Political Opportunism

Charles Krauthammer has a lengthy op-ed in today's Washington Post about Virginia Tech, laws regarding the mentally unstable, gun control and finally political opportunism.

Now the use of tragedy to advance one's agenda is nothing new, nor is it entirely the province of presidential candidates and interest groups, but Sen. Barack Obama made a serious miscalculation with his speech in Milwaukee on Monday. This from Krauthammer's peice:

It is inevitable, I suppose, that advocates of one social policy or another will try to use the Virginia Tech massacre to their advantage. But it is simply dismaying that a serious presidential candidate should use it as the ideological frame for his set-piece issues.

Politico columnist Ben Smith has brought attention to a speech that Barack Obama made in Milwaukee just hours after the massacre. It must be heard to be believed. After deploring and expressing grief about the shootings, he continues (my transcription): "I hope that it causes us to reflect a little bit more broadly on the degree to which we do accept violence in various forms. . . . There's also another kind of violence . . . it's not necessarily physical violence."

What kinds does he have in mind? First, "Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women [of Rutgers]. . . . For them to be degraded . . . that's a form of violence. It may be quiet. It may not surface to the same level of the tragedy we read about today and we mourn." Good to know that Don Imus's "violence" does not quite rise to the level of Cho's.

Second, outsourcing. Yes, outsourcing: "the violence of men and women who . . . suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country."

Obama then cites bad schools and bad neighborhoods as forms of violence, before finishing with, for good measure, Darfur -- accusing America of conducting "foreign policy as if the children in Darfur are somehow less than the children here, and so we tolerate violence there." Is Obama, who proudly opposed overthrowing the premier mass murderer of our time, Saddam Hussein, suggesting an invasion of Sudan?

Who knows. This whole exercise in defining violence down to include shock-jock taunts and outsourcing would normally be mere intellectual slovenliness. Doing so in the shadow of the murder of 32 innocents still unburied is tasteless, bordering on the sacrilegious.

Of course, Obama's opponent, Hillary Clinton used the Imus/Rutgers affairs to score a few political points as a sympathetic ear and presence. But Krauthammer has this one right. Obama swung and missed on this one, although I think I understand his point. As far as extemporaneoud speaking, I have heard worse.

Writ large, what Obama is doing is nothing more than what Hillary Clinton and other Democrats are doing with regard to the Iraq war, or what Rudy Giuliani has done with regard to 9/11, everyone uses tragedies of historical poporaitons to advance their world view, but in this case, Obama would have been well-served by offering a prayer and shutting up about violence.

Despite all our handwringing about the tragic loss, the media exploitation and grief mongering by nearly all parties, we as a nation seem to revel in the grief. I don't know if this makes us wimpy or simply pathetic in our quest to feel something, but it does belie our outrage. The problem is that the families of the slain victims don't need a nation to mourn with them, they will do that on their own. What they need is a nation that has returned to some semblence of normal so that they too can return to as normal a life as they will ever have again.

That may sound hypocritical given the Virginia Tech stories I have posted. But the national mourning needs to end at some point and the sooner the better. I am not suggesting we forget, but we do need to move beyond that national grief exhibit we seem to love so much.