AND PRESIDENT Bush thought he was taking the "positive" campaign route.
Bush has recently come under attack for displaying quick images of Sept. 11 in his new television campaign ads. Critics, many of whom are family members of those lost on Sept. 11, say the ads are distasteful and exploitative.
Of course, our hearts continue to go out to those who lost loved ones in the tragic events of September 11. Of course, images and memories of that day still cause grief and anguish for those families. But Sept. 11 happened to all of us.
We seem to have set up a situation where these "families of September 11" are the authorities, judges, and managers of anything having to do with the tragedy, and anyone with a dissenting opinion isn't given the space or the right to voice it. In their statements, these critics appear to speak for everyone who suffered losses in the events. Yet, according to Debra Burlingame, sister to the pilot whose plane crashed at the Pentagon, in a column in the Wall Street Journal, "They do not represent me. Nor do they represent those Americans who feel that Sept. 11 was a defining moment in the history of our country and who want to know how the current or future occupant of the Oval Office views the lessons of that day."
Despite their losses, these people don't own Sept. 11. It was an attack on all of America. It was an act of war.
And unfortunately, war is owned by everyone.
President Bush is a war president. There's just no getting around it. The events of Sept. 11 were a turning point in his presidency. The subsequent "war on terror" is a major, major policy issue in the upcoming election. Is he supposed to just ignore the single most important event of his administration, not to mention of modern times?
To say that a president seeking re-election cannot allude to the tragedy that changed America, that he cannot remind the people of a time when the country rallied around him in tremendous support, and when he showed incredible strength and resolve, is ludicrous. That's what presidents do.
Take Franklin Delano Roosevelt, venerated icon of the modern Democratic Party. He invoked Pearl Harbor on numerous occasions during his campaign for re-election in 1944. He delivered campaign speeches from the site at Pearl Harbor. Images from the World War II tragedy were plastered all over Roosevelt buttons and posters. Roosevelt was also a war president, and as such, could not ignore the event that changed his presidency.
Forbidding Bush from alluding to the act of war that was Sept. 11 would, by that logic, also prevent him, or any other candidate, from using images of the war in Iraq to speak for or against the current foreign policy. But you don't see many families of soldiers protesting this idea.
The images used in the ads are not graphic. There is no blood, fire or bodies. What the ad features are quick clips of American flags and firefighters working in the rubble of the World Trade Center.
This isn't new footage. It's not like we haven't seen these same images emblazoned on posters, shirts, mugs and virtually every television station and newspaper in the country. But when Bush uses them, of course, it's exploitative.
Bush isn't abusing Sept.11. It's understandable that some families are upset at seeing these images, but the fact remains that these very images are at the core of the Bush presidency. Sadly, the recent events in Madrid only serve to remind us that terrorism is a very real, very deadly threat. We would do better to face that threat than to hide from it.
Kristin Brown's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kbrown@cavalierdaily.com.
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