Politics
Two Senate Candidates Discover 9/11 Is A Resume Category Now
By Sean Vanity, . BSN Network. Satire.
LANSING, Mich. -- Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, Michigan voters preparing to choose between Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers for a U.S. Senate seat have been asked to consider a new and previously unannounced qualification: correct grief performance on a specific Tuesday in 2001.
The candidates have spent recent weeks exchanging accusations over their respective 9/11 records, a phrase that was not a phrase anyone expected to need before this election cycle. Rogers, a former FBI agent and congressman who has leaned heavily into his national security biography, questioned whether El-Sayed's statements and associations reflect sufficient commitment to the post-attack consensus. El-Sayed's campaign fired back that Rogers's actual conduct in the relevant period does not hold up to scrutiny either. Both sides are confident they have located the authentic 9/11 position.
Voters who assumed the debate would cover housing costs, healthcare, or literally anything that started happening after 2002 have been asked to wait.
Rogers told supporters at a campaign event in Grand Rapids that his FBI background puts him in a unique position to understand the threat environment. "I was there," Rogers said, a statement that is technically true of roughly 280 million Americans. He then described his post-attack work in counterterrorism for approximately eleven minutes while a man in the third row checked his phone.
El-Sayed, a physician and former Detroit health director, responded that Rogers is using 9/11 as a shield to avoid discussing his actual Senate record, which is a reasonable point to make and which landed with all the force of a man explaining the rules of a game everyone has already agreed to play anyway.
Political analysts in the state say the exchange reflects a genuine strategic calculation: Rogers believes his security biography is his strongest credential with undecided voters, and El-Sayed believes attacking that biography is his fastest path to neutralizing it. What neither campaign appears to have considered is that Michigan currently has a 6.8 percent unemployment rate among voters who would like to afford groceries.
A spokesperson for the Rogers campaign issued a statement describing El-Sayed's criticism as "a deeply cynical attempt to politicize the sacred memory of 9/11," which was released alongside three campaign ads politicizing the memory of 9/11.
El-Sayed, for his part, posted a lengthy thread arguing that honoring 9/11 requires more than biography, that the policies pursued after the attacks caused measurable harm, and that Rogers supported many of those policies. This is also true and was read by fourteen thousand people, nine thousand of whom quote-tweeted it to argue about something else.
There is, to be clear, an actual substantive argument buried under all of this. Rogers did vote for and publicly support post-9/11 surveillance and foreign policy measures that remain genuinely contested. El-Sayed did make public statements after the attacks that Rogers's team finds disqualifying. Reasonable people can evaluate both sets of facts. The problem is that "reasonable evaluation" is not what either campaign is offering. What they are offering is a competitive grief exhibition with a Senate seat as the trophy.
A focus group participant in Dearborn, reached by a local television station, said she found the exchange "exhausting" and that she wished someone would talk about her water bill. She was not asked a follow-up question.
Michigan's Senate seat has been competitive for the first time in a generation. Both candidates have real records, real policy differences, and real reasons a voter might prefer one over the other. None of that is what the last two weeks have been about.
The primary is in August. Whoever wins will almost certainly spend September running ads about September.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/michigan-senate-candidates-25-years-9-11-el-sayed-rogers/