"Somebody somewhere will comment and say, Obama politicized this issue," said Obama.

"Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic."

"When Americans are killed in mine disasters, we work to make mines safer. When Americans are killed in floods and hurricanes, we work to make communities safer. When roads are unsafe, we fix them. To reduce auto fatalities, we have seat belt laws because we know it saves lives," Obama said.

"So the notion that gun violence is somehow different, that our freedom and our Constitution prohibits any modest regulation of how we use a deadly weapon, when there are law-abiding gun owners across the country who could hunt and protect their families and do everything they do under such regulations. Doesn't make sense."

Of course, gun rights advocates are politicizing this in the other direction. It's entirely predictable. What's new is the clear statement: This is something we should politicize.

It's even odd to see the word "politicize" used in a positive way. I looked up the word (in the OED). The original meaning was "To engage in or talk about politics." That's an intransitive verb. You're not politicizing anything, just politicizing — gabbing about politics. It goes back to 1758. Horace Walpole, the 4th Earl of Orford, wrote: "But while I am politicizing, I forget to tell you half the purport of my letter."



The transitive verb, meaning "To make political" has spent most of its time referring to people — making them "politically aware or politically active." That goes back to 1846. The idea of making a subject matter political seems to be much more recent. The first example in the OED is from 1991: "Sociobiology was politicized at the outset by those who saw in it an elaborate argument for justifying a competitive, capitalist status quo." Timothy H. Goldsmith Biol. Roots Human Nature i. 5.

Now, I'm getting deeply into NYT archive, looking at the development of the word. The transitive verb referring to people spikes in 1968 in the context of politicizing students. (There's also talk of politicizing the Court and politicizing black people.) By the early 70s, I'm seeing references to politicizing the activities of persons — politicizing education, politicizing the Watergate investigation. The idea of politicizing an issue happens a bit later.

ADDED: I've gone through 1,000+ occurrences of "politicize" in the NYT archive, and I'll do another post showing you a lot of interesting things about it, but I want to complete this post by saying that I believe that Obama did something new. I can't find earlier examples of a high-level, newsworthy person saying that politicizing an issue is a good idea. I can find examples of people saying that it's a good idea to politicize people — to make them politically aware/active.

In the late 60s, there were lots of lefties who were excited about politicizing college students, and the yippies wanted to politicize hippies. But the later-developing idea of politicizing an issue is always somebody saying they don't want to politicize it, that they want to "de-politicize" it, or an attack on somebody else for politicizing it.

I did find this, from 1989, in a long article by the art critic Grace Glueck about the artist Jenny Holzer:

Holzer's real admirers among artists tend, naturally, to be those involved with newer forms. ''Her work is great, a bit ahead of its time,'' says Christoper Wool, a painter who last year began to make ''word drawings'' that deal with words as abstractions.... ''She has managed to politicize her art without losing the poetics of it. And she's made the light-emitting diodes so much her own that no one else can use them without evoking her work.''

Holzer... accepts the term ''political'' for her work. ''I hope it's political in the larger sense, not topical,'' she says. ''It deals with life-and-death issues; that's supposedly what politics are about.'' An avowed feminist, she is usually seen as part of a group of other strong female artists - Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler and Kruger, among them - who in their work seem concerned about ''real world'' rather than fantasy subject matter, especially the might of military and corporate America.

Since feminism runs on the theory that "the personal is political," it makes sense to find the positive view of politicization in this context.