Politics and Violence Merge

A few days, or at the very least, a few hours – in an earlier era, people would have taken a breath before plunging into a remorseless debate about the political implications of an obscene act of violence.

Not in this era.

Within minutes after a gunman’s shots—bullets that killed a federal judge, a nine-year-old girl and four others, and left a congresswoman clinging to life—activists of all stripes were busy, first on Twitter and blogs, then on cable television, chewing on two questions that once would have been indelicate to raise before the blood was dry:

Who in American politics deserves a slice of blame for the Tucson murders? And what public officials find themselves with sudden opportunities for political gain from a tragedy?

By day’s end, the argument that the political right—fueled by anti-government, and anti-immigrant passions that run especially strong in Arizona—is culpable for the Tucson massacre, even if by indirect association, seemed to be validated by the top local law enforcement official investigating the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D).

“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government—the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous,” said Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, an elected Democrat, at a news conference Saturday evening. “And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

Some Republicans responded with indignation—why should the alleged act of an apparently deranged young man with a record of barely coherent, and only vaguely ideological rantings get charged to their account?

Others acknowledged what they called an unavoidable reality—flamboyant or incendiary anti-government rhetoric of the sort used by many conservative politicians, commentators and tea party activists for the time being will carry a stigma.

A senior Republican senator, speaking anonymously in order to freely discuss the tragedy, told POLITICO that the Giffords shooting should be taken as a “cautionary tale” by Republicans.

“There is a need for some reflection here - what is too far now?” said the senator. “What was too far when Oklahoma City happened is accepted now. There’s been a desensitizing. These town halls and cable TV and talk radio, everybody’s trying to outdo each other.”

The vast majority of tea party activists, this senator said, ought not be impugned.

“They’re talking about things most mainstream Americans are talking about, like spending and debt,” the Republican said, before adding that politicians of all stripes need to emphasize in the coming days that “tone matters.”

“And the Republican Party in particular needs to reinforce that,” the senator said.


The references to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 echoed in other ways. That horror, which killed 168 people including many children, helped then-President Bill Clinton stigmatize extreme anti-government rhetoric and re-energize his presidency at a time when Newt Gingrich and conservative Republicans were riding high in Congress.

One veteran Democratic operative, who blames overheated rhetoric for the shooting, said President Barack Obama should carefully but forcefully do what his predecessor did.

“They need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” said the Democrat. “Just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.”

Another Democratic strategist said the similarity is that Tucson and Oklahoma City both “take place in a climate of bitter and virulent rhetoric against the government and Democrats.”

This Democrat said that the time had come to insist that Republicans stand up when, for example, a figure such as Fox News commentator Glenn Beck says something incendiary.

Conservative intellectual William F. Buckley denounced the conspiracy theories and darker rantings of the John Birch Society, this Democrat said, “but these guys don’t seem to be willing to do that.” Not long after the shooting, at about 10:10 a.m. in Arizona, some took to Twitter to note that Sarah Palin had targeted Gifford in symbolic crosshairs—plainly intending to target her for political defeat, not for physical violence. By the end of the day Saturday, a website showing a gunsight on Giffords’ and 19 other Democratic districts had been taken off line, though a Google cache showed that it was still posted as late as 2:00 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday.

Some Republicans have scrambled to portray alleged shooter Jared Lee Loughner as an unbalanced loner, and pointed to a high school classmate’s account that, four years ago, he had left-wing views. Democrats are framing his attack as the tragic-but-inevitable end result of a right-wing political culture that has become radicalized since President Obama’s election.

“Today we have seen the results” of “irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric,” former Democratic senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart wrote on Huffington Post. “Those with a megaphone, whether provided by public office or a media outlet, have responsibilities. They cannot avoid the consequences of their blatant efforts to inflame, anger, and outrage.” No politician – not even the most strident partisan on the left – is suggesting that any mainstream conservative feels anything but horror over the Tucson shootings. Yet assassinations are by definition a political act, and solo actors in the past have shaped American history on many occasions.

Loughner, it seems, was a deeply agitated, even paranoid, 22-year-old, not a tea party radical. But he was also politically aware – he referred on his MySpace page to Giffords’ 8th District –and acted in a district and state that have been defined over the last two years by the bitter immigration debate and against a backdrop of incendiary rhetoric and images of firearms at town hall meetings. This context guaranteed that this act of violence would not be viewed in isolation. Liberal commentators such as MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, who on a special Saturday evening show said he was sometimes guilty of over-the-top rhetoric, made an impassioned plea for more restraint and civil debate. But he also guaranteed that the political temperature would rise by devoting most of the show to the still-undocumented assertion that conservative political rhetoric helped send someone with a predisposition to violence over the edge. He called on a long roster of politicians like Palin and defeated Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle (who once spoke of “Second Amendment remedies” for conservatives to rein in Congress) to “repudiate” past rhetoric and demanded that commentators like Beck and Bill O’Reilly offer “solemn apologies” for giving “oxygen to those deep in madness to whom violence is an acceptable solution.”


