Keeping death out of the picture
Maureen Dowd NYT
Friday, November 7, 2003
WASHINGTON Who can blame poor President
George W. Bush? Look at his terrible dilemma.
There are those who say that as the chief
executive he should have come out of his Texas
ranch house and articulated and assuaged the
sorrow and outrage and anxiety the nation was
feeling on Sunday after the deadliest day in Iraq
in seven months. An attack on a Chinook
helicopter had killed 15 American soldiers - 13
men and two women - and wounded 21.
There are those who say Bush should have
emulated Rudolph Giuliani's empathetic
leadership in New York after Sept. 11, or Dad's in
the first Gulf War, and attended some of the
funerals of the 379 Americans killed in Iraq. Or
one. Maybe the one for Specialist Darryl Dent, the
21-year-old National Guardsman from Washington
who died outside Baghdad in late August when a
bomb struck his truck while he was delivering
mail to troops. His funeral was held at a Baptist
church three miles, or about 5 kilometers, from
the White House.
But let's look at it from the president's point of
view: if he grieves more publicly or concretely, if
he addresses every instance of bad news, like the
hideous specter of Iraqis celebrating the downing
of the Chinook, he will simply remind people of
what's going on in Iraq.
So it's understandable why, going into his
re-election campaign, Bush wouldn't want to point
out that young Americans keep getting whacked
over there, and we don't know who is doing it or
how to stop it.
The White House is cleverly trying to distance
Bush from the messy problem of flesh-and-blood
soldiers with real names dying nearly every day,
while linking him to the heroic task of fighting
global terror.
It's better to keep it vague, to talk about the
"important cause" and the "brave defenders" of
liberty.
If he gets more explicit, or allows the flag-draped
coffins of fallen heroes to be photographed coming
home, it will just remind people that the
administration said this would be easy, and it's
teeth-grindingly hard. And that the
administration vowed to get Osama and Saddam
and weapons of mass destruction, and hasn't. And
that the Bush team that hyped the presence of Al
Qaeda in Iraq has now created an Al Qaeda
presence in Iraq. And that there was no plan for
the occupation or for financing one, no plan for
rotating or supporting troops stretched too thin to
guard ammunition caches or police a fractious
society, and no decent plan for getting out.
As the White House points out, Bush cannot fairly
pick and choose which memorial services to go to,
or which deaths to speak of.
"If a helicopter were hit an hour later, after he
came out and spoke, should he come out again?"
Dan Bartlett, the White House communications
director, asked The New York Times's Elisabeth
Bumiller, explaining Bush's silence after the
Chinook crash. The public, he added, "wants the
commander in chief to have proper perspective,
and keep his eye on the big picture and ball." The
ball for fall is fund raising. Bush has been going
full throttle since summer, spending several days
a week flying around the country, hitting up rich
Republicans for $2,000 checks. He has raised $90
million so far out of the $175 million he plans to
spend on a primary campaign in which he has no
opponent.
At fund-raisers, Bush prefers to talk about the
uptick in the economy, not the downtick in Iraq.
On Monday, arriving for a fund-raiser in
Birmingham, Alabama, he was upbeat, not
somber. As Mike Allen of The Washington Post
reported in his pool report, "The president, who
gave his usual salute as he stepped off Marine
One, appeared to start the day in a fabulous
mood. … An Alabama reporter who was under the
wing shouted, 'How long will U.S. troops be in
Iraq?' The president gave him an unappreciative
look."
Raising $1.8 million at lunch, he stuck to the line
that "we are aggressively striking the terrorists in
Iraq, defeating them there so we will not have to
face them in our own country." He didn't want to
depress the donors by mentioning the big news
story, the loss of 15 American soldiers, or sour the
mood by conceding the obvious, that the swelling
of the horde of terrorists fighting Americans there
will not prevent terrorists from coming to the U.S.
Maybe everyone should be like Bush and not read
the papers, so we don't get worn down either.
Perhaps the solution to Bush's quandary is to
coordinate his schedule so he can go to cities
where he can attend both fund-raisers and
funerals.
The law of averages suggests it shouldn't be hard.
E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com
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