Good morning, it's Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023. Another commemoration of the attacks of 9/11 has come and gone. I was a bit under the weather this week, so I watched more than usual of this year's television coverage and thought the broadcast networks in particular did a fine job.
I'll single out two: CBS "60 Minutes" aired a heartrending show on the New York City Fire Department families who lost so much that day. Also, ABC anchorman David Muir visited Ground Zero and conducted his typically excellent interview, which is to say informative and moving.
Cable is going to cable, of course, and Fox News was in high dudgeon that President Biden visited none of the three 9/11 sites yesterday, the first president not to do so on the anniversary of the attacks. Biden had a pretty good reason, though: He was returning from an overseas trip, and anyway, Vice President Kamala Harris did speak at the New York City service. Biden didn't ignore the anniversary, either. He stopped on his way back home to make remarks about 9/11 to the troops at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska.
On our podcast this morning, Tom Bevan and I express opposing views on whether Biden did his duty, with me defending the president. That said, it would have been nice if the commander in chief could have refrained from opening his speech without self-aggrandizing banter with Alaska's governor about playing high school football in Scranton. And it really would have been better if Biden had refrained from dispensing a whopper about being at Ground Zero on Sept. 12, 2001. (He spent the day in the U.S. Senate, where he belonged).
It's hard for a president to always have perfect pitch, which is a pretty good description of Barack Obama's performance 12 years ago on the 10th anniversary of the attack.
In 2011, President Obama spoke eloquently about the unity Americans felt after the 9/11 attacks, words that remind us even more today than they did when Obama uttered them what we lose as a country if we let the muscles that bind us together atrophy completely.
"Debates -- about war and peace, about security and civil liberties -- have often been fierce these last 10 years," Obama said. "But it is precisely the rigor of these debates, and our ability to resolve them in a way that honors our values and our democracy, that is a measure of our strength."
Barack Obama continued:
"Decades from now, Americans will visit the memorials to those who were lost on 9/11. They will run their fingers over the places where the names of those we loved are carved into marble and stone, and they may wonder at the lives they led. Standing before the white headstones in Arlington, and in peaceful cemeteries and small-town squares in every corner of our country, they will pay respects to those lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. They will see the names of the fallen on bridges and statues, at gardens and schools.
"And they will know that nothing can break the will of a truly United States of America. They will remember that we have overcome slavery and Civil War; we've overcome bread lines and fascism; recession and riots; communism and, yes, terrorism. They will be reminded that we are not perfect, but our democracy is durable, and that democracy -- reflecting, as it does, the imperfections of man -- also gives us the opportunity to perfect our union. That is what we honor on days of national commemoration: those aspects of the American experience that are enduring, and the determination to move forward as one people."
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
