-By Warner Todd Huston
Radio talker Rush Limbaugh got in dutch with Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer for saying that Obama supporters were “slobbering” over his address at the pep rally/memorial sponsored by the University of Arizona for those fallen in the Arizona shooting. But “slobbering” is nothing compared to historian Douglas Brinkley’s hyperbolic praise. Brinkley absurdly said that Obama was “Martin Luther King-like” in his efforts.
Brinkley’s blinkered assessment was originally reported by CNN’s Krsiti Keck immediately after the speech. His comments were coupled with those of several other commentators and published under the headline, “Obama’s Tucson speech: Inspirational, but tone surprised some.” Brinkley made himself look simply silly with his comments.
“I thought President Obama did a wonderful job this evening. I thought that he really brought people together. I mean, when he, in the middle of the speech, said, ‘Gabby opened her eyes, Gabby opened her eyes,’ & you could almost hear a Martin Luther King-like inflection — And he carried that throughout a lot of the speech.
“I was, like David Gergen earlier, a little put off by the atmospherics, 14,000 cheering people. But the president, I think, worked his way into that atmosphere. So, by the end of it, you could almost feel people hugging in the excitement, in the warmth & the love in the arena.”
There is little doubt that the atmosphere of this memorial cum pep rally was nearly as bad as that of the Wellstone funeral of 2002. The University of Arizona set the tone badly right at the beginning by treating the whole thing like an Obama campaign appearance. U of A President Richard Shelton’s introduction of Obama, for instance, was wholly inappropriate for a memorial.
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‘Historian’ Douglas Brinkley: Obama ‘Like’ Martin Luther King”