As a speech by an American president, it will likely find a place in history. Its rhetoric was well crafted, it delivered a forceful message on a crucial issue — but it will be remembered for the unexpected sight of the leader of the free world in tears, fulsome and falling, forcing a silent pause that, by television’s staccato standard, spanned an eon.
It was during his challenge of the supremacy of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution — “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” — above and beyond other safeguards of democracy in the same Bill of Rights, that Barack Obama choked up.
“There are other rights that we care about as well. And we have to be able to balance them,” he said to a room filled by survivors of gun violence and families of gun victims.
Other freedoms are repeatedly violated by guns, he said. The right to worship freely was denied parishioners in Charleston, S.C., and the right to peaceful assembly denied moviegoers in Aurora, Colo., he said, invoking recent mass shootings.
“Our unalienable right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness — those rights
were stripped from college students in Blacksburg and Santa Barbara, and from high schoolers at Columbine,” he said before a pause.
“And, and, from first-graders in Newtown,” he continued, his cadence faltering as he recalled the 2012 slaughter of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which he has called the worst day of his presidency.
His jaw clenched. “First-graders,” he repeated, posture stiffening, eyes welling up.
He pressed ahead for one more sentence then stopped, staring off to his left. He wiped at his eye and bowed his head.
“Every time I think about those kids it gets me mad.”
Then the tears came. He wiped them away, the whirring of news cameras cutting the awkward silence.
In Tuesday’s address on the gun violence endemic to the United States, Obama announced a collection of small gun-control measures to be delivered via executive action — unilateral orders he can take without approval from Congress: a tightening of background checks on gun buyers, a push for better gun safety technology and the provision of more resources for mental health.
But effectively, in that speech and in the live town hall on CNN and the unusual New York Times op-ed that followed it this week, he was declaring his goal for the final year of his presidency, his last effort to change the face of America.
“I’m not on the ballot again,” he said Tuesday. “I’m not looking to score some points.” It is plain Obama now feels free to voice what many politicians will not, launching a direct attack on America’s sacrosanct gun culture, the powerful gun lobby that defends it.
If Obama’s status as a soon-to-be has-been lets him raise his voice, it may also mute the impact of his resolve. Like an aging prizefighter, Obama is still assured of top billing on the card — live television audiences and headlines around the world — but also, questions about the power remaining in his punch.
What became clear this week is that the issue is personal for Obama. And that means this president’s last stand will be an acrimonious, precarious and deeply intimate fight to the finish.
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The gun issue gets others mad as well, but not all for the same reasons.
Before Obama had said a word Tuesday, the opposition and conspiracy theories started flowing, from sources mainstream and fringe.
Canadian-born Sen. Ted Cruz, whose campaign for the Republican presidential nomination uses a logo that features crossed rifles under his name, released a fundraising appeal with a doctored photo of Obama in SWAT gear and the headline, “Obama wants your guns.”
Hardcore gun-rights activists and conservative pundits called his tears fake, manufactured by “raw onions” under the podium or a hidden flick of astringent from his fingertips. “Phony fascist tears,” some said.
Chris Cox, the top lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, accused Obama of “political exploitation.”
“The American people do not need more emotional, condescending lectures that are completely devoid of facts,” Cox said. “The timing of this announcement, in the eighth and final year of his presidency, demonstrates not only political exploitation but a fundamental lack of seriousness.”
There is also little doubt his speech will spark another surge in gun sales across America, as happens each time Obama speaks against gun violence, fuelled by fears the Democrat secretly plans to ban guns altogether. Such is the distrust of Obama that when the U.S. military ran a training exercise in rural Texas in July, the belief spread surprisingly widely that it was a ruse to use soldiers to confiscate guns.
Compared to those suspicions, Obama’s actions this week were modest. Even he admits it. “We can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world,” he said. “But maybe we could try to stop one act of evil, one act of violence.”
In part that modesty is enforced by Congressional opposition and the knowledge that perceived overreach on his part via executive action could poison the well for Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances in November. Those restrictions are emphasized by the battlefields he has chosen: stage-managed broadcasts, the opinion pages of newspapers.
So the fight Obama chooses this year may prove less a battle over legislation and more a battle for hearts and minds.
Since Sandy Hook, and excluding those announced this week, Obama has signed 25 executive actions on a range of gun-related matters. Most have amounted to little more than suggestions, promises and pleas.
“This is mostly symbolic and the administration recognizes it is mostly symbolic,” says David Rohde, professor of political science at Duke University in North Carolina.
The end game for Obama now is to recalibrate the debate on guns from its current extremes toward consensus around what the president sees — and some polling data affirms — as the quiet majority.
He made that point in his Times op-ed.
“We need the vast majority of responsible gun owners who grieve with us after every mass shooting, who support common-sense gun safety and who feel that their views are not being properly represented, to stand with us and demand that leaders heed the voices of the people they are supposed to represent,” Obama wrote.
This week likely marked the beginning of an effort to ensure gun violence will be a cornerstone of November’s presidential election, and a core issue that sets the Republicans and Democrats apart.
“He is not seeking votes, but his party will face the other party for the presidency with absolutely enormous stakes for the country,” said Rohde. “No matter how small the actions are that the Democrats want to take on guns, the Republicans will block it and this is what the president is trying to demonstrate to the country.”
Obama avoided overt electioneering in his speech, but not in his writing.
“Even as I continue to take every action possible as president, I will also take every action I can as a citizen,” he wrote. “I will not campaign for, vote for or support any candidate, even in my own party, who does not support common-sense gun reform. And if the 90% of Americans who do support common-sense gun reforms join me, we will elect the leadership we deserve.”
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Any doubts that Obama means business on the issue despite the clock ticking on his time in office should be allayed after this week.
“I know him, and I’ve never seen him that emotional before,” said James Thurber, a political science professor and director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington.
“I don’t think this is just politics, I don’t think it is faking, I think it’s from his heart,” Thurber said.
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