A Tale Of Two Speeches

If you need any proof that President Obama is as a decent as Sarah Palin is not, then, by all means, consider what each of them said yesterday about the shooting in Tucson. Obama, at a memorial gathering at the University of Arizona in Tucson, gave a comforting, conciliatory address that was aimed at helping people get beyond the tragedy and see the best in America, noting the bravery of those who risked their lives to save others and disarmed the gunman. Obama has long been criticized for being cool and detached, but last night he emanated enough warmth and compassion to bring the crowd to their feet and applaud thunderously, and he invoked the spirit of the murdered little girl Christina Taylor Green as a touchstone. He asked us to make America the country she imagined it could be.

Sarah Palin was just plain mean.

Palin's eight-minute video diatribe was devoted to presenting conservative activists like herself as victims of a media smear campaign designed to discredit her and anyone else whose vicious rhetoric may have led to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and several others. Palin's use of the term "blood libel" - mentioned here yesterday - was a reference to the anti-Semitic belief that Jews killed Christian children to make Passover matzo from their blood, suggesting a Nixonian smear of a Jewish media establishment. (Ms. Giffords, we all know now, is a Reform Jew.) Palin insisted that debate in this country has always been heated, starting with the duels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so why bother to expect today's debates to be less heated? She conveniently ignored examples of bipartisan collegiality from more recent times, such as the congressional friendships between Democrats and Republicans, and she missed the point that we in fact don't have duels anymore, meaning we've made the effort to improve the quality of political debate. Or, to put it this way: Aaron Burr sought to validate himself in 1804 by dueling with his rival Alexander Hamilton; Richard Burr validated himself in 2004 by facing the voters of North Carolina with his U.S. Senate campaign rival Erskine Bowles. No one died when the latter Burr won his match.

Palin's biggest concern, though, is the fear that this tragedy might be used to spread the kind of hatred liberals seek to condemn against people of her ilk. "America must be stronger than the evil we saw displayed last week," she said. "We are better than the mindless finger-pointing we endured in the wake of the tragedy." What she appears to be saying is that she hates people who hate, a contradictory and un-Christian statement. What she's really saying is she hates people who hate her.

Obama's approval rating is at 53 percent now - the same percentage of popular votes he won in 2008 - and though the poll was taken before the shooting, I can't help but wonder if his poll numbers are going up in part because of the poor quality of potential Republican presidential opponents for 2012 and that of Palin in particular. She has damaged herself with more hypocrisy than my subject of ridicule in yesterday's post, Ben Quayle ("I was raised right," said the noted porn fan) could ever aspire to. If her supporters swallow this one, God help us.

And, at the risk of sounding sour, I don't think the current spirit of renewal, unity and self-reflection will last. After 9/11, we did not become the wise and sober people we appeared to be in the last three weeks of that September.