Beyond the Flags and Fire Fighters

The farther you got from ground zero last week, the less the elections seemed to be about terror. New Yorkers heeded Rudy Giuliani's advice, but 300 miles south, in Virginia--the state in which the Pentagon was attacked--nobody much cared when America's mayor appeared in a television commercial and declared, "If I were a Virginian, I would vote for Mark Earley." Giuliani's benediction couldn't help the hapless Republican gubernatorial candidate. Earley's opponent, Democratic businessman Mark Warner, made sure to pose with flags and fire fighters, but the race was about taxes, teachers' salaries, traffic congestion--pre-9/11 stuff. Warner won with 52% of the vote.

Across the country, candidates decorated their ads with stars and stripes and brave rhetoric about "these challenging times," but the elections proved that Sept. 11 changed politics less than those trappings might suggest. Viciousness took a two-week break after the attacks but returned in full force before Election Day (even in New York City, where loser Mark Green set the low mark with an ad alleging Michael Bloomberg had pressured a woman to have an abortion). The candidates with the most talent and money tended to win, and Tip O'Neill's old line about all politics being local held up once again.

Which is not to say that politicians didn't do their best to milk the situation. By one estimate, campaigns across the country spent more than $10 million on commercials about terrorism. Setting the standard for tawdry was Lieutenant Governor Corinne Wood of Illinois, who tried to get a jump on next year's Governor's race with an ad that juxtaposed an image of the burning World Trade Center with one of the Sears Tower in Chicago. (Her campaign later said the spot, which ran several times in Springfield, was never meant to air.) Others were more successful at catching the moment. Running for chief executive of Nassau County, N.Y., Glen Cove Mayor Thomas Suozzi dumped an ad in which he posed with a garbage truck in favor of one in which he strolled down a street decked out in American flags. But that was less important than voter discontent with the county's once mighty Republican machine, and Suozzi won by nearly 2 to 1.

Two thousand miles from ground zero, Houston Mayor Lee Brown tried to use the attack as a ticket to re-election. "Now is not the time for on-the-job training in the mayor's office," said Brown, who ran police departments in New York, Atlanta and Houston and served as Bill Clinton's drug czar before being elected mayor in 1997. But voters were more interested in knowing why he hadn't done more about gridlock and smog. Brown's credentials didn't keep him from a runoff with city councilman Orlando Sanchez, who was in rompers when Brown was walking a beat.

For all the effort that politicians put into exploiting what Sept. 11 had done to the electorate, they missed its real impact. Eighty-four percent of those surveyed told pollster Mark Penn that terrorism had made government more relevant to their lives. Which meant they were looking past the symbols and slogans and taking careful measure of the candidates themselves.