In the world of politics, there are issues, there are non-issues, and then there are extremely annoying non-issues. And one such recent "issue" that scores highly on the "are you kidding me?!"-ometer is the recent eye-rolling absurdity caused by President Bush's opening volley of campaign ads.
To quickly recap: the president has finally begun his campaign and released several positive-themed television ads. One of the ads, entitled "Safer and Stronger," briefly lists some of the national hardships the president has had to deal with since inauguration. After some montage clips mentioning the recession, the dot-com bust, etc., the ad mentions "a day of tragedy" with a one-second clip of ground zero. That one second has prompted the usual histrionics.
John Kerry called the ad "astonishing" and "revisionist history."
The International Association of Fire Fighters union took personal offense at the commercial, calling it "disgraceful" and demanding that Bush "apologize to the families of firefighters killed on Sept. 11 for demeaning the memory of their loved ones in an attempt to curry support for his re-election."
The Sept. 11 victims' families group, Peaceful Tomorrows, also took issue umbrage. PT leader Colleen Kelly said that the ad makes her "sick" and asked, "Would you ever go to someone's grave site and use that as an instrument of politics?"
At the risk of being called the most insensitive person on the planet, I'm going to have to call shenanigans.
Attempts to portray or even think of these and other groups as grieving families or non-partisan bystanders are, at best, foolhardy. The IAFF, being, well, a union, has proudly endorsed John Kerry this year, and IAFF President Harold Schaitberger has been at Kerry's side for virtually every step of the campaign trail. Similarly, Peaceful Tomorrows is an openly partisan anti-Bush group and is a project of the Tides Center, a leftist nonprofit organization that has received over $4 million from Teresa Heinz Kerry, the ketchup-heiress wife of this year's Democratic presidential nominee.
Our country's firefighters deserve the utmost gratitude for the valiant public service they perform for us, and the families of the victims of Sept. 11 should be granted our unequivocal sympathy for their tragic loss. But politics are politics, and being a firefighter or a widow should not and does not shield one's partisan opinions from criticism or allow them to couch such opinions in the language of politically neutral moral outrage.
"It is one thing for individual family members to invoke the memory of all 3,000 victims as they take to the microphone or podium to show respect for our collective loss," as Debra Burlingame says, the widow of the pilot whose flight hit the Pentagon. "It is another for them to attempt to stifle the debate over the future direction of our country by declaring that the images of Sept. 11 should be off limits in the presidential race."
Furthermore, most any other cry of supposed outrage over the ad from the left belies either hypocrisy or a lousy sense of perspective. There was a similar hubbub in the 2002 elections about Bush "politicizing" the upcoming war in Iraq, because apparently issues important to the country are somehow supposed to be off limits in political discussion. One wonders how the Democrats are going to react when they dig through their old stuff and find those mid-World War II campaign buttons from FDR that proudly proclaim, "Remember Pearl Harbor!"
In fact, it's funny that it's the left that's complaining about "tasteless" ads, since it was they who first brought political speech to a new low with LBJ's infamous "Daisy" ad in 1964, which basically stated, in no uncertain terms, that Barry Goldwater wanted to blow up the universe.
And meanwhile in the present, John Kerry continues to plug for votes by "politicizing" his tour in Vietnam -- you know, that ugly conflict that ended 30 years ago and cost some 57,000 American lives.
Well, he's not the only one who's "astonished."
Eric Spratling is a public relations senior. Reach him at eric.spratling@asu.edu. Click over to his blog online at asuwebdevil.com.
