President Obama will focus his speech at a memorial service in Tucson on Wednesday evening on the victims of the attack and on the idea of service to the country, avoiding any overt commentary on the debate over violence and the nation’s political culture.
Instead, Mr. Obama, who was still working with his speechwriters on his remarks on Tuesday, will call for unity among Americans, while trying to honor the victims, including their service to government, as an example to all Americans. He will share the anecdotes about the victims that he has learned during private phone calls to the families, aides said.
By staying above the partisan fray, Mr. Obama is adopting a model that is very close to what President Bill Clinton did 16 years ago, when Mr. Clinton was faced with responding to the Oklahoma City bombing at a similar point in his presidency. On April 23, 1995, four days after Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Mr. Clinton traveled to Oklahoma City, where he told grieving family members at a memorial service that “those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind.”
It was a widely praised address that helped reinvigorate his presidency just months after a midterm drubbing. Against the backdrop of a partisan debate over the role and size of government, Mr. Clinton paid tribute to federal workers in a relatively brief speech that did not wade directly into politics.
Tucson is not Oklahoma City— Jared L. Loughner allegedly killed six people outside the Safeway on Saturday, not 168, and injured 15, not 450. But when Mr. Obama walks onto the basketball court at the University of Arizona at 8 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday night, he will be facing both a challenge, to find the words and the tone that a horrified country will find comforting, and an opportunity, to appear as a leader first instead of a politician.
“The president needs to go to the highest ground here and really be a source of comfort and inspiration to the whole country,” said John Podesta, the head of the Center for American Progress, a policy group that has deep ties to the Democratic Party. “He should, as much as possible, personally stay away from anything that could possibly be accused of politics.”
White House officials were clearly aware of the potential traps. David Axelrod, a senior advisor who oversees all major speeches delivered by the president, said Tuesday that it would be wrong to view the speech through a political prism.
“His interests in going, his role in going is in response to a tremendous trauma for that community and the whole American community,” Mr. Axelrod said. “That’s his mindset as he goes.”
Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman, added: “The president thought it was important to visit the Tucson community since this tragedy touched everyone there as well as throughout the entire country in some way.”
Mr. Obama, Mr. Shapiro said, “believes that right now, the main thing we should be doing is offering our thoughts and prayers to those who’ve been impacted and making sure that we’re joining together and pulling together as a country.”
Mr. Obama’s speech in Arizona will mark the third time since taking office two years ago that he will lead the country in mourning after a national tragedy. He eulogized the 13 soldiers who were gunned down in November 2009 at Fort Hood, Tex., and five months later he traveled to West Virginia to remember the lives of the 29 men killed in the nation’s worst coal mining disaster in four decades.
In both cases, the president recounted personal anecdotes about those who lost their lives, even as he tried to draw broader lessons about the tragedy. But he did not, particularly in the case of the Fort Hood speech, directly address an array of haunting questions about the shooter.
In each instance, Mr. Obama also used the occasion to draw upon his faith, which an official said he will do again in Arizona.
