You’d think a Presidential speech on the fifth anniversary of 911 would be a simple task, a quick way to try to regain a reputation as a “uniter not a divider.”
But whether it was his intent or not President George Bush’s 911 speech, which could have been an occasion to look at the terrorist attack and shore up national unity while skirting anything that could be construed as divisive in an election year, proved to be anything but. Democrats immediately denounced it — and Republicans immediately defended it and denounced Democrats who denounced it.
Was there a better way to do it? Or, was it impossible because George Bush’s political capital is down nearly so low that he might regret signing the bankruptcy reform law?
WE BLOG, the blog by the editorial writers of this writer’s journalistic alma mater, The Wichita Eagle Beacon, declares:
President Bush’s Sept. 11 commemorative speech Monday night sounded pretty much the same themes, in the same phrases, as speeches he gave two or three years ago.
He sounded the right notes about Sept. 11 — we’ve heard them before — but then he shifted to defending the war on Iraq as the central front in the war on terror. The problem: A majority of Americans no longer agree with that fundamental premise of Bush’s anti-terror strategy.
In a recent CNN poll, 53 percent of Americans didn’t think that the war in Iraq is part of the war on terrorism. That’s probably because more Americans today understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Sept. 11 (as the president now admits), and that the bloody sectarian civil war in Iraq is more complicated than Bush’s rhetoric that “the safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.�
Further, when Bush says “America did not ask for this war,� Americans know that doesn’t apply to Iraq.
The Washington Post noted:
President Bush’s Oval Office speech last night was the culmination of two weeks of efforts to rally the nation behind his policies and presidency by summoning the memory of Sept. 11, 2001. Five years after that indelible day, however, this president’s capacity to move the public is severely diminished.
There were echoes of the language and logic Bush invoked five years ago when he united a stricken nation looking to him for both comfort and leadership. But he was speaking to a different nation last night.
Setbacks in Iraq have soured a majority of Americans on that mission. Falsely optimistic predictions of progress have undermined the administration’s credibility. A majority of Americans question fundamental elements of the president’s argument, including his contention that Iraq is the central front in the campaign against terrorism.
Cumulatively, it leaves decidedly uncertain whether this week’s flood of rhetoric and remembrance can alter Bush’s perilous circumstances — at a critical moment for the future of the Iraq mission and the president’s own domestic standing 56 days before the midterm elections.
“The power of his rhetoric is in marked decline, and that’s no reflection on the quality of what he says, which is still very high,” said Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a neoconservative scholar who has been sympathetic to Bush’s anti-terrorism policies. “There’s a desire in the country for more deeds, not more words. . . . We are losing a war right now, and there is no way to get around that.”
President Bush’s speech on Monday night from the Oval Office commemorating the five-year anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, was not political.
Or was it? …
….While there are certainly ways to discuss the war on terrorism and, even, the American military efforts in Iraq, in ways that are not divisive, Bush used the occasion to make a vigorous case for his Iraq policy — a topic as “political” as anything else in national life today.
And, indeed, Bush used the 911 anniversary — an anniversary already seemingly desecrated by a two-part film aired on ABC that in its original pre-air form reportedly resembled a GOP campaign commercial more than even a typical Hollywood riddled-with-inaccuracies docudrama (the film’s producer and some critics disagree with this view)) — to turn it into a kind of pitch for support for the war in Iraq.
It was a message in which remembering 911, the specifics of that outrage, and the 3,000 innocents who woke up one morning not realizing it was their last on earth, was not lost — but unnecessarily diluted.
The case could be made — as Bush does — that if the U.S. pulls out from Iraq it will give terrorist forces a victory to tout. Some will (and do) debate that…but that could have been kept for another date and another debate.
It wasn’t…and the political fall out of yet another missed opportunity to unify rather than divide the United States was immediately apparent by a partisan mini-firestorm in Congress:
Some leading Democrats on Capitol Hill say President Bush shouldn’t have used the memory of the Nine-Eleven attacks to defend the Iraq war.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid complains that “the American people deserved better.” Reid says the president could’ve used the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks to reclaim what
Reid calls a “sense of unity, purpose and patriotism” that came in 2001.Senator Ted Kennedy says outright that Bush “should be ashamed” of giving a speech that “had nothing to do with Nine-Eleven.” The veteran Massachusetts lawmaker says the anniversary wasn’t the time to debate the president’s Iraq policy.
And Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who oversees efforts to win Democratic control of the House, says Americans would’ve been glad had partisanship been a casualty of September Eleventh. Instead, Emanuel says it’s “the one thing the president refuses to give up.”
The White House immediately insisted that there was nothing partisan about the speech:
Bush spokesman Tony Snow said although there were “three or four sentences” in the president’s 17-minute address Monday night that could be considered controversial, Bush took pains not to be partisan. He said Bush had to discuss the dominant issue of Iraq, but he wasn’t “picking fights” or making any demands of Congress.
“This was not a speech that was designed to single out anybody for partisan reasons, but gave the president’s honest reflections and reactions to what has happened since September 11, 2001,” Snow said. “The president decided that yesterday wasn’t a day for partisanship.”
Question: When, with the exception of a short period after Sept. 12, 2001, has this White House put aside partisanship? In historical terms the Bush administration has proven to be one of the most bitterly polarizing and partisan ever — which is why it now faces a credibility gap with roots far more profound than just its Iraq policy and the justifications originally given to the nation for it.
Newsweek’s Richard Wolfe and Holly Bailey nail what GWB really did in his speech on the fifth anniversary of 911, in a column that should be read in full. Here’s part of it:
Sure, President Bush avoided the words Democrat and Republican. And there were no exhortations for legislation. But if that’s the definition of political, then there’s little that qualifies outside a 30-second TV ad and a State of the Union speech. Instead, the 9-11 anniversary speech carried all the hallmarks of politics as honed and polished by President Bush in the 12 years he has held public office.
The most important hallmark is a passive-aggressive strategy—to land a punch without looking like you’re in a fight. So Bush took the high road of patriotism, as he called for Democrats to stop opposing his policies in Iraq and elsewhere. “Winning this war will require the determined efforts of a unified country,� Bush said, “and we must put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us.�
Nothing in his speech, and nothing outside it, suggests that President Bush is ready to meet his critics half-way in setting aside their differences. In the president’s view, the people playing politics—and dividing the nation—are those who oppose his approach. That may not be explicitly partisan politics, but it is political debate dressed up in patriotic clothes.
They also note this:
Bush’s rhetorical strategy is twofold: first, issue a statement of fact about your own position; second, caricature your opponents to look foolish. First the statement of fact: “We’re training Iraqi troops so they can defend their nation. We’re helping Iraq’s unity government grow in strength and serve its people. We will not leave until this work is done,� he explained.
Second, the caricature: “Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone,� he said. “They will not leave us alone. They will follow us.�
And, in fact, it’s hard to think of a single credible political figure in the Democratic party of a single credible (or perhaps even uncredible) weblogger who has ever said the terrorists “would leave us alone” if the U.S. either sped up its task in Iraq or pulled out.
The authors further note that Bush used this same tactic to decimate Senator John McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000 and has used it since:
This is the kind of politics that Bush has used in every cycle, and he shows every sign of repeating the strategy in 2006. He questions his opponents’ weakness, and asserts his own strength; he accuses his opponents of playing politics, while asserting his own honesty and sincerity.
In Washington, such tactics have long been credited to Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff and master political strategist. In fact, Bush is using some of the oldest rhetorical tactics from classical times—and that’s not by chance.
Another astute observation:
The sad lesson of the last five years of politics is that even the most benign ideas, like acting with resolve, have taken on political—and partisan—meaning. No matter how somber the events on Monday, this campaign season will be just as political as the last.
That’s one reason why Bush’s 911 speech will go down as an opportunity as lost as the unprecedented national unity the country enjoyed after the 911 attacks when both parties seemed to come together and many thought George Bush had the makings of becoming a 21st century FDR: someone who’d unify this nation in wartime and solidify his party’s hold on power for years due to its using a national crisis to reassure Americans and expand its tent so that all Americans were welcome to battle the common foe.
Instead, the tent has been increasingly screened in recent years, to try and keep many Americans who don’t completely agree with Bush out.
Could the 911 speech have been done in a better manner to unify and not leave the slightest chance of creating political controversy in an election year? Yes.
Did the 911 victims — who faced their last minutes on earth with sudden and unspeakable horror in airplanes and in the twin towers — deserve better? Yes.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.