NEW YORK—If it’s true that the better speech-giver wins in presidential elections, then it’s going to be Bush in a landslide. In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for the presidency—particularly the powerful final third—the president provided the eloquence that the times demand. It’s too bad he doesn’t have the presidency to match his (or Michael Gerson’s) rhetoric.
The inspiration the president provided, however, was overshadowed by the disturbing nostalgia for Sept. 11 that preceded it. The phenomenon of “faster nostalgia” keeps accelerating, and the decades we reminisce about grow closer and closer to the present with each passing year. But the two political conventions this August must be the first recorded instances of nostalgia for the 21st century.
During the Democratic convention, too many speakers looked back to 9/11 with fondness. They didn’t recall the months after the worst foreign attack in American history as a sad and tragic time. Instead, they appeared to remember those days as a warm-and-fuzzy time of national unity, now lost because of Republican partisanship. But the GOP’s wistful look back at the tragedy as a marvelous occasion that somehow justifies the re-election of President Bush was even more stomach-turning. The convention’s final night had the air of a VH-1 special: I Love Sept. 11.
Before President Bush came out to speak, the convention’s image-masters aired a hagiographic video, a 9/11 retrospective that was Field of Dreams as told by the narrator of The Big Lebowski, with a dash of the David McCullough sections of Seabiscuit. (Like The Dude’s rug in Lebowski, 9/11 really tied Bush’s presidency together.) The reason to re-elect Bush, actual narrator Fred Thompson implied, is not the foreign-policy actions he took after being saddled with a historic tragedy. No, Bush merits re-election because of his performance as an Oprah-like healer in chief. He placed a deceased New York cop’s badge in his pocket. He jogged with a wounded soldier. And most of all, he went to a baseball game.
“What do a bullhorn and a baseball have in common?” Thompson asked, and soon we were told: The defining moment of the Bush presidency came not only on Sept. 14, as previously thought, when Bush stood at Ground Zero and proclaimed that the terrorists who struck New York and Washington would “hear from us.” It also came a month later, when Bush marched to the mound of Yankee Stadium and boldly, decisively, resolutely tossed out the first pitch of the World Series. “What he did that night, that man in the arena, he helped us come back.That’s the story of this presidency,” Thompson said, as I wondered how many takes it took Thompson to do this without giggling. You keep pitching, no matter what, Thompson said. You go to the game, no matter what. “You throw, and you become who you are.” The delegates went nuts. Remember that time Osama chased Bush’s slider in the dirt?
The absurd film was actually Bush’s second introduction. The first had come five minutes earlier, when New York Gov. George Pataki finished his speech, a repugnant politicization of Sept. 11. At first, like the video, Pataki’s use of 9/11 was just laughable, such as when he took a moment to thank the good people of the swing states Oregon, Iowa, and Pennsylvania for their generosity in New York’s hour of need. The despicable moment came later, when he blamed the Clinton administration for the terrorist attacks.
After 9/11, “The president took strong action to protect our country,” Pataki said. “That sounds like something any president would do. How I wish that were so.” Instead, Bill Clinton shamefully ignored the attacks on the World Trade Center, the embassies, and the U.S.S. Cole. “How I wish the administration at that time, in those years, had done something,” Pataki said. “How I wish they had moved to protect us. But they didn’t do it.”
But, wait—didn’t President Clinton strike at Osama Bin Laden’s training camps in 1998? And didn’t Republicans criticize him for doing it? I think it’s misguided and pointless to discuss whether 9/11 was preventable, and it’s a waste of time to ponder who is more blameworthy, Bush or Clinton. But since Pataki brought it up, isn’t the fact that President Bush presided over the most catastrophic attack on the U.S. mainland in American history a strike against him, not a point in his favor? If it was so obvious that the nation needed to attack al-Qaida more forcefully in the 1990s, why did President Bush take nine months to pay attention to the threat? And didn’t the Clinton administration disrupt the planned millennium bombing of Los Angeles International Airport? Wasn’t that a move to protect us? Nothing Zell Miller said Wednesday was as loathsome as Pataki’s speech.
There was an honest case to be made for war with Iraq: Saddam Hussein did not possess nuclear weapons, but he was pursuing them and needed to be toppled before he acquired them. President Bush never made that case, preferring instead to exaggerate the nature and immediacy of the threat and to link al-Qaida with Iraq in the public mind. This convention continued that disgraceful record, muddying the distinction between 9/11 and Iraq, conflating the war of necessity the nation faced after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the war of choice in Iraq, and repeatedly telling the lie that John Kerry wants to wait until the nation is struck again before crushing al-Qaida.
The president’s defenders say he invaded Iraq with good intentions, and I believe them. But if President Bush didn’t mislead us into war, he’s misleading us during one, and he deserves to be defeated for it.
