President Obama spoke beautifully at Tucson this evening in a much-needed speech. It is hard to imagine how his remarks could have been improved. No doubt there will be some less generous in their appraisal, but that is our reaction. We haven’t heard such a performance from the president since his “one America” speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. At Tucson the president capped a week of shock, grief, and anger by reaching for the best in all of us and bidding America to recapture the wonder and the dream of a nine-year-old girl who had gone to hear her congresswoman.

One of the remarkable things that came through in the broadcasts we watched of the event was the way a whole nation turned to embrace what is, in Tucson, a relatively small, university town. The congresswoman, the judge, the student hero, the university president, and Republican governor, the former Democratic governor, the Mexican-American physician with Indian ancestry, they all, among others, know each other in the intimacy of a small town. Yet they represent themes that reach out to our whole vast country in an inspiring way.

The most surprising, and admirable, element of the Mr. Obama’s speech, was the pointedness with which he rejected the accusations against Sarah Palin and her colleagues in the Tea Party movement to whom the left wing of the president’s own party has been trying so shamelessly these past few days to attach the blame. Quoth the president: “If, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse let us remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not — but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.”

Mr. Obama welcomed a wide debate on all the issues, but he made no plea for gun control, no call for regulations on political speech, no bid for censorship of the images our politicians use in targeting their opponents. He may join in that; we shall see. This evening, he had a different message.

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized — at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do — it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds,” he said in a none-too-subtle rejection of the Paul-Krugman, New York Times line that has emerged in the wake of the shootings. “[W]hat we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.”

The president’s remarks were consonant with the statement earlier in the day by Sarah Palin, who has borne the brunt of the left-wing attacks with such admirable restraint since the New York Times and others began tuning up against her without so much as a quark of evidence that any of her rousing political rhetoric these past two years had anything to do with the killer’s motivations. The president’s point was Mrs. Palin’s point when she warned that journalists and pundits “should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn.”

Mrs. Palin, by speaking up for herself when so many turned on her, was speaking up for the rights of all Americans to participate vigorously in our national debate — and she was marking the same point the president made, when he called on each of us to enter the fray with “a good dose of humility.” We liked the way he put it when he said: “Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”

_____

This editorial has been updated with an additional quote from the president’s speech.