Barack Obama took some heat last week for suggesting that the violence perpetrated against the victims at Virginia Tech is somehow comparable to the "verbal violence" of Don Imus or the "violence" of losing a job to outsourcing.
Candidates occasionally overreach in an effort to pull certain issues into their wheelhouse, and it was a mistake for Obama to try and use the tragic events in Blacksburg to weave a larger narrative about different types of violence in society, even if you think Obama's theme has merit.
But Obama's not the only one in the race guilty of the overreach - and at least he doesn't make a habit of it. Republican Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, includes it as part of his standard stump speech when he compares the "terror" of September 11 to other kinds of terror Americans face every day. Here's Huckabee from my interview with him last month in New Hampshire:
September 11 certainly changed the spirit of the country in many ways and gave us a new level of anxiety. There are things we need to be afraid of; we need to be afraid of Islamic fascists; we need to afraid of the internal terrors that we face. The fact that many people will go to work this Friday and get a pink slip and be told that the job they've been working at 20 years won't exist anymore. The fear that people are going to get a phone call that their 8 year old has broken his arm on the playground and they're not sure how they're going to pay the doctor bill and pay the rent on the first of the month.
That's real terror. I mean, people have to understand that there are many forms of terror in the United States. There's a terror that exists because our healthcare system is upside down and we're just so overwhelmed with chronic disease that it's bankrupting us and making us non-competitive. Parents are afraid their kids are going to spend twelve years in schools and still not be prepared to challenge the issues of the world.
So those are real true forms of terror for many American families.
Again, even if you feel Huckabee's larger narrative has merit, it strikes me as a bad idea to go around comparing the horror of 9/11 to deficiencies in healthcare, public schools, etc. Such comparisons might be particularly risky for Huckabee given that the war on terror is far and away the most important issue to Republican primary voters.
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