Obama shines
L. Ian MacDonald sees light at the end of a dark week.
Part of the job description for an American president is commander-in-chief. Then there’s the president’s occasional role as comforter-in-chief, or mourner-in-chief.
Ronald Reagan instinctively understood the role after the U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut in 1983. Bill Clinton played the role brilliantly after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. George W. Bush stepped up after 9/11 in 2001. And Barack Obama has risen to the role on a number of occasions, the latest being Newtown and Boston.
The president’s role requires empathy, a sense of occasion, and words to suit it.
On Thursday, Obama stood at the pulpit of Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston, at an interfaith service in the wake of Monday’s horrific bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
“We may be momentarily knocked off our feet,” he declared, “but we’ll pick ourselves up. We’ll keep going. We will finish the race.”
He continued: “That’s what you’ve taught us, Boston. That’s what you’ve reminded us — to push on. To persevere. To not grow weary. To not get faint. Even when it hurts. Even when our heart aches. We summon the strength that maybe we didn’t even know we had, and we carry on. We finish the race. We finish the race.”
Had he been speaking at Fenway, they would have said he hit it out of the park, right over the Green Monster.
The day before, Obama was standing in the Rose Garden of the White House, accompanied by families of Newtown victims, as well as Gabrielle Giffords, the former Congresswoman who was nearly killed in the 2011 Arizona massacre.
Obama made no attempt to conceal his anger over what he called “a pretty shameful day for Washington” — the refusal of the U.S. Senate to pass a bill requiring background checks for people buying weapons at gun shows and online.
While 68 out of 100 senators voted to hear the bill last week, only 54 supported it, six short of the 60 votes required to pass it over a filibuster by gun advocates. A classic bait and switch.
Before Newtown, gun control was never on Obama’s agenda. Since the murder of 20 children and six educators on that awful December day, he’s thrown the moral authority of the presidency behind renewed efforts to ban assault weapons and require background checks for criminal records and mental illness.
Ronald Reagan instinctively understood the role after the U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut in 1983. Bill Clinton played the role brilliantly after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
It seems that the only effect of Newtown was to drive the sale of guns and assault weapons even higher, ahead of anticipated gun control legislation. And this, in a country where there are nearly as many guns as there are people — more than 300 million.
There are lots of decisions by American presidents that go with the job — what to do about Iranian nuclear ambitions, or that crazy young dictator in North Korea, or how to encourage regime change in Syria, or whether to endorse or block the Keystone XL pipeline. Even poison pen letters — laced with ricin — apparently go with the territory.
But Obama in the Rose Garden was using the bully pulpit of his office. And again in Boston, he was rising to the role.
“We will find you,” he said to the perpetrators. And that evening, following the release of videos at the crime scene, they did. The black hat and the white hat, a pair of young immigrants of Chechen origin. The police killed the older brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan, and Friday evening caught the younger one, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, hiding in a Boston suburb.
As it turns out, these enemies of America were both foreign and domestic, having lived in the U.S. for more than a decade. It’s not known whether they were acting alone, or had accomplices in making their improvised explosive devices — boiler pots filled with shrapnel that killed three people and injured 170 more. Nor is it known whether the brothers had a political agenda.
Obama’s response to the bombing could serve as a lesson in leadership for Justin Trudeau, who got it all wrong when asked about the Boston tragedy by Peter Mansbridge in a feature-length interview with CBC’s The National.
“We have to look at the root causes,” Trudeau said. “Now, we don’t know whether it was terrorism or a single crazy or a domestic issue or a foreign issue.
“But there’s no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded. Completely at war with innocents. At war with a society. And our approach has to be, where do those tensions come from?”
He went on: “Yes, there’s a need for security and response. But we also need to make sure that as we go forward, that we don’t emphasize a culture of fear and mistrust. Because that ends up marginalizing even further those who are already feeling like they are enemies of society.”
Really? Don’t be surprised if the Conservatives take down their puerile attack ads on the new Liberal leader, and run that clip instead.