US PRESIDENT Barack Obama will this evening address the nation at a memorial ceremony for victims of the shooting rampage that killed six people and wounded 14 others last Saturday.
Mr Obama will be accompanied by the First Lady and will speak at 6pm local time in the basketball arena of the University of Arizona.
The White House said he began writing his speech on Monday evening and would devote much of it “to memorialising the victims”.
The president will inevitably be compared to his predecessors at earlier times of national distress: Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863; Ronald Reagan, hours after the space shuttle disaster in 1986; Bill Clinton at the time of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and George W Bush in the National Cathedral, in the wake of the attacks on September 11th,2 001.
Mr Obama’s dilemma most resembles Mr Clinton’s, because Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma bombing, viewed the federal government as a tyrannical power. Jared Loughner, who has been charged in connection with the weekend’s mass killing in Tucson, made similar statements on internet postings. In 1995, as now, Democrats accused the right of inciting violence.
Like Mr Obama, Mr Clinton had just suffered a defeat in midterm elections. Mr Clinton found the right tone in Oklahoma and his ratings in opinion polls shot up.
The title of Mr Obama’s speech will be Together We Thrive: Tucson and America. He will be careful to avoid casting blame.
The university said the ceremony would include a native American blessing, a moment of silence, a poetry reading and the presentation of a chain with messages from the public.
The Obamas are expected to visit Gabrielle Giffords, the Democrat congresswoman whom authorities say Loughner targeted for assassination.
Dr Michael Lemole, the head of neurosurgery at the University of Arizona Medical Center, told reporters yesterday Ms Giffords was breathing on her own.
A bullet traversed the left side of Ms Giffords’s brain. “She has no right to look this good, and she does,” Dr Lemole said.
One of Ms Giffords’s surgeons, Dr Philip Rhee, said earlier that the congresswoman is “100 per cent” certain to survive.
“Hopefully she’ll live to be 95 years old,” Dr Rhee said, adding that he was “very optimistic . . . that she’s not going to be in a vegetative type of state”.
Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has reacted to criticism linking her to the mass shooting in an e-mail to the right-wing radio host Glenn Beck.
“Our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalise on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence,” Ms Palin wrote in the e-mail read by Beck on air.
Ms Palin had published a map with the districts of Democrats who were targeted for defeat marked with crosshairs. She exhorted supporters: “Don’t retreat, Reload!”
Former governor of Minnesota Tim Pawlenty, who like Ms Palin is a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination, told the New York Times there was no evidence linking Ms Palin to the shooting.
Asked about the crosshairs graphic, Mr Pawlenty said: “I wouldn’t have done it.”