Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
Bill McGurn ·
Sep. 3 at 6:58am
Commentary's Jennifer Rubin has an excellent post picking up on a Politico story why President Obama is unlikely to go to Ground Zero on the 9/11 anniversary this year. In her post, she also links to an MSNBC video of then-President Bush speaking with that fireman there atop the rubble. She says it still makes her cry. I suspect she's not alone.
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Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
Wow, I had forgotten about the bullhorn speech. One of W's finest moments and one just can't imagine Obama on top of that pile of rubble. I don't mean that Obama lacks the patriotism, but he lacks the passion.
I agree with Rubin's analysis. If Obama got away with skipping Ground Zero last year, why would he go this year?
Jun '10
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
No one in their right mind had anything but admiration for GW Bush at that moment. How quickly things change. Unfortunately, not always for the correct reasons.
May '10
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
What a sad state of affairs when something so important to remember should be thus diminished by political calculation. He should go to Ground Zero regardless of the optics because it's the right thing to do. If he handles himself properly, critics will give him a pass. I know I would.
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
I think you are right. My brother was in the Towers and escaped. I was just across the river in Hoboken when the planes hit, about to take a ferry to work. (I didn't see planes, and thought it was just a fire).
We ended up putting out the WSJ from NJ. Two sad things that will always haunt me. Driving home past midnight that evening, and seeing the lights on in the home of Tim Hughes, a Cantor Fitzgerald exec who never made it back. The next days, I would see parked cars left at the train station by other men and women who also went to work and never came back that day.
This was the context in my head when President Bush stood up on that rubble. No thought I'd ever work for the man.
Jun '10
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
Maybe he'll go with his wife to (the mosque-free) Shanksville, PA
http://www.nps.gov/flni/firstladies.htm
The Flight 93 Memorial Design:
http://www.nps.gov/flni/upload/Design%20presentatioN2.pdf
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
If you are President, you really don't want to be boxed in on places you can't go. Plus, he will have to go next year anyway.
Jun '10
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
This situation (Obama's reluctance to go to Ground Zero) is symptomatic of one of the great flaws of the statist/collectivist view of the world: people (in this case nearly 3,000 fellow citizens who died at the hand of Islamist murderers) are viewed as abstractions instead of real, live humans.
Whatever you may think of George W. (I like him, though not all of his policies), he knew those were real people who died that day. For Obama, they're now just a political problem.
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
Bull's eye, Adam. It's really come through in these Oval Office addresses. I have zero doubt that Obama really loves America -- even if it's in large part because America, in his judgment, is the only country in the world that can successfully point us and others beyond the limits on pan-human social justice that our very particular nation has itself produced. (This is a serious and sustained line of thought on the left.) But my perplexity deepens and deepens when I ponder how hard it is for BHO to find a fusion of Big Candidate mode on the campaign trail and Small President mode in office, or even a middle ground between them.
Jul '10
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
He "loves" America? Please. Be honest here. Twenty plus years with "God @#$% America" and selected a wife who wasn't proud of her Nation until just recently?
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
People do funny things to become President. But let me walk it back a little, Jimmy, and put it in the negative: I do strongly doubt that Obama doesn't like America. I'm too familiar with the educated left impression that only America can successfully lead the way to the left-loved promised land to be found beyond America as we know it.
Jul '10
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
Then why are their policies anti-American? Are you telling me that they do not know what "American" is? Start a thread with Ricochet members defining "American." Barry would be no where near it.
A good interview question, then, would be to ask them, "Could you define 'American?'"
Jul '10
Re: Why Obama Can't Go to NYC on 9/11
A good interview question, then, would be to ask them, "Could you define 'American?'"
"...them..." being the opposition, the libs.