A day after declaring that he wouldn’t “spike the ball” by releasing photographs of Osama bin Laden’s bloody face, President Barack Obama is doing an end-zone dance through New York’s Ground Zero and down to Kentucky’s Fort Campbell, the home base of the helicopter-born commandos who won the victory.
“Is he rubbing it in? Absolutely,” said Larry Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “Do Americans want him to do that? Hell yes,” he said.
There’s little likelihood of a negative public reaction because he’s taking his two-day “victory lap” as the nation’s head of state, not as the partisan chief of the Democratic Party, Sabato said.
President George W. Bush took his victory-lap by landing on an aircraft-carrier, the U.S.S. Lincoln, after deposing Saddam Hussein in 2003, he said. “Bush was entitled, and Obama is entitled,” he said.
Decorum requires presidents to set aside their political role during these national galas. The president’s rapidly organized wreath-laying in New York, said White House spokesman Jay Carney, is appropriate “this week in the wake of the successful mission to bring Osama bin Laden justice in order to recognize the terrible loss that New York suffered on 9/11.” And, he said, “to perhaps help New Yorkers and Americans everywhere to achieve a sense of closure.”
The president’s lunchtime remarks in a N.Y. firehouse followed the chief-of-state script. “What happened on Sunday, because of the courage of our military and the outstanding work of our intelligence, sent a message around the world, but also sent a message here back home that when we say we will never forget, we mean what we say,” he said. “It didn’t matter which administration was in, it didn’t matter who was in charge, we were going to make sure that the perpetrators of that horrible act — that they received justice,” he said to the firefighters, dignitaries and many, many watching the remarks on television.
“You guys are making sacrifices every single day,” he told the firefighters, before closing the event by saying, “God bless the United States of America. And with that, I’m going to try some of that food. All right? Appreciate you.”
But political prudence also requires presidents to avoid gaffes that might subsequently be used by rivals. In 2003, the “Mission Accomplished” banner was erected by the carriers’ crew for their own coming-home celebration, but was subsequently wrapped around Bush’s neck by Democrats when Hussein’s Sunni tribesmen allied with al Qaeda to launch a bloody war against U.S. troops and Iraq’s new Shia-dominated government.
Obama’s over-enthusiastic supporters may create subsequent headaches for his reelection campaign. New York’s Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer was especially generous in his praise for Obama; “Getting bin Laden is a turning point — it’s like Gettysburg in the War on Terrorism,” he gushed in a television interview. “The president is doing it perfectly, just right, focus on the families, the firefighters, the cops, not giving a speech…it fits his personality, [which is] strong, cerebral,” he said.
The underlying political goal was flashed by Karen Finney, a former aide to Hillary Clinton and now a N.Y.-based Democratic political consultant: “I hope that part of what comes out of what we feel about this mission is that government can work,” she said in an MSNBC interview. The attack “was an operation that was coordinated across multiple agencies…it was well planned, it was effective and I hope that people feel good about that too,” she said.
There was no need for Obama to make any speech during the Ground Zero tour, she said, because “as a communications director, I just don’t know what you would say that is more powerful and more important than just the symbolism of just being there and that bin Laden is dead.”
Very few Republicans groused about the victory tour or about Obama’s supporters. “I think it’s an appropriate moment to mark, and then there will be a larger ceremony, that will include President [George W.] Bush, amongst others, on the 10th anniversary in September,” said Bush’s former press secretary, Dana Perino.
Still, President Bush declined Obama’s invitation to accompany him to New York, as did former Republican New York Governor George Pataki, who spent the day in Texas. “It is perfectly appropriate for him now that this butcher has been killed to visit the scene of the crime,” Pataki said, although he also warned that Obama’s tour requires ”a difficult balancing act” between the president’s roles as political leader and head of state.
A few complaints were heard. Debra Burlingame, whose pilot-brother was killed on one of the aircraft on 9/11 and who has expertly criticized elements of domestic-security policies for several years, decried the event as “a choreographed photo-op.”
But there’s little chance of significant disapproval because Americans don’t want to see the tour, and Obama doesn’t want to showcase the tour, as a partisan event, Sabato said. “The president is doing what presidents love to do — be the [non-partisan] Chief of State,” he said. “In other societies, this is what monarchs do.”