Obama at Dover: Just a photo op?

last updated 8 January 2015

The Obama presidency has its first “iconic image,” said Democratic strategist Tom Matzzie in HuffingtonPost.com. Before dawn one morning last week, the president flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where cameras captured him, ramrod-straight in a somber blue suit, saluting the caskets of 18 Americans killed last week in Afghanistan. Obama also spent two hours talking with the families of the dead, said The New York Times in an editorial, but he can have said nothing that matched the eloquence and gravity of that silent salute. Such gestures used to be a tradition for U.S. presidents, until George W. Bush decided it was necessary “to hide the pain of war from Americans,” stayed away from Dover, and even banned photos of these “dolorous homecomings.” Obama’s dignified visit to Dover was a “long-overdue display of national gratitude” to our fallen heroes, and a reminder to the nation of the true cost of war. “The pity is President Bush never dared as much.”

That’s unfair, said Monte Kuligowski in AmericanThinker.com. Bush “spent volumes of time with grieving family members.” The only difference is that Bush learned to salute from a drill instructor, rather than from an acting coach or an aide who’d seen it on YouTube, and that he consoled families without cameras present. When I first heard of Obama’s pre-dawn visit to Dover, “I was tempted to give him some credit.” But then I saw the pictures and knew, with a horrible certainty, that Team Obama arranged them to boost his military gravitas. That it dishonors the dead to use their caskets for political gain would never occur to these image-obsessed power junkies. “The word ‘honor’ is not in their lexicon.”

The cameras had to be there, said Michael Ledeen in National Review Online. I’m no fan of Obama generally, and when he first visited wounded soldiers in the early days of his administration I did worry that “he might use these occasions as photo ops and promos for his presidency.” But he has not. Obama continues to make regular visits to Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval veterans’ hospitals without any publicity at all. The trip to Dover, on the other hand, needed photographing—not so much for the American public as for the morale of our troops in the field, which soars when they see they have a president who “understands and honors them. Which he clearly does. Good on him.”