibly brave young woman Congress member was just shot by extremists in our country. We have the same kinds of problems. So rather than standing off from each other, we should work to try to prevent the extremists anywhere from being able to commit violence.
I’d like to contrast this with something President Obama said in his speech last night to make the point that Secretary Clinton got it wrong in representing us and this event abroad. She put the focus on extremists, as if the shooter was an extremist. President Obama did not focus on the shooter (whose name I will not use) or extremists and instead focused on the individual victims, placing the event in the context of the people and the roles they played in our community. Of Representative Giffords he said:
In Gabby, we see a reflection of our public spiritedness, that desire to participate in that sometimes frustrating, sometimes contentious, but always necessary and never-ending process to form a more perfect union.
It’s that aspect of building a more perfect union that I wish Secretary Clinton had focused on in her comments in Dubai. Rather than saying “hey, we have extremists just like you,” it would have been far better to say that the U.S., as an experiment in democracy, is a work in progress, always moving forward toward the goal of a more perfect union. We challenge each other with that goal, that shared national identity, and it was that challenge we needed to hear from President Obama last night and when we heard it, yes, we cheered.
