Greg Sargent writes that what Obama's speech in Tucson accomplished was that with a rhetorical concession to the right, he undermined their larger narrative about his inherent "otherness":
Even if Obama didn't say so, his larger message that we all tone it down was mainly -- though not exclusively -- directed at the right. In a context where prominent conservatives have accused Obama of not loving America and have called him a socialist, a Marxist, a secret Muslim sympathizer, and a coddler of our enemies, Obama's insistence that we improve the discourse for the sake of our children and our country was unmistakably aimed mostly at them.
And this is the speech conservatives hailed. Obama surely knew the only way to get conservatives to listen to this message at all was to absolve the right of blame for the shooting first.
Whether the more strident voices on the right act on this message, of course, is another question entirely. But at least Obama got conservatives to listen to it, and even to implicitly endorse it as a guide and an ideal to aspire to as we move forward.
Julian Sanchez writes about "The Voldemort Effect," which is when political partisans are attracted to a politician with the ability to “drive the other side crazy.” Now Obama does drive Republicans crazy. But that's not actually why Democrats liked him at first. They were drawn to him precisely because everyone already knew that Hillary Clinton drove Republicans crazy, and they were hoping to de-escalate the inevitable culture war in advance. His 2004 speech set the tone for a politician Democrats believed would be able to rhetorically disarm Republicans while implementing a liberal policy agenda -- in other words, Democrats liked Obama for the exact opposite reason that Republicans, say, like Sarah Palin. But, as Nate Silver wrote last year, instead of putting a popular, centrist sheen on a relatively liberal agenda," the right doubled down on the culture war rhetoric and Obama ended up with an "unpopular, liberal sheen on a relatively centrist agenda."
What happened in Tucson was that pre-2008 Obama re-emerged -- but only briefly, and only in a really symbolic way. It was a brief glimpse of the presidency as Democrats might have imagined it in 2007. Obama managed to temporarily silence his conservative critics, but I'm not optimistic that it portends any grand successes from this point forward. For this president, the speeches have always been the easy part.
