President Obama will be in Orlando Thursday afternoon for a trip that will include visits with the families of victims of Sunday’s horrific mass shooting. It’s become a too-familiar ritual given the number of mass shootings in recent years, with details like the White House M&Ms given to children in the victims’ families already widely reported. If it is a ritual, though, it’s one that the president seemingly never fails to make personal and honest:
“He hugged each one of us individually — and I mean hug, so that I was able to smell his cologne,” said Sharon Risher, 57, who lost her mother, Ethel Lance, and two cousins in the shooting in Charleston, S.C., last year, and met privately with Mr. Obama the next week. “It was not a little pat on the back. The intimacy of that hug is what I’ll always remember.” [...]
At a high school in Newtown in 2012, Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son, Daniel, was among the 28 killed at Sandy Hook two days earlier, decided, in what he now calls a fog of shock and trauma, to lecture Mr. Obama on the importance of spending time with his children.
“He looked me in the eyes and said, ‘I’m coming from a recital right now,’ ” Mr. Barden said in an interview, adding that he now finds the episode “horrendously embarrassing.” But Mr. Obama could relate, he added.
The scale of the massacre in Orlando means that Obama has a wrenching day ahead of him. He will be accompanied to Orlando by Vice President Joe Biden.