Ariz. shooting: Has political rhetoric gone too far?

WASHINGTON — Has the nation's harsh political rhetoric become more than just talk?

The attempted assassination of ArizonaRep. Gabrielle Giffords as she talked to voters outside a grocery store in Tucsonfueled a debate Sunday over whether the sharp partisanship and anti-government language that now mark American politics have created a climate that makes violence against public officials more likely.

"You can't say they're just words; they have consequences," South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, a member of the Democratic leadership, said in an interview, especially given their potential impact on "people who may not be clicking on all cylinders."

He cautioned: "We need to take a look at what we're drifting into here."

But some Republican leaders and conservative activists flatly reject the suggestion that hard-edged language on issues such as health care and immigration could fairly be tied to the shocking attack that left six people dead, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl. Giffords remained in critical condition after brain surgery.


"This is a terrible politicization of a tragedy," Rebecca Mansour, an aide to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, said in an interview. "We don't know this person's motive. It doesn't seem like he was motivated by a political ideology. Craziness is not an ideology."

She disputed criticism on liberal blogs of Palin for posting a map that put the crosshairs of a gun on 20 Democratic congressional districts targeted for takeover in November's congressional elections. Giffords' was one of them.

The map on the SarahPAC website and on Palin's Facebookpage didn't show Giffords herself in the crosshairs but only her district, Mansour said. "The language of targeting a swing district has been used long before we used it," she protested. "We have no idea whether that person ever saw that graphic."

Some national tragedies — the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, for one, and the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001 — became moments of national unity and solemnity that prompted officeholders and their constituents to step back from the most polarized politics of the day, at least for a time.

Whether that would happen in the aftermath of the tragedy in Tucson wasn't clear, though officials on all sides decried the shooting and offered prayers for Giffords and the other victims. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., announced that Wednesday's scheduled vote to repeal the health care law, guaranteed to be an occasion for heated rhetoric, would be postponed.

Meanwhile, the same instant venues that have accelerated the polarization of American politics — cable TV, talk radio, political blogs, Twitter and more — became the vehicles for fierce back-and-forths on who was to blame and what should be done.

"When politicians and news commentators use nasty, violent rhetoric, it revs up the base and it fills campaign coffers, but there are repercussions," said Daniel Shea of the Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College in Meadville, Penn. "No one wants to make a direct connection between this fellow's actions and a single political speech or event, but we have to worry about the climate."

Not so fast, said John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. "Shootings happen all the time. It could be political, but it's more likely that this person isn't stable," he cautioned, calling tough criticism part of democracy. "It's not for the faint-hearted."

A Grand Canyon of woes

Arizona is the center of some of the nation's most polarized politics.

The once-booming economy in the Grand Canyon State has been devastated by the mortgage crisis that has left some neighborhoods pockmarked with foreclosed homes. Fears about illegal immigration across the border with Mexico prompted the state legislature last year to enact the nation's toughest crackdown.

The state also has one of the nation's most lenient gun laws.

"I think we're the Tombstone of the United States of America," Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik told reporters at a news conference Sunday, a reference to the dusty Arizona town that was the site of the legendary 19th-century gunfight at the O.K. Corral. "I have never been a proponent of letting everybody in this state carry weapons under any circumstances where they want, and that's almost where we are."

The blunt-spoken Democratic sheriff called Arizona "the capital" for anti-government rhetoric that is heard across the country, often calling the Wall Street bailout and the health care law as overreach by the federal government.

"The rhetoric about hatred, about mistrust of government, about paranoia of how government operates — and to try to inflame the public on a daily basis, 24 hours a day, seven days a week — has impact on people, especially (those) who are unbalanced personalities to begin with," Dupnik said.

The health care law had been a flashpoint in Arizona. During the debate over the bill, in August 2009, a protester at a Giffords event dropped a gun; police escorted him out. On the night the law passed in Washington, with her support, a window in her district office was smashed.

In the election, she faced a Republican challenger with Tea Party support. Jesse Kelly, a businessman and Iraq veteran, used tough language against her, accusing her of having "betrayed" her district on immigration and of having produced "four years of failure" in Congress on every issue.

She prevailed and won a third term, but barely.

'Congress on Your Corner'

A few minutes before 10 a.m Saturday, Giffords typed out a tweet on her iPad.

"My 1st Congress on Your Corner starts now," it read. "Please stop by to let me know what is on your mind or tweet me later."

Setting up shop outside a grocery story on a weekend morning so voters would have a chance to say a word or express a concern is the kind of event many members of Congress routinely hold to connect with their constituents. But a few minutes after Gifford sent that message on Twitter, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner walked up to her, pulled out his gun and hit her and 19 others in a spray of gunfire, according to charges filed Sunday.

The victims may also include events like "Congress on Your Corner" themselves. Congressional leaders and the Capitol Police force are reassessing security for lawmakers and their aides at the Capitol and when they travel to their home states, typically without any regular security details. Members of Congress and their family members participated in a conference call Sunday afternoon to discuss security and other issues.

The attack seems to be virtually unprecedented. House records indicate only a handful of assassination attempts against members of Congress: A duel between two House members in 1838, a brutal fistfight over slavery between two House members and a senator in 1856, an attack by Puerto Rican nationalists on Congress in 1954 and the ambush of a California congressman in 1978 while he was on an investigative trip to Guyana.

In this case, however, the congresswoman was simply meeting with constituents when a gunman started firing. Fears of that sort of violence could make officeholders more reluctant to go to open events where there are often no law enforcement figures present.

Rhetorical attacks on public officials have been getting tougher, and words that once would have seemed out of bounds are now almost routine. President Obama has been labeled a socialist and likened to Hitler. South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" at Obama's speech to a joint session on health care in 2009.

Sharron Angle, the Nevada Republican who challenged Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last year, said she hoped "we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies" in dealing with "the Harry Reid problems." (Reid was re-elected.) Florida Rep. Alan Grayson ran a TV ad calling Republican opponent Daniel Webster "Taliban Dan." (Grayson lost.)

With the escalating verbal attacks, concerns about security have been building. During the health care debate last year, chaotic protests prompted some members to end the practice of holding town hall meetings. The FBIreports that death threats to members of Congress tripled in the second half of 2010, mostly tied to the health care debate.

"I don't think there's any doubt but my colleagues are very concerned about the environment in which they are now operating," Democratic whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland said on CBS' Face the Nation. "It has been a much angrier confrontational environment over the last two or three years than we have experienced in the past. And I think there is worry about that."

On the other hand, some representatives said limits on interacting with voters could make it impossible to do their job. "I'm concerned about putting up more walls between me and the people I represent," Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., said on Fox.

The nation's angry politics distresses many Americans. Nearly three of four voters polled in November called the fall election one of the nastiest they had seen, according to a survey by the Allegheny College center. Nearly two-thirds called the negative tone of politics bad for democracy.

The nation has endured violent episodes in the past, but the shooting "feels like a significant moment" to a country bruised by the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and the bitter midterm elections in November, said Kirk Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California.

"Americans are trying to cope with diminished expectations; we will not be the richest and most successful country in the next 25 years," he said. The shooting "reinforces a soul-searching that many in Washington and around the country have been engaged in the last month. The questions about violent rhetoric were already being asked even before the first shots were fired on Saturday."