MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
First, President Obama went to Arizona and delivered a eulogy.
BARACK OBAMA: And I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.
SIEGEL: On Capitol Hill, speaker of the House, John Boehner, cleared the new majority's agenda for the entire week.
JOHN BOEHNER: The needs of this institution have always risen above partisanship. And what this institution needs right now is strength, wholly and uplifting strength.
SIEGEL: And from Alaska, Sarah Palin, lit into those who linked her group's campaign literature to acts of violence.
SARAH PALIN: Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.
SIEGEL: Well, joining us now, columnists E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and the Brookings Institution and David Brooks of The New York Times. Good to see you both.
DIONNE: Good to see you.
DAVID BROOKS: And you.
SIEGEL: E.J., you first.
DIONNE: I'd like to believe it would be a change in tone. I particularly liked in President Obama's speech his asking us to expand our moral imaginations to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy. So I pledge myself to listening to David more carefully and empathizing with him more. But I thought that was actually a lovely way to put it.
OBAMA: civility is not a sign of weakness. But if you actually look at the whole statement, he said, so let us begin a new remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness and sincerity is always subject to proof. And so what Kennedy was saying and I guess my attitude here is: hope, but verify.
SIEGEL: David Brooks, what do you think?
BROOKS: And then the final thing and I think this is the most important thing, it's acknowledging your own weakness. I need E.J. because I don't have 100 percent of the truth. I may have 60 percent, he may have 40, but, you know...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: No. We each have a share of the truth.
DIONNE: Now we know what this civility is all about.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: But we need each other to balance each other out and we need the conversation. Without that conversation, we really have nothing. And so that's why we need civility because individually each of us are weak.
DIONNE: I just want to say, David and I both love Reinhold Niebuhr. He had an excellent Niebuhr line in his column today. One of my favorite Niebuhr lines on this theme is: We must see the error in our own truth and the truth in our opponent's error. That's a wonderful idea. It's awfully hard to run a campaign on the basis of that principle.
SIEGEL: Speaking of that, it appears at this moment, that President Obama is more popular than he was a week ago, and that Sarah Palin, less so. Do you think there will be lasting consequences for those two political figures, David?
BROOKS: She does not have a political strategy. She has a media strategy. And the way conservatives develop their media strategy is to offend liberals. And what she does is she continually picks phrases and things that will offend a lot of people in the country. And this is the way she rallies conservatives to her side. And it works as a media strategy. As a political strategy, I think even a lot of conservatives say we may sort of like her, but she's not ready to be president and I'm afraid she showed that again this week.
DIONNE: The fact she pulled them down from her website suggests that she understood this at some level. She should've just said it. And I think she would've been so much better off.
SIEGEL: I just want to get beyond Tucson for a moment here. David Brooks, the House Republicans now in the majority have their retreat this weekend. What are the questions they have to answer at their retreat?
BROOKS: I think over the last three, four weeks he's made it abundantly clear he's a moderate, pragmatic liberal. They have to take a new look at him and decide where they can work with him. And I think they're actually more willing to do that than one might suppose.
SIEGEL: Do some Republicans say there's no such thing as a moderate pragmatic liberal?
BROOKS: No.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: You've created an odd creature there?
BROOKS: No, I think I've heard from a number of them. They said, you know, he's not as liberal as he was before. I'm becoming more optimistic there will be less gridlock over the next year than I would've thought maybe a month or two ago.
SIEGEL: E.J., thoughts on that?
DIONNE: I'm a little less optimistic than David is. Partly because I wish the Republicans could've kicked down the road having this debate on health care, which is still, by the way, called the repealing the job killing health care law act. I don't think they needed to debate that now. It would've been nice to kick it down the road a little bit.
SIEGEL: E.J. Dionne, David Brooks, thanks to both of you.
DIONNE: Thank you.
BROOKS: Thank you.