Obama has an opportunity to re-civilize an increasingly intense partisan climate. Obama's Oklahoma City moment

Of all the unfulfilled campaign promises President Barack Obama made in 2008, the one that bothers the president most isn’t any squandered policy priority – it’s his failure to re-civilize what he views as an increasingly savage partisan climate.

Obama idolizes Lincoln, and like his fellow Illinoisan he sees himself as a warrior by compulsion, forced by circumstance to confront political adversaries instead of following his preferred path of reconciliation, civility and compromise.


In that regard, the shootings in Tucson on Saturday, which he has decried as a “national tragedy,” present a critical opportunity to a president at a crossroads, a chance for Obama to elevate the debased tenor of politics, much as President Bill Clinton attempted in the aftermath of the 1995 terrorist attack in Oklahoma City. It was announced Monday that Obama will travel to Arizona on Wednesday.

Paul Begala, one of Clinton’s top political advisers during the 1990s, thinks Obama has a genuine opportunity to re-define the nation’s political debate – a promise he first made in his breakout 2004 speech to the Democratic convention —and reclaim moral high ground lost during the last two years of intense partisan combat.

“One of the things I learned from Oklahoma City is not to rush to judgment…We don’t know this Arizona animal’s motive,” said Begala.

“But almost irrespective of that, it wouldn’t hurt for all of us to tone things down a bit - myself included. If the President uses this tragedy to challenge us all to move to higher ground, it would be a welcome message. And if the right tries to demonize him for doing that, they will look small and petty and extreme.”

Veteran Democratic consultant Dan Gerstein said the crisis “really plays to Obama’s strengths as consensus-builder” and gives him the opportunity to build a deeper emotional connection with the people he governs.

“He’ll be active, but also very careful not to appear like he’s blaming or politicizing,” Gerstein predicted.

“The biggest question about him is strength - can he be a strong leader? This tragedy will give him an opportunity to answer that question and build a closer emotional connection with the middle of the electorate that sees this as a reflection of something disturbing about our politics.”

Yet Obama has often expressed anger - broadly in public, far more pointedly in private - against conservatives from Rush Limbaugh to Sarah Palin for whipping up anger against him and other Democrats. And few people around Obama were upset at the barrage of criticism unleashed against Republicans on Sunday for standing by while conservatives like Palin used gun-related imagery to score political points against Giffords and others.

The question is whether Obama joins the partisan fray, flies far above it, or takes the canny middle path successfully navigated by Clinton, who was able to associate Republicans with the degradation of discourse while reaping the political benefits of being labeled as a unifying, post-partisan peacemaker.

There are, however, major differences between Oklahoma City and the Arizona attack, complicating matters for Obama.

For one, the scale of the tragedy in Tucson, while heart-wrenching, is far smaller than the militia-fueled attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which killed 168 and represented a serious, new threat by a gang of domestic terrorists.

Moreover, Obama has yet to show he’s as comfortable in the role of national sympathizer as Clinton, who had a far more intuitive feeling for the nation’s emotional mood.

And Clinton benefitted from a far slower 1990s news cycle – when information sped at the speed of fax – but he also took his time to react. It was nearly a week after Timothy McVeigh plowed his truck into the building when Clinton blamed conservatives for poisoning the political atmosphere by spreading “hate” and “[leaving] the impression…by their very words, that violence is acceptable.”

Behind the scenes, Clinton’s Svengali, adviser Dick Morris, was calculating the political advantages six months after humbling losses in the 1994 midterms, issuing a memo that predicted Clinton could leverage the crisis into a “permanent gain” in voter perceptions.

Among the possible benefits Morris cited were “Improvements in character/personality attributes” and a chance to use the “Extremist Issue vs. Republicans.”

That is precisely the kind of crass calculation that Obama and his advisers have long deplored: In fact, they point with perverse pride to their less-than-stellar public relations responses to previous crises as proof that they place substance over political self-interest.

The issue of civil discourse – or lack thereof — has been a central issue in Obama’s career, a default theme on the campaign trail. Since taking office, he’s raised the issue over and over in interviews, at commencements and prayer breakfasts, and during negotiating sessions with skeptical Republicans.

