John McCain and Barack Obama were to observe a truce yesterday in their increasingly bitter White House contest with a joint appearance at Ground Zero on the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Their visit to the site of the former World Trade Center in Manhattan promised a rare break from hostilities in the frenzied last two months of the presidential race.
“There will be no speeches,” Democrat Obama’s spokeswoman Linda Douglass said. “This is going to be a moment when politics are set aside.”
PHOTO: AFP
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Both Obama and his Republican rival McCain were to suspend campaign advertising for the day.
Heavy security was in place well ahead, with streets near Ground Zero closed and buses re-routed before ceremonies starting at 8:40am.
Two separate minutes of silence were to mark the moments when the two hijacked airliners struck on Sept. 11, 2001, destroying each of the Twin Towers and killing some 3,000 people — at 8:46am and at 9:03am.
Ceremonies included additional minutes of silence commemorating the collapse of each tower, as well as the traditional reading out of all the victims’ names.
McCain and Obama — expected by staff to be arriving later in the day, after the official ceremonies — have promised to bury the hatchet in honor of the anniversary.
Obama set the tone for the Ground Zero event, saying on Wednesday that Sept. 11 showed “that here in America, we all have a stake in each other. I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper and we rise and fall as one nation.”
Although they will want to avoid politicking at Ground Zero, temperatures could rise later in the day when the two candidates participate in a televised forum.
The forum, organized by a coalition of civic groups named ServiceNation, is not a debate and the two rivals will appear separately, with Obama going second — a line-up his aides said was decided by flipping a coin.
BEST BEHAVIOR
Analysts said the antagonists would likely be on best behavior.
“The campaign’s likely to get pretty nasty, but tomorrow they’ll want to be above the battle,” said John Mueller, a politics professor at Ohio State University. “Bashing the opponent is bad politics at that moment.”
The Sept. 11 attacks remain a deeply emotional issue in the US, even if polls show that pocketbook concerns, particularly the parlous state of the housing market, now top terrorism fears.
OPEN WOUND
Because of continued delays in erecting the World Trade Center’s replacement and a memorial, the memory of the attacks remain literally an open wound.
On the eve of the anniversary, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg lambasted bureaucratic hurdles for what he said was “frustratingly slow” progress in redeveloping the site.
But don’t expect the bipartisan approach in Manhattan to last long, warned New York University politics professor Steven Brams.
“They’ll obviously want to unify the country, to commemorate this occasion. There’ll be no harsh words exchanged if they meet face to face,” Brams said. “But this is just an interlude.”
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