"Bush Photo with Teen Shows Conviction and Compassion" Does it? [View All]

Bush Photo with Teen Shows Conviction and Compassion

The Washington Dispatch
Editorial by CK Rairden
May 10, 2004

(these are excerpts. I don't have the original link anymore)

As the event
wound down, the president worked the line in full campaign mode shaking
hands and signing autographs. As the president passed the group, Mr.
Faulkner got an autograph, and the president continued on until Linda
Prince spoke up, This girl lost her mother on 9/11, Prince told the
president. Then everything changed.



"The president's entire expression transformed", Mr. Faulkner told me on
Sunday. "He turned and came back against the flow and his eyes locked
on Ashley's. His face showed a man who was no longer the president, he
was a father and a husband." President Bush made his way back to Ashley
and he embraced the 15-yeal old young woman. "She snuggled in with the
president just like she did when she was a little girl with her dad,"
Mr. Faulkner said. "I know it's hard," Mr. Faulkner heard the president
tell his daughter. "I'm okay," Ashley told the president. The embrace
continued.

Mr. Faulkner had his Kodak digital camera with him and debated on
invading this very private moment between his daughter and the leader of
the free world. "For 20-30 seconds the president belonged exclusively to
Ashley," Lynn Faulkner told me. So he decided to capture the moment
without invading Ashley and the president's privacy. He held up his
digital camera, not even aiming with his eye and with one click snapped
just one picture. It showed in detail the face of a compassionate man
who just happens to be the president comforting a young woman who lost
her mother in the 9/11 attacks on America.


Mr. Faulkner called the embrace "President Bush's precious gift to my
daughter." And with his small act of e-mailing that photo to friends and
family, the picture can now become a gift to the American people.