Thread by @dsamuelsohn

NEW LONG READ: The demise of 'thoughts and prayers': How the clichéd greeting-card condolence died amid a rash of mass shootings - A powerful story from @adamwren ($) @thisisinsider businessinsider.com/gun-violence-m…

LEDE: The wordsmith-in-chief found himself flummoxed. It was June 2015, and President Barack Obama had been invited to a memorial service for nine Black churchgoers gunned down at a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

But Obama, who had built his authorial brand on the back of two hailed political memoirs and often wrote his speeches longhand on yellow legal paper, couldn't find words that met the moment.

"What am I gonna say?" Obama wondered aloud in the Oval Office to his speechwriter Cody Keenan. His 2 terms in office had been pockmarked by major mass shootings that came to be memorialized by the cities where they took place: Tucson. Fort Hood. Aurora. Newtown. Now, Charleston.

To make matters bleaker, more than two years earlier, in April 2013, the Manchin-Toomey background-checks proposal — which Obama had spent considerable political capital selling at the beginning of his second term — had died in the Senate by a 54-46 vote.

"Cody," Obama asked Keenan that week, "do you have anything to say?"

"I don't because we have exhausted the words," Keenan responded.

"There are only so many times we can eulogize victims," Keenan, who is writing a book about the week leading up to Obama's "Amazing Grace" remarks, said in a recent interview.

"I don't have anything left to say," Obama said earlier this year, reliving that moment in an interview with Bruce Springsteen in an episode of the duo's podcast, "Renegades: Born in the USA."

"I feel like I've used up all my words," Obama said. "Nothing I've been able to say — whether making practical, rational arguments, emotional arguments. I've shown anger in speaking about this. I've shown sorrow, and nothing seems to have any impact. I'm out of words."

Now, six years later, so are the rest of the nation's public officials, including the mayors and their staffers whose frontline job it is to lament the lives lost to mass shootings in the immediate hours after tragedy strikes.

The people who must come up with words when there are no words following each mass shooting are increasingly at a loss for what to say. Their jobs have become tougher as the gun policy debate stalemates. "As long as nothing's going to change, that's probably true," Keenan said.

"It does feel like we're starting to run out of words," said Zev Karlin-Neumann, Buttigieg's ex-chief speechwriter. What's more, he said, the stock greeting-card phrase that once populated public remarks in the wake of tragedies - "thoughts and prayers" - has become verboten.

"Even sort of the most reflective way of talking about expressing the sentiment of grief is off the table because it feels hollow, and it now has been hijacked to sound like it's just a fig leaf for action," said Karlin-Neumann,

"That particular phrase has become off-limits," Sam Weaver, the Democratic mayor of Boulder, Colorado, said after 10 people, including an on-duty police officer, were murdered at a King Soopers supermarket in March.

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