The president at Tucson: How will we change?

Generational historians say that the times can change in an afternoon. This
change may have occurred Saturday in Tucson, an afternoon many of us began
thinking about Michael Vick and ended listening to Dr. Peter Rhee at the trauma
center in Tucson. History will mark it by the president’s speech, introducing
himself as “an American.” This will define him, for the first time in a long
time, as “one of us,” and define ourselves as one with him as well. He did, for
the moment, “make sense of that which seems senseless.” None of us can know what
triggered this vicious attack, he said, “but what we cannot do is to use this
occasion to turn on each other.”

Came to mind in these warring times the words of Lt. Col. Ely Parker, the
Seneca Indian who served as an aide to Ulysses S. Grant, to Robert E. Lee
during the signing at Appomattox: “We are all Americans here.”

The president does have “an instinct for empathy,” and it was a good speech. Obama
is in many ways better than many who support and many who oppose him, and it is
that Obama, the empathetic Obama, which elevates us collectively, lets the American
spirit soar and rings with suggestion of JFK. But the speech and the events do
ask, as he said, “what is required of us” in moving forward? How do we change?
What have we become since Saturday?

The Tucson tragedy brings a turning point. Like Kent State, for example, when
four college students were shot by National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970. The ’60s
pretty much ended then but left a bitter aftermath. Another was March 30, 1981,
when John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. I have
distinct memories of that, sitting in my office on Madison Avenue. The recent
Yale grad calling her friend to say she hoped he would die still grates. But he
didn’t. And Reagan was reelected, carrying 49 out of 50 states. The bitter and
the confused went on to grad school or entered rehab.

The tragic shootings in Tucson could well bring a change of zeitgeist. In the
last month, President Obama shifted his positions to the middle, fortifying his
staff with the mainstream Bill Daley of Chicago. Strategically, it was a clever
move, virtually sweeping the 20 percent on the edge of the left off the table. The
center moved right in the November election, and Obama moved with it. He specifically
cited the editorial board of The New York Times as being out of touch and not representative of mainstream America.
But the Tucson shootings brought that whack-a-mole effect: Up they popped
again, as if on cue, Marcos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann,
Paul Krugman and The New York Times
itself. Possibly they could be relevant again in this time of hysteria.

Or not. As The Hill’s Christian Heinze reports this week, Sarah Palin is being defended
by a variety of mainstream media figures and liberal journalists in the wake of
the Arizona shootings, pushing Olbermann, Krugman and the crew back over the
edge. Her supporters included ABC’s Barbara Walters, the Daily Beast’s Howard
Kurtz, The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine’s Dan Amira and The Atlantic’s Garance Frank-Ruta.

It is also significant that The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, icon of the conservative
movement, was the first to come to Palin’s aid, suggesting that pinning
culpability on Palin in the tragedy was McCarthyist. Kristol’s visceral
reaction was most important: a natural reflex, indicating that in spite of
differences, Palin is, to them, “one of us.” Likewise, conservative Charles
Krauthammer’s column in The Washington Post, “Massacre, followed by libel.” He responds to the
charge that “The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the ‘climate of hate’
created by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, ObamaCare opponents and sundry
other liberal betes noires.” Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by trade, says, “rarely
in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so
scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.”

Krauthammer has never liked Palin (although she is the conservatives’ best bet
on Israel). Kristol is of mixed mind. He is adamantly opposed to the drive to
small government to which Palin appears attached. But crisis speaks to the
heart, the better place. This one could well bring consolidation to
oppositional factions on the right.