President Obama and Mitt Romney stepped away from attacking each other on the presidential campaign trail Saturday and sought to project the image of national healer in the wake of the tragic shooting in Colorado.
Much like the Columbine, Virginia Tech or Fort Hood shootings, the response to the movie-theater killings in Aurora, Colo. was a moment for both men to provide assurances they could handle the litany of challenges awaiting either of them in the Oval Office.
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Both met the benchmark on Saturday, political experts said. But for Obama and Romney, the coming days are likely to create more complicated political challenges as the pressure builds to say what, if anything, they would do to prevent future tragedies.
“They both looked presidential,” said Charles Walcott, a political scientist at Virginia Tech, who focuses on the presidency. “We expect our leaders to be emotional leaders who represent our feelings — if you don’t, there are great consequences.”
For Obama, the pressure was already starting to build to use the killings as a moment to lead the way to tougher gun-control laws. Some Democrats were already calling for the president to commit to tighten gun laws. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called for both Obama and Romney to address the issue.
“Soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it,” Bloomberg said in an interview on WOR Radio.
The issue is a delicate one, especially for Democrats. In the post-mortems after the close 2000 election, in which Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee and Bill Clinton’s Arkansas, many party analysts assigned part of the blame to the gun control issue.
On Saturday, both the president and his GOP challenger were content to speak about the need for the nation to heal.
“The answer is that we can come together,” Romney said during remarks at a campaign event in New Hampshire. “We will show our fellow citizens the good heart of the America we know and love.”
In his weekly address on Saturday, Obama struck a similar tone, speaking as a parent rather than a politician.
“While we will never know fully what causes someone to take the life of another, we do know what makes that life worth living,” he said. “And what matters in the end are not the small and trivial things which often consume our lives.”
The White House announced late Saturday that Obama would travel to Aurora to meet with families of the shooting victims and local officials.
Amid the political cease-fire, however, some said the nation would soon be inundated again with the rough-and-tumble nature of the presidential campaign.
“When you get it right, as both Romney and Obama did with their reaction to the Colorado shooting, people appreciate it,” said Northeastern University professor Alan Schroeder, an expert on presidential communication. “But it won’t take long. The natural cycle of things will put us back in campaign mode immediately.”