Though they put it less stridently than Olbermann, many Democrats made clear in statements that they agree.

“I put a lot of blame on…the rhetoric,” said Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), a longtime gun control advocate. “You had some pretty high up political people saying, ‘Get your guns out –we’re going to take our country back’ —you have to be careful. Politicians have a very strong responsibility to be careful on what they say. We’ve got to tone the rhetoric down.”

Many of Giffords’ colleagues kept their statements focused on expressing their sadness over the tragedy and concern over her condition. But a subtle difference could be detected between the simple denunciations of many Republicans and some Democrats’ efforts to begin putting the moment in context, and to frame the episode as the result of a toxic political debate.

“This tragedy serves as a grim reminder that we, as a nation, must redouble our efforts to promote civility and respect for differing viewpoints in our political discourse,” said Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) in a statement.

A top Democratic strategist was less subtle: “He seems somewhat incoherent but does seem to be stridently anti-government,” the strategist said.

But Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, sought to preempt any attempt to link the rhetoric of the far-right with the Arizona tragedy, tagging Loughner as crazed.

“The best way to avoid politicizing it is to not make a political issue out of it,” said King. “It’s a horrible tragedy. From what we know it’s a deranged person, and I think any other discussion at this time does politicize it.”

Another House Republican went a step further, saying: “From what I can tell on the web this guy looks liberal. He’s definitely crazy.”

On talk radio, other conservatives did the same, emphasizing that Loughner seemed far-left.

But Republicans, too, are aware of the poisoned climate. Former GOP Rep. Jim Kolbe, who represented Giffords’ congressional district for 22 years before retiring in 2006, said in an interview Saturday that he increased security at his town hall meetings toward the end of his time in Congress when the debate over immigration grew more heated along the border.

“I never got through a town hall without a lot of very nasty things being said and a lot of shouting,” Kolbe said. “There has been a lot of emotion around the immigration issue.”

Kolbe said that by the time he retired “half to two-thirds” of his town halls were staffed by an off-duty police officer.

But he emphatically noted that Tucson should not be singled out.

“This kind of thing can happen anyplace,” said Kolbe.


The tone was set Saturday, though, by some of the hardest-edged Internet partisans.

Liberal blogger and activist Markos Moulitsas was even blunter, charging two prominent Republicans with egging on acts of violence, Angle and Palin.

Moulitsas linked to an image of Palin’s map, writing on Twitter: “Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin.”

Palin, for her part, released a statement saying that she and her family would pray “for peace and justice” and offering “sincere condolences … to the family of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today’s tragic shooting in Arizona.”

But she also moved quickly to scrub her website of the imagery that had the Giffords seat in a gun’s crosshairs.

A spokeswoman for Palin, Rebecca Mansour, reacted to criticism of the former Alaska governor on Twitter with a brief message: “Politicizing this is repulsive.”

Though the afternoon’s responses were laced with politics, one veteran of Oklahoma City suggested the finger-pointing was just one response to the sheer trauma of the event.

“Everybody looks for motives. They can’t understand why someone would commit such an unforgivable act and they look for motive,” said former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, who took office just months before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building. “In the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, it was a left-wing motive. In the case of Tim McVeigh, it was a right-wing motive. In both cases, terrible things occurred.”

“I’m sure we’ll surgically diagnose this over the next few weeks and months,” Keating added.

For politicians, however – and most especially for the president – Keating pointed to the Oklahoma City experience as a model for trying to stay above politics.

“The most important thing for a leader to do is to embrace the people in a moment of tragedy and agony, to unqualifiedly say that this conduct is unforgivable and justice will be done, but in the meantime we have to hold together as a people and pray together as a people,” he said.

But of course Oklahoma City also illustrates how much more quickly the political culture moves than 16 years ago. Back then, the political debate did not begin in earnest until five days after the bombings, when Clinton in a speech in Minneapolis denounced conservative commentators with “loud and angry voices” who he said “spread hate” and “leave the impression…by their very words, that violence is acceptable.”

At the same time, Clinton political advisers privately embraced a ghoulish reality: The tragedy had been good for the president’s standing. Dick Morris, then Clinton’s top consultant, wrote the president a memo shortly after the bombing about how to maximize the advantage: “A. Temporary gain: boost in ratings. B. More permanent gain: Improvements in character/personality attributes—remedies weakness, incompetence, ineffectiveness found in recent poll. C. Permanent possible gain: sets up Extremist Issue vs. Republicans.”