In light of the comments of some on Fox News and conservative websites claiming President Barack Obama used onions to make himself cry or faked it (a further example of the toxic nature of partisanship in the United States), some TMV readers have asked us to post the COMPLETE speech by President Barack Obama on gun control so they can watch it unedited and comment on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlx3GEsM1pQ‘
Many analysts who aren’t in the trenches doing p.r. for candidates or who don’t have talk shows or big book sales and fly around the United States in their private planes agree with Mediaite’s Joe Concha:
The importance of optics is something that has been discussed in this space before, particularly as it pertains to President Obama.
On a few occasions throughout his seven years in office, he has tripped badly in this regard, even admitting regret after one instance (golfing minutes after announcing the beheading of American journalist James Foley by ISIS) and acknowledging that the theater of the job does matter. Which brings us to Tuesday’s announcement from the White House East Room regarding Mr. Obama’s executive action on a string of new gun control measures. Simple question: Was the message and presentation effective?
First, a quick review: President makes announcement. Evokes Sandy Hook massacre. Begins to cry. Says he thinks about it every day and it makes him angry. This is a departure from the president’s lack of emotion following other horrific events recently (Paris, San Bernardino) and therefore notable. Context: When John Boehner cried, it lost it’s noteworthiness after the 2nd or 3rd time. But Obama’s emotion appears genuine here, heartfelt. If you’re a father like me and millions more out there, you drop your kids off at an educational facility every morning and marvel at the innocence and happiness of it all. And to think a monster could go in there and start executing them is enough to make any parent break down, particularly when relatives of victims of gun violence are surrounding you as they were with the president yesterday. Note: Roughly 47 percent of you out there will automatically say the president was putting on a show; another 47 percent happen will believe the emotion was sincere. That’s just the way it is today…
Bottom line regarding optics here: The president’s speech was very effective in that he showed he cares … that he’s trying to at least do something about a growing, disturbing problem facing this country to any extent he can on his own.
And with Eleanor Clift in The Daily Beast:
For a president who sometimes is criticized as too cerebral and lacking emotion, the memories he carries from comforting grieving families in Tucson, Fort Hood, Binghamton, Aurora, Oak Creek, Newtown, Navy Yard, Santa Barbara, Charleston, and San Bernardino came together in what history will likely record as one of President Obama’s landmark speeches on Tuesday.
It was an effort to bring urgency to the gun issue in the same way he rescued his candidacy with a speech about race when he first ran for the White House. And for the gun safety advocates and gun violence survivors packed into the East Room of the White House Tuesday morning, it was a huge moment in a fight that for too long has seemed stalemated.
…Obama’s nearly 40-minute long speech was thankfully more sermon than college lecture as he sought to mobilize activists and voters alike for the long battle ahead. And one point, tears visibly streamed down his face. He didn’t use the word “movement” to describe the increasing array of gun safety groups, some launched in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, but he reminded his audience that the women’s right to vote and the liberation of African-Americans didn’t happen overnight, and LGBT rights took decades of work.
“Just because it’s hard, it’s no excuse not to try,” he said as he acknowledged the obvious, that gun violence and the scourge of mass shootings will extend beyond his presidency.
He expressed his puzzlement at how American society has reached a point where mass violence erupts with such frequency that it seems almost normal “and instead of talking about how to solve the problem, it’s become one of the most partisan and polarizing debates.” He put in a plug for a town meeting he is doing Thursday evening that will be televised on CNN. “I’m not on the ballot again. I’m not looking to score some points,” he said, adding that he wants to instill what Dr. King called, “the fierce urgency of now.”
AND:
Noting that two in three gun deaths is a suicide, Obama wants Congress to do more to fund access to mental health treatment. To those in Congress who rush to blame mental illness as a way to avoid the gun issue, he said, “here’s your chance to support these efforts.” He also pledged to put the federal government’s research arm, including the Defense Department, behind gun safety technology. “If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin, we need to make sure they can’t pull the trigger on a gun.”
The expansion of background checks so that people with criminal records, domestic assault violations, and severe mental illness can’t buy guns is popular with all groups, including 64 percent of gun owners and 56 percent of those who describe themselves as “favorable toward the NRA,” according to pollster Anna Greenberg, who conducted the survey just before Thanksgiving for Americans for Responsible Gun Solutions, founded by Kelly and Giffords. Ninety percent of millennials support the kind of action Obama took, Greenberg said.
Elected officials have long memories, and Bill Clinton still blames the Democrats’ loss of Congress in 1994 on their support for the Brady Bill and an assault weapons ban. A lot of big names went down in that election, and gun regulation went down with them. What Obama did this week is “the most significant achievement since the Brady Bill” more than 20 years ago, said Kelly.
And with Piers Morgan in The Daily Mail:
I’ve repeatedly and loudly hammered Obama for his cowardice on guns, because cowardice is what it’s been.
He’s allowed the NRA, the most invidious and dangerous lobby group in the world, to grow ever more powerful and to sell ever more guns.…..The more La Pierre screams ‘More guns less gun death!’ the more weapons they sell, and the more cash they then throw their champion’s way.
To make it worse, the NRA bullies and threatens any politicians who support gun control measures in such an outrageously menacing way that they usually capitulate or lose their jobs.
Today, Obama finally had enough of this nonsense, and he exploded in a speech of such searing passion and emotion that he openly wept when talking of the 20 children who were slaughtered in their classroom at Sandy Hook in 2012.
I watched Obama crying, and I began to well up too.
This was real.
These were not political tears, they were the tears of a father, of a man who hugged the families of those children a day after the massacre, who felt their pain so close he could hear their hearts breaking.
As the president wept, I experienced another emotion – one of euphoria.
‘YES!’
At last, I thought, he gets it.
Words, he now realises, are simply not enough.
AND:
The speech was brilliantly pitched…
…..I’d have liked to see Obama really go for it and ban ALL assault weapons and ALL magazine clips holding 10 bullets.
So if I wanted to be churlish, I’d say this is all too little, too late.
But I don’t want to be churlish.
Instead, I want to congratulate the President.
It takes guts to do what he did today in a country where over 160 million people love guns and hate any attempts to restrict their access to them or supposedly infringe their rights.
Obama will be reviled for what he did and said.
The Right wing will come after him hard, we’ve already seen that with Republican presidential candidates like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump making it clear they’ll revoke all these new executive orders if they win power.
The NRA were predictably callous.
‘President Obama’s executive orders will do nothing to improve public safety’ they tweeted.
To which I replied ‘idiots’ when I really meant ‘dangerous, deluded numbskulls.’
But none of this matters if enough Americans are as moved by Obama’s tears as I was.
I’ve heard for three years from numerous people close to him how emotional he supposedly gets in private whenever he talks about the Newtown massacre.
The journalistic cynic in me, though, found it hard to believe given the lack of firm action he took to stop it happening again.
Today, I saw it with my own eyes, we all did.
You can’t fake those tears that Barack Obama shed today, not when you have some of the families of the victims you’re shedding them for standing right behind you as you shed them.
What the President has announced won’t stop all gun violence, of course it won’t.
But as he said, it will almost certainly stop some, and will thus save lives.
The battle to stop America from shooting itself to death began today.
Polls consistently show Americans want some form of gun control. When a leader delivers a tough and clearly from-the-heart speech like this that touches thoughtful people, the story in a political entertainment complex that makes big bucks by riling people up then turns into (unfounded) allegations about onions or fake tears. But the tipoff about whether that’s reality is that even that doesn’t fly with some people on their own side…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.