The passion of the Rudy

The GOP's Monday night moderates try to fire up the convention's far-right true believers. But Michael Moore is more successful.

By Tim Grieve

Aug 31, 2004 | It was quiet at ground zero Monday afternoon. A few dozen tourists approached the big hole with the slow respect they might show an open casket. Here and there, people held their cameras up to the fence and clicked photos to show the folks back home. A fat man in shorts and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt pulled his sunglasses from his face and wiped away a tear. Across the street at St. Paul's Chapel, banners preserved from the days after Sept. 11 spoke of light and hope, gratitude and a connection to one other.

There was a moment then, a moment when Americans felt connected to one another -- and the world felt more connected to us -- when Le Monde proclaimed for the world, "We are all Americans."

Inside Madison Square Garden Monday night, the Republicans tried mightily to bring that moment back, even as they ignored the reasons it was lost in the first place. On the strangely flat opening night of the Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker reminded delegates of Bush's bravura performance at a ground zero photo opportunity in 2001 -- the one where he grabbed a bullhorn and vowed that the terrorists would soon "hear from" the United States -- and then papered over the president's unpopular war in Iraq.

Recalling the days after Sept. 11, Arizona Sen. John McCain told delegates: "We were united, first in sorrow and anger, then in recognition we were attacked not for a wrong we had done, but for who we are -- a people united in a kinship of ideals, committed to the notion that the people are sovereign."

Turning to Iraq, McCain argued that the war was necessary and inevitable. He dismissed criticism of the decision to invade Iraq as the naive and misguided rantings of Michael Moore. In the only real show of enthusiasm of the night, the crowd roared its approval, at least in part because Moore himself was in the hall to hear it, chuckling at the Republican fusillade directed at him from his seat in the press gallery, where he is filing a column for USA Today. But Moore wasn't the only war critic in the house Monday night; McCain himself has taken the administration to task for sending too few troops to Iraq and for failing to plan for the postwar period, and he has led the questioning about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. He didn't mention any of that Monday night.

If McCain buried his criticism of the war, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani took his support for it to new heights. He resuscitated the administration's seemingly abandoned rationale that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, invoking -- as at least three previous speakers had -- that ground zero photo op. Giuliani said that Bush "stood amid the fallen towers of the World Trade Center and said to the barbaric terrorists who attacked us, 'They will hear from us.' They have heard from us! They heard from us in Afghanistan and we removed the Taliban. They heard from us in Iraq and we ended Saddam Hussein's reign of terror."

In putting the country on the offensive in Afghanistan and Iraq, Giuliani said that Bush had succeeded in "keeping us unified" and in "holding us together."

Giuliani's words were belied by events in his city -- where hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets over the weekend -- and around the country, where polls show that Americans are sharply divided over the president and the war he chose to fight.

For Republicans, George W. Bush is still a resolute hero, and the days after Sept. 11 were his finest moments. Robyn Rutledge, a delegate from North Carolina, said she looks back at those days, and the words "leadership" and "courage" come to mind.

For many Democrats, of course, memories of Bush's reaction to Sept. 11 come in a wave of very different images. There's Bush, sitting in that Sarasota classroom while the schoolkids read "The Pet Goat." There's Bush, flying aimlessly around the country on Sept. 11 to avoid a threat to Air Force One -- a threat that Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer trumpeted and the White House later quietly disavowed. And there's Bush, invoking the attacks of Sept. 11 to launch a war against a different enemy in a different place.

But if the country is divided today, it is not Bush's doing -- at least according to some Republican delegates. "The Democrats have polarized our country," Rutledge said as she waited for the night's speeches to begin. "Our president has been attacked so much over the last year, it's ridiculous."

McCain called for some sort of end to those attacks Monday night. He didn't mention the Swift boat flap or the Bush smears he faced in 2000. Instead, he reminded delegates that Democrats are Americans, too, and he said that neither party should question the other's sincerity. But that didn't stop speaker after speaker from questioning Kerry's sincerity Monday night, suggesting again and again that he has no firm convictions and waffles on important issues. One delegate, Dianne Alexander from California, showed up at the convention in a sweater embroidered with flip-flops. "My issue is national security," she said, "and I don't think John Kerry has ever addressed our safety. I don't think he's serious about it. I know our president is."

Next Page: Focus on Sept. 11 to avoid talking about the war abroad or safety at home

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