Sept. 11 casts shadows over 2008 presidential election race

WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- Seven years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, it's fashionable to say that the American people have moved on to other things. But, in fact, the shadow of that day is the unacknowledged elephant in the bedroom of American politics that is strongly influencing the outcome of the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

The Washington Post claimed this week that terrorism has faded as an issue in the presidential campaign. Taking the subject in isolation, that appears to be true. But when terrorism is put in the wider context of the security of the American people, the memories, lessons and traumas of that terrible day when nearly 3,000 Americans were killed without warning loom larger than ever.

"Defending the homeland" remains a huge issue as the fall presidential campaign enters its final two-month closing stretch. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was obviously expected to focus on the issue, but his closing speech to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., last week appears to have had much more of an impact on the public than had been anticipated by most, if not all, political pundits.

The shadow of Sept. 11 also has played a pivotal role in Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's conduct of the campaign, and it may have led him into a huge miscalculation.

Obama, D-Ill., had maintained a clear lead over McCain, sometimes as wide as a potentially decisive 6 percentage points in the polls, until he took his famous trip during the summer to Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Germany, France and Britain. Obama showed an impressive command of the security issues in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki went out of his way to make the senator from Illinois look good and to support Obama's plan to pull all U.S. combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months of taking office.

However, a strange thing happened during Obama's trip: The more the Democratic presidential candidate was feted overseas, the more his support eroded at home. A month before McCain's selection of the human hurricane known as Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate turned the election campaign upside down, Obama had already started his fateful slide in the polls as he was feted around the world. The grass-roots American nationalism that had been reignited in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks was slowly but surely shifting tectonically against him.

In fact, for all the Bush administration's many areas of fumbling and crisis, especially over its naive and almost uniformly failed domestic energy policies, the out-of-control housing crisis, the still soaring annual balance-of-payments trading deficit with the rest of the world, especially China, the collapsing dollar and the unprecedented annual federal budget deficit, its record so far on domestic national security has been surprisingly good.

There has not been a single significant or identifiable terrorist attack against the U.S. homeland since Sept. 11, 2001. Outside Iraq and Afghanistan, attacks on U.S. citizens, aircraft, interests and installations have been way down as well.

On the downside, Bush and his defense and national security teams have clearly failed to kill Sept. 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden or bring him to justice, and well over 150,000 troops of the U.S. Army remain mired in Iraq while other threats, many of them conventional, arise around the world.

However, the widely criticized and even feared USA Patriot Act did succeed in breaking down the legally mandated and dangerously obsolete rules limiting or banning the necessary levels of cooperation between the U.S. domestic police, national security services and the U.S. intelligence agencies. Despite all the criticisms made of the enhanced surveillance powers the Patriot Act provided, the American people remained free to reject President George W. Bush and his policies and to throw his ruling Republican Party out of power in both houses of the U.S. Congress in November 2006.

Today, the American people face potential national security dangers very different from the terrorist nightmare that took them by surprise seven years ago. Tensions are currently rising with Russia, and the dangers of a maritime clash between U.S. and Russian warships in the Black Sea are no longer inconceivable. A senior Russian naval commander warned about them last week.

However, the horrors, traumas and lessons of Sept. 11 have not been repressed or forgotten: They are still there, rumbling beneath the surface of hundreds of millions of memories, subtly and not so subtly shaping the ways the American people view and confront a world that changed forever on a clear, bright and beautiful early fall morning in New York City, northern Virginia and rural Pennsylvania seven fateful years ago.