King in Tucson, Part II

King in Tucson, Part II

Nicolaus Mills: King in Tucson, Part II

The day after I wrote “Remembering King in Tucson,” I came across Garry Wills?s New York Review of Books essay comparing Obama?s speech at the memorial service for Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other shooting victims of Jared Lee Loughner with Lincoln?s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural. (I had not read his essay when it appeared on the NYRB blog on January 13). The author of Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, Wills is the best analyst of Lincoln?s prose that we have, and his deliberately extravagant praise of Obama naturally gave me second thoughts about my criticism of Obama?s speech.

At the heart of Wills?s praise in his ?His Finest Hour? tribute is admiration of Obama?s aims. Instead of using the speech as an occasion for recrimination, Obama, Wills argues, followed Lincoln?s example at Gettysburg. He asked America to learn from the dead, to redeem their deaths by making the world a better place.

Wills is right. Obama went out of his way to avoid making accusations. That?s not the problem with his Tucson speech. The problem is that the speech was overwhelmingly based on short cuts. Obama?s idea of transcending the moment was to get his audience to rise to its feet every time he spoke of someone who had died or who had acted heroically.

It was a great strategy for a political rally and great theater. But it was not a strategy for encouraging deep thinking. Nobody thinks deeply while bouncing up and down in his chair. The president never came close to asking his audience to imagine what it would mean, what we would have to sacrifice, to adopt a politics of empathy.

Missing from the speech was the kind of moral toughness that Lincoln made central to his Second Inaugural, when he went out of his way to insist that North and South shared blame for the Civil War: both sides, Lincoln emphasized, prayed to the same God and both asked for His aid in fighting one another. Obama believed he had done his job if he shed his image as the aloof, intellectual president and came across as the nation?s comforter. He was content to talk about the murdered Christina Taylor Green jumping on ?rain puddles in Heaven,? and ?Gabby? Giffords opening her eyes.

That so astute a historian as Garry Wills should hear in the cheers Obama aroused the sound of a nation recovering is surprising. But most of all, it is sign of how desperate those of us who want the president to succeed are these days.