It's easy for a public figure to become focused themselves, on their own image in the news.
You can see why Sarah Palin wanted to fight back against critics pointing fingers in the wake of the Arizona shootings that killed six and wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, one of the members of Congress that Palin put on a map and targeted with rifle crosshairs after Giffords voted for health care reform.
Critics charged Palin and others courting the Tea Party took things too far with calls for "second amendment solutions" and talk of armed revolution. Conservatives defended her just as strongly.
It's a passionate debate, and it's completely understandable that Palin would want to defend herself at what she sees as baseless attacks.
But where Palin went wrong -- and President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain went right -- is in their approach to the tragedy.
Palin gave a speech via a video on Facebook -- an informal medium -- that was focused on herself. Her reaction to the tragedy. Her thoughts. Why she wasn't to blame.
It was a defiant speech that would certainly make her supporters happy, but it wasn't meant to appeal to a wide audience of moderates, independents or Democrats.
She also created a media firestorm by using -- or misusing -- the loaded phrase "blood libel," which is a term that maligns members of a religion and is most famous for its false reference to Jews using the blood of Christian children to make unleavened bread. Even if Palin had given a much different speech, this blunder would have overshadowed her message, given that Rep. Giffords is Jewish.
The contrast in Arizona, later that same day, was stark.
Obama was joined in Arizona by McCain, Republican U.S. Senator from Arizona and his rival in the 2008 race for the White House.
They comforted the families of the dead and a nation shocked at the violence.
Before the speech, Obama visited Rep. Giffords and her family in the hospital, reporting to the audience in the stadium, and the citizens watching it live on TV, that she had opened her eye for the first time.
Here's a key excerpt from Obama's speech:
That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.
This is a lesson for public figures. It's easy, once you're in the bubble, to start believing that it's all about you, and that whatever you say about a major event -- or a national tragedy -- is newsworthy and important.
Palin shows that what is newsworthy is not always what is smart. Reporters covered her remarks and essentially ignored those of the new Speaker of the U.S. House and other national political figures because they didn't speak so boldly and defiantly.
They didn't make news because they did what public figures typically do: they focused on the victims of the shooting.
The bigger the news, the tougher the tragedy or disaster, the more public figures need to remember three things:
1) It's not about you.
2) It's not about you.
3) It's not about you.
It's always about the audience. About the people.
And in cases of national tragedy -- such as the Challenger Disaster, when President Ronald Reagan helped heal a shocked nation, and the Oklahoma City Bombing, which some say turned President Bill Clinton from a politician into a president -- it is about the people we have lost, the families left behind and those wondering what they, and we, should do in the aftermath.