Remembering King in Tucson

Remembering King in Tucson

Nicolaus Mills: Remembering King in Tucson

In terms of its media impact, President Obama?s memorial service speech in Tucson, Arizona, for Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other shooting victims of Jared Lee Loughner has been a hit. Especially among conservatives, there is relief that the president, by declaring that ?none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack,? has blunted criticism of them for their political rhetoric of recent years.

But as we celebrate Martin Luther King?s birthday, it is also fair to ask if the president gave a speech that will have any lasting impact. At the heart of the speech, the president cited by name those who were victims of the shooting and those who helped Representative Giffords. If the person attended the memorial service, he or she was asked to stand and receive applause from the audience.

In this calling forth of names, President Obama was following a tradition that presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton used successfully in state of the union addresses. But he was also blunting his own message.

Just how President Obama blunted his message may be seen by recalling the choices made by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King in delivering their best public speeches. In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln might easily have personalized his remarks after mentioning ?those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.? Here was the perfect opportunity for him to cite by name a series of dead and living Union soldiers and to ask his audience to applaud their heroism. In his ?I Have a Dream? speech, delivered exactly one hundred years later, King had a similar opportunity after he spoke of those listening to him who had suffered ?great trials and tribulations.?

For good reason, Lincoln and King did not break off their speeches to name names and win applause from their listeners. Had Lincoln offered up for cheers a list those who had made sacrifices at Gettysburg, he would then have had to ask his audience to sit back down and remember the larger point of his speech?the responsibility of his generation of Americans to keep faith with the founding fathers by making good on the ?proposition that all men are created equal.?

For King, there would have been a similar loss in tone and sensibility if, in the middle of his speech, he had provided his audience with a list of those who had made personal sacrifices on behalf of the civil rights movement. It would have made it impossible for King?s speech to be heard as a sermon based on the belief that ?unearned suffering is redemptive? and can bring about political change.

Given how beleaguered President Obama has been since the midterm elections, it is not surprising that he chose the easy way out. His strategy of interrupting the solemnity of the Tucson memorial service by actively engaging his audience may well pay off in 2012 as he runs for a second term. But such a strategy comes with a price. It is difficult to imagine future generations seeing President Obama?s memorial service speech as a historic turning point, let alone remembering his call for a politics of empathy that starts with a ?good dose of humility? on all our parts.


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