“As I’ve found out after a year in the White House, changing this type of slash-and-burn politics isn’t easy,” Obama told a crowd of 92,000 at the University of Michigan in May 2010, a speech devoted almost entirely to elevating the tone of political discourse.

“And part of what civility requires is that we recall the simple lesson most of us learned from our parents: Treat others as you would like to be treated, with courtesy and respect.”

Obama is likely to remain relatively cautious about explicitly connecting hate speech and the Arizona killings until much more is known about the motives of the suspected shooter, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, people close to him say.

And he has the benefit of advice from several former Clinton hands close to him who directly experienced the aftermath of Oklahoma City: Incoming chief of staff Bill Daley, who showed up at the White House Saturday despite not yet being officially on the job, and the man who held his job until October, Rahm Emanuel, whom Obama still consults.

In the past 48 hours, Obama has confined his public reaction to a televised statement of sympathy for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the six people murdered at a Tucson strip mall, mobilizing federal law enforcement authorities, several ceremonial gestures, and cancellation of a planned trip to a General Electric plant in upstate New York.

Obama’s decision to address a pool camera in the White House on Saturday instead of relying on a written statement was an unusual step for Obama. But it was a sign that he has learned from previous tragedies and national emergencies, like the Christmas Day bombing attempt and the deaths of oil drilling rig workers in the BP disaster, events where his reaction was widely panned as insufficiently urgent or empathetic.

His response to Tucson wasn’t entirely glitch-free either. In his statement Saturday, Obama referred to Giffords, who is fighting for her life in a Tucson intensive care unit, in the past tense – and seemed to pause when he’d realized what he’d said. And some critics took note that he spent several hours at the residence of senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, guessing that he’s spent the night watching the NFL playoffs or football.

In public, Obama is not particularly emotive. On a few occasions, he’s welled up – when talking about how his mother’s struggle with cancer motivated his push for health reform or speaking at a memorial service last year for miners killed in a West Virginia mine.

Unlike the reflexively public Clinton, Obama’s instinct is to keep private emotions private. When he made an unscheduled visit to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in October 2009 to view the coffins of 18 American soldiers and federal agents killed in Afghanistan, he did in the middle of the night, outside the presence of pool reporters.

During his brief remarks Saturday, Obama appeared to be genuinely moved, calling the shootings “a tragedy for Arizona and a tragedy for our entire country,” and urging Americans “to come together and support each other.”

White House officials say Obama has no plans, as of yet, to travel to Arizona. But he will preside over a national moment of silence on the South Lawn at 11 a.m. Monday to mourn the dead and pray for the wounded.

Fairly or not to conservatives, the mass murder in Tucson has ignited a larger debate about the rhetoric in American political life and the implications of a discourse in which partisans – not all of them Republicans — routinely employ the vocabulary of hunting, warfare and slaughter to describe quotidian political conflict.

It’s a debate that will be hard for Obama to ignore, whatever his desire to appear above the fray.

A key ally, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), for example, explicitly called out Palin for injecting gun imagery into politics, arguing that her use of crosshairs over districts – including Giffords’ — in an email pitch to SarahPAC supporters incited violence.

“We live in a world of violent images … the phrase ‘don’t retreat, reload’ — putting crosshairs on congressional districts as targets … they invite the unstable,” Durbin told Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

Republicans bristle at any suggestion they have enabled zealots. Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, a Republican, told CBS that Giffords was a staunch Second Amendment defender who wouldn’t want anyone to jump to conclusions about her attacker.

Yet Giffords herself made the connection between right-wing rhetoric in an eerie appearance on MSNBC during the health care debate last March.

And Clinton has made clear he believes that the trend he identified in the 1990s – the connection between radical speech and violent deeds – still exists.

“Civic virtue can include harsh criticism, protest, even civil disobedience. But not violence or its advocacy,” Clinton wrote in an April 19, 2010 New York Times op-ed to mark the 15th anniversary of Oklahoma City.

“Fifteen years ago, the line was crossed in Oklahoma City,” he wrote. “In the current climate, with so many threats against the president, members of Congress and other public servants, we owe it to the victims of Oklahoma City, and those who survived and responded so bravely, not to cross it again.”