Why MSM Can’t Sell It
With an increasing number of activists gathering outside the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, the left and it’s Main Stream Media allies still can’t sell the anti-war, anti-administration, and anti-Bush agenda. They have their gift of Cindy Sheehan posing as the grieving mother demanding another audience with the President, they have the media camped out literally, and camping out on this story, but it hasn’t moved ordinary people from their position on the war.
We think it might be worth standing in the President’s shoes for a while, and look at it through his eyes in this piece from the August 22nd issue of Newsweek. Read for yourself, the President’s side of grieving (HT to Trevino at Red State):
“The grieving room was arranged like a doctor’s office. The families and loved ones of 33 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan were summoned to a large waiting area at Fort Bragg, N.C. For three hours, they were rotated through five private rooms, where they met with President George W. Bush, accompanied by two Secret Service men and a photographer. Because the walls were thin, the families awaiting their turn could hear the crying inside.
President Bush was wearing “a huge smile,” but his eyes were red and he looked drained by the time he got to the last widow, Crystal Owen, a third-grade schoolteacher who had lost her husband in Iraq. “Tell me about Mike,” he said immediately. “I don’t want my husband’s death to be in vain,” she told him. The president apologized repeatedly for her husband’s death. When Owen began to cry, Bush grabbed her hands. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” he said, though his choking voice suggested that he had worries of his own. The president and the widow hugged. “It felt like he could have been my dad,” Owen recalled to NEWSWEEK. “It was like we were old friends. It almost makes me sad. In a way, I wish he weren’t the president, just so I could talk to him all the time.”
Bush likes to play the resolute War Leader, and he has never been known for admitting mistakes or regret. But that does not mean that he is free of doubt. For the past three years, Bush has been living in two worlds—unwavering and confident in public, but sometimes stricken in private. Bush’s meetings with widows like Crystal Owen offer a rare look inside that inner, private world…
Privately, Bush has met with about 900 family members of some 270 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The conversations are closed to the press, and Bush does not like to talk about what goes on in these grieving sessions, though there have been hints…
…For George W. Bush, these private audiences with the families of dead soldiers and Marines seem to be an outlet of sorts. (They are perhaps harder for Laura, who sometimes accompanies Bush and looks devastated afterward.) Family members interviewed by NEWSWEEK say they have been taken aback by the president’s emotionalism and his sincerity…
…The most telling—and moving—picture of Bush grieving with the families of the dead was provided by Rachel Ascione, who met with him last summer. Her older brother, Ron Payne, was a Marine who had been killed in Afghanistan only a few weeks before Ascione was invited to meet with Bush at MacDill Air Force Base, near Tampa, Fla.
Ascione wasn’t sure she could restrain herself with the president. She was feeling “raw.” “I wanted him to look me in the eye and tell me why my brother was never coming back, and I wanted him to know it was his fault that my heart was broken,” she recalls. The president was coming to Florida, a key swing state, in the middle of his re-election campaign. Ascione was worried that her family would be “exploited” by a “phony effort to make good with people in order to get votes.”
Ascione and her family were gathered with 18 other families in a large room on the air base. The president entered with some Secret Service agents, a military entourage and a White House photographer. “I’m here for you, and I will take as much time as you need,” Bush said. He began moving from family to family. Ascione watched as mothers confronted him: “How could you let this happen? Why is my son gone?” one asked. Ascione couldn’t hear his answer, but soon “she began to sob, and he began crying, too. And then he just hugged her tight, and they cried together for what seemed like forever.”
Ascione’s family was one of the last Bush approached. Ascione still planned to confront him, but Bush disarmed her in an almost uncanny way. Ascione is just over five feet; her late brother was 6 feet 7. “My whole life, he used to put his hand on the top of my head and just hold it there, and it drove me crazy,” she says. When Bush saw that she was crying, he leaned over and put his hand on the top of her head and drew her to him. “It was just like my brother used to do,” she says, beginning to cry at the memory.
Before Bush left the meeting, he paused in the middle of the room and said to the families, “I will never feel the same level of pain and loss you do. I didn’t lose anyone close to me, a member of my family or someone that I love. But I want you to know that I didn’t go into this lightly. This was a decision that I struggle with every day.”
As he spoke, Ascione could see the grief rising through the president’s body. His shoulder slumped and his face turned ashen. He began to cry and his voice choked. He paused, tried to regain his composure and looked around the room. “I am sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said.”
Now we have all heard the President speak at one time or another, and we have watched him on television. It can safely be said that he is not an actor, or a tremendous public speaker. He often mis-speaks, and fumbles his words, but no one can deny that his message comes through loud and clear.
That is the precise reason why the left and the MSM can not defeat him or his ideas. The American people can identify with him and they do. All the activists, and all the media coverage will not darken his convictions, nor dissuade his purpose, and it will have no effect on the public at large.
