A Delicate Dance Over 9/11
Three years ago, Kristen Breitweiser voted for George W. Bush. That was before her husband died in the World Trade Center, before Bush opposed the formation of the independent 9/11 commission, and before his campaign ran TV ads featuring images from September 11. She isn't sure whom she'll vote for in November, but her enthusiasm for Bush has waned. "If [September 11] is important enough to be invoked in his campaign," says Breitweiser, 33, "why is it not important enough to give more than an hour to the commission?"
The White House last week backed off from its one-hour limit for Bush's meeting with the 9/11 commission, but the flap over his ads shows that September 11 could become political dynamite. As Bush and John Kerry seek to use the attacks to their advantage, both risk appearing crassly manipulative to voters.
A poll released last week showed that more than half the respondents found Bush's use of 9/11 images in his advertisements inappropriate. Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker says the spots failed the first test of a presidential re-election bid: to reintroduce the incumbent in "the most nonoffensive manner possible."
But Nelson Warfield, press secretary for Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, says the flap will help Bush by "changing the conversation." Bush may hope to frame the bleak job landscape and casualties in Iraq as effects of 9/11. "You couldn't do a commercial about [Bush's] challenges without including September 11," says former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. "The way it was depicted was tasteful--and necessary."
Back and forth. Kerry, meanwhile, used the debate over the spots to lay into Bush, declaring that "if the president . . . can find time to go to a rodeo, he can find the time to do more than one hour in front of [the 9/11] commission." A day later, aides said Bush would "answer all the questions [commission members] want to raise."
The September 11 attacks could become more of a lightning rod as the election nears. The Republican National Convention opens in New York two weeks before their third anniversary, which Rutgers's Baker sees as part of "a grand design to get as many 9/11 hits as possible," a charge Republicans deny. If Baker is right, those hits come with both costs and benefits. When he attended a groundbreaking for a September 11 memorial on Long Island last week, President Bush was praised by some victims' families for participating--and excoriated by others for attending a nearby fundraiser afterward.
This story appears in the March 22, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.