Never before in the annals of national moments of mourning have the words spoken been so wildly mismatched by the spirit in which they were received.

The sentences and paragraphs of President Obama’s speech last night were beautiful and moving and powerful. But for the most part they didn’t quite transcend the wildly inappropriate setting in which he delivered them.

There was something about the choice of place, a college arena with the appropriate name of the McKale Memorial Center, that made the event turn literally sophomoric.

If there is one thing we expect from occasions of national mourning, it is, at the very least, a modicum of gravity. That gravity was present in the president’s speech from first to last — especially in the pitch-perfect response to the disgusting national political debate over the past couple of days.

“What we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another,” he said. “Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy.”

Exactly right, as so much else in his text was — a moment that truly deserves to be called “healing.”

But the president’s stunning speech was marred by the feeling of the evening that surrounded it and the appalling behavior of the crowd in Tucson listening to it.

It was as though no one in the arena but the immediate mourners and sufferers had the least notion of displaying respectful solemnity in the face of breathtaking loss and terrifying evil.

First there was the professor with Mexican roots who spent 10 minutes talking about himself and then rushed through the Native American blessing he was supposed to be delivering.

There was the twinkly student-body president praising the heroic savior of Gabby Giffords for having fetched her (the student-body president) many cups of coffee during late-night working sessions.

Worst of all, there was the crowd, which bubbled over with excitement and enthusiasm. The tone of the event came to resemble a pep rally, no matter the monstrous fact of the six dead and the many injured.

Even Obama’s lovely peroration about little Christina Green — “I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it” — was greeted by the listeners as though they were delegates at a political convention, rather than attendees at a memorial service.

They might have been mindful that they too had a role, a role as front-line mourners just as it was President Obama’s role to play mourner-in-chief. Instead, they were a “Daily Show” audience writ large.

There’s been a great deal of talk in the wake of the massacre about the need for a national conversation about civility. Maybe what we need is a national conversation about elementary manners.

johnpodhoretz@gmail.com