Obama’s Brilliant Speech Unites an Insecure America

The fog of shock over the rampage in Tuscon hangs low over all Americans. Not only because, as if it weren’t bad enough, the apparently mentally disturbed offender shot a 9-year-old girl, a federal judge, a Congressional representative and 15 more people

America begins to question itself, wondering what sort of political “unculture” it is threatening to slip into. It asks itself if a strengthened-beyond-measure increase in verbal aggression in political conflicts has created a climate in which a slightly mentally unstable gun-nut targets cruelly and literally political and apolitical people alike. Remember, on Sarah Palin’s election map, Arizona is marked by a cross-hair.

On March 25, after the door of her party’s office was demolished by the opposition, Gabrielle Giffords gave a short interview to MSNBC. In it she warned against political aggression. An excerpt: “This is a situation where — people don’t — they really need to realize that the rhetoric and firing people up and, you know, even things, for example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list. But the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. And when people do that, they’ve gotta realize there’s consequences to that action.”

It takes the rhetorically brilliant president Barack Obama to ask his unsure country to promise to make it stop and to put the events of Jan. 8 behind them. The tragedy in Tucson has been perhaps the most important point in his leadership thus far, and it may have laid the foundation for his re-election. He has the chance to use the national pain to reconcile, not to polarize. In that we see his political instincts. But also human warmth and measurement.