Giuliani defeat marks end of 9/11 politics

The Politico: Rudy defeat marks end of 9/11 politics
By: Ben Smith and David Paul Kuhn
January 30, 2008

Rudy Giuliani's distant third-place finish in Florida may put an end to his bid for president, and it seems also to mark the beginning of the end of a period in Republican politics that began on Sept. 11, 2001....

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Giuliani's failure reflects a broader shift in the American landscape, in which Sept. 11 has so diminished as an emotional touchstone that neither The Gallup Organization nor The Pew Research Center has even polled Americans about the attacks for a half year. "We have 9/11 fatigue in the United States," said Mitchell Moss, a professor at New York University and an adviser to Giuliani's successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a technocrat who has focused on the future, and away from 9/11 and terrorism-related concerns....

When Gallup last asked about Sept. 11, in the summer of 2007, only 43 percent of Americans considered the war in Iraq "to be part of the war on terrorism which began on Sept. 11, 2001." Four years earlier, in the summer of 2003, 57 percent of Americans believed the war in Iraq was related to the Sept. 11 attacks. It was that perception shift that made a Sept. 11 campaign far more effective in 2004 than in 2008.

The image of George W. Bush standing amidst the rubble of the World Trade Center gave the Bush campaign an anchor to effectively tout their candidate's leadership qualities. But in the ensuing years — as the war in Iraq plummeted in popularity, concern over imminent attacks ebbed, and Americans became increasingly worried about the economy — the evocative image of Giuliani managing a city under attack became less and less relevant....

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Giuliani managed to do something that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: He turned 9/11 into a punch line. The late-night television riffs bubbled into prime time during a Democratic debate in October, when Sen. Joe Biden dismissed the former mayor scornfully. "There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11," Biden said....His ads...drew more snide jokes than votes, and he closed out his campaign in Florida on the relatively anodyne question of insurance policy.

After growing accustomed to tapping into fears of terrorism and faith in Republican strength, Giuliani's failure will force a major shift in Republican campaigns, some GOP strategists said....

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A simple commemoration would be enough.. Picking that scab & squeezing it until it bleeds,every year is not a healthy thing to do..

will use septembertheeleventh as much as possible. Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, and beyond, and according to him, we can be in Iraq for a hundred years and the Amerikan people won't care.

mongering, sack of shit that people saw through him.

Just being in New York on 9/11 and not wetting his pants hardly made him and expert on foreign policy and fighting terrorism as he claimed and people saw through that.

The real test would be if some dyed in the wool Bushie or even McCain ran on a similar fear-forward campaign and still lost.

"Peter, you didn't even know what 9/11 was until 2004."