Susan Faludi

A few days before Mother’s Day in 2004, President Bush made a brief campaign stop in the Republican stronghold of Lebanon, Ohio. His handlers were hustling him down the crowded rope line outside the Golden Lamb Hotel when a voice cut through the din: “Mr. President! This girl lost her mom in the World Trade Center on 9/11!” Bush, according to the much­burnished retellings, wheeled around and plunged back down the line.

Linda Prince, the woman who belted out the summons, had arrived many hours earlier to stake out a position up front for her neighbor, Lynn Faulkner, and his fifteen­year­old daughter, Ashley, the girl who lost her mom. The president “locked” eyes with the grieving teenager.
“I know that’s hard,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m OK,” she said.

Then he gave her “The Hug.” The moment was captured by Ashley’s father, a marketing consultant and ardent Bush supporter, who had purchased a new digital camera for the occasion. After professedly averting his eyes from the viewfinder to grant his daughter her “private moment” with the president, Lynn Faulkner went home and e-mailed the photograph to more than a dozen “friends and family” across the country. They must have been well­positioned intimates; by the next day, the photo was on prominent display on the Drudge Report and scores of conservative blogs. The day after that, The Hug ran in the Cincinnati Enquirer and soon thereafter was enjoying national news coverage. As various reverential accounts of this “emotion­packed encounter” later characterized it, the president had “stopped in his tracks” when he heard the call and fought his way “against the flow” of the rope line, and “without fanfare” and “in one of those huge solitary moments that speak legions” had “instinctively reached for the teenager, clutched her head, placed it on his chest—and just held her.”

The photo drew a record 1.6 million page views on the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Web site. In the echo chamber of the conservative blogo­sphere, the photo was said to reveal Bush as a man of “strength” with “the courage to do what needs to be done to protect our country.” “The protective encirclement of her head by President Bush’s arm and hand is the essence of fatherly compassion,” said a particularly adoring post on FreeRepublic.com. To Bush’s backers, the photo became the money shot. “Nothing speaks better to the compassion, the character, and the leadership of the president,” Brian McCabe, the head of one of the biggest Republican funding groups, told CNNfn. Some weeks after Lynn Faulkner snapped that single frame, McCabe’s group, the Progress for America Voters Fund, dispatched a camera crew to the Faulkners’ home to film “Ashley’s Story,” a ­multimillion-­dollar po­liti­cal commercial.