Obama, Romney Pull Campaign Ads On Sept. 11
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Blue skies, a late summer day with hints of fall: The weather in New York and Washington today felt eerily similar to September 11, 2001.
CORNISH: At ground zero in New York City, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon here in Washington, people stood quietly today under those blue skies and remembered the dead. And the presidential campaign was also quieter. As NPR's Mara Liasson reports, the candidates took a break from their most fierce partisan battles.
…
LIASSON: Romney still enjoys the Republicans' traditional advantage among voters who are veterans, but the Obama campaign is confident it can chip away at that. Why? Because, says Dan Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, this year, for the first time in 40 years of presidential campaign polling, voters trust the Democrat more than the Republican on national security. And, Drezner says, Romney's credentials have slipped since the primaries when he did not have to debate anyone with serious foreign policy credentials.
Prof. DANIEL DREZNER: Since then, Romney has gone on a trip overseas in July that I think could best be described as not going terribly well. And then he went to the Republican National Convention, and for the first time since 1952, a Republican nominee failed to mention anything with respect to the war.
Listen to the full interview