As the general election season begins, our country, unfortunately, is about to be subjected to an avalanche of ad after ad with exaggeration after exaggeration. Furthermore, every ad and every selling point on both sides will be subjected to endless second-guessing from the other side. In the case of the latest ads from the Bush campaign, though, they really do deserve it.
The new ads for the Bush campaign were not on the air even one day before they came under fire from families of the Sept. 11 victims. The ads use footage of the bombed-out site and of a coffin with an American flag draped upon it. The ad said we should re-elect the president because of his leadership in these tough times. Instead of boosting the campaign, the press immediately covered what some victims' families saw as the hypocrisy of the thing.
Bush has, up to now, employed all sorts of maneuvers to avoid answering to the special commission on Sept. 11, declaring that he would only speak with them for an hour, an hour which has yet to actually occur. House Republicans even attempted to cut off the commission's mandate, almost declining to extend their term through the whole election season.
If the president was serious about leadership through our war on terrorism, these families claim, he would at least help the commission whose job is to figure out how the intelligence failures happened and where we go from here. He wouldn't be employing this stall tactic if he had nothing to hide about what happened on his administration's watch. An upcoming book from former counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke tells that, in fact, Bush was negligent in the months leading up to Sept. 11, and above all else doesn't want the public to know about it. At any rate, relatives of the dead are furious that Bush is exploiting what is to them a personal tragedy for his own ads.
Even worse is just how serious these ads are in their exaggeration. Toward the end of the ad, as we see proud Americans from coast to coast, we see two firefighters in the Bush campaign ad. Newsweek has revealed that these two \firefighters"" are in fact paid actors. Just as Bush seeks to co-opt everything good in America into himself and his own image, he doesn't mind falsifying the image of support from people the average American respects. Thus an administration that was cutting aid to firefighters and would have had a hard time finding a real one to be in their ad can construct an image for people to follow.
The firefighters union has been a strong supporter of John Kerry for more than a year, so the administration's answer is to get some actors playing firefighters and telling you they're for Bush. It was a small detail that might not have been noticed if there wasn't already coverage of the outraged families.
In an interview conducted shortly after he began his crusade for gay marriage, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made a great observation about the current state of our political system. He said that a lot of people are dissatisfied with politics because of the tendency of too many politicians to make great promises about what they're for and then do nothing once elected. Just as he said he was for gay marriage during his campaign for mayor, he would not then follow too many politicians and continue to engage in the artificiality that plagues our political culture.
We see the opposite of Newsom's ethic at the top levels of leadership. We have an administration that says it cares about our security but won't answer any questions or give any sensitive information to a commission they formed on the subject. We have an administration that shows its dedication to our servicemen by having the president dress up as one and then cut veterans benefits. We have an administration that shows its dedication to emergency personnel by having actors dress up to look like them. This is in fact the best statement that the administration could have made about themselves. President Bush is not a man who looks out for the American people, he just plays one on TV.
