WASHINGTON — President Obama is not known for showing a surplus of emotion in public, but toward the end of his speech at the University of Arizona, he paused for 51 seconds and appeared to gather himself.
The audience was on its feet. Mr. Obama had just laid down a stark and powerful gauntlet, challenging the country to live up to the expectations of 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, whose death on Saturday was an emotional punch to the gut for so many people across the country. Among them, apparently, is the president himself, whose younger daughter, Sasha, was born three months before Christina.
“I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it,” Mr. Obama had just said. “All of us — we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.”
And then he stopped. After 10 seconds, he looked to his right. After 20 seconds, he took a deep breath. After 30 seconds, he started blinking. Then his jaw tightened. Finally, after 51 seconds of silence, he began to speak again, describing a book published after Sept. 11, 2001 — the day Christina was born — that included her picture and included simple wishes for a child’s life, including one inscription that read “I hope you jump in rain puddles.”
It was a stark moment for Mr. Obama, both as a president and as a father. This is a man who introduced himself to the nation with a memoir that explored how he was shaped by the absence of his own father, and it has been clear that he takes his role as a parent seriously.
On Wednesday evening, he made no explicit mention of either Sasha or her older sister, Malia. But they have been on his mind as he has grappled with how to respond to the shootings.
They have been on his wife’s mind, too. On Thursday, she posted an open letter on the White House Web site that said: “As parents, an event like this hits home especially hard. It makes our hearts ache for those who lost loved ones. It makes us want to hug our own families a little tighter. And it makes us think about what an event like this says about the world we live in — and the world in which our children will grow up.”
The president, friends said, was initially hesitant about calling Christina’s parents, Roxanna and John Green, after the shootings, saying that if it had happened to his daughters, he would not be capable of talking to anyone. He eventually did call the Greens, who buried their daughter on Thursday, and then met with them before his speech.
So on Wednesday night, Mr. Obama’s perspective as a parent came through, propelling him to what is likely to be remembered as the one of the most soaring moments of his presidency.
After two years in which his public appearances have often focused on policy and where he has seemed professorial, the president seemed to speak more from the heart and to connect with his nationwide audience on a more emotional level than at any time since his election. White House aides said that Mr. Obama, like many Americans, thought that Christina’s death was a heartbreak beyond description.
He wrote the bulk of his speech himself, and Mr. Obama was still making final touches aboard Air Force One on the way to Tucson.
Mr. Obama decided, they said, in much the way that he used the historic figures in a recent book that he wrote for Sasha and Malia, “Of Thee I Sing,” to illustrate traits such as courage and creativity, that he would use Christina to challenge Americans to live up to the ideals and expectations of children.
The president spoke eloquently of all six of the people who were killed on Saturday, summoning lighthearted remembrances gleaned from his conversations with their family members. He lauded the doctors who helped the wounded, singled out the two men who wrestled Jared L. Loughner, the man charged in the killings, to the ground, and praised the intern who tried to stem Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s bleeding.
But Christina provided the emotional underpinning.
“Here was a young girl who was becoming aware of our democracy,” Mr. Obama said. “She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model.
“She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often take for granted.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Friday, January 14th 2011 at 9:57AM
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