Courtland Milloy: Bush's Absence At Soldier's Wake Insults the District

• Originally published in The Washington Post on September 8, 2003 Copyright 2003

By Courtland Milloy

In the District, President Bush serves as commander in chief of the D.C. National Guard, the way governors do in their states. So you might have expected him to show up yesterday at the funeral for Spec. Darryl T. Dent, 21, the D.C. guardsman who was killed recently in Iraq.

Canaan Baptist Church, where Dent's funeral was held, is at 16th and Newton streets NW, not five miles from the White House. Bush could have jogged to the wake, had a courier drop off flowers and a card or, at the very least, telephoned the slain soldier's family.

Call Bush AWOL, missing in action -- or just too busy fundraising. But he blew it.

"We haven't heard from him or the White House, not a word," said Marion Bruce, Dent's aunt and family spokeswoman. "I don't want to speak for the whole family, but I am not pleased."

Several District officials attended the funeral, including Mayor Anthony A. Williams and D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. Dent is to be buried today at Arlington National Cemetery.

During a nationally broadcast speech last year, Bush referred to Williams as "my mayor." That being the case, he could have attended Dent's funeral as a simple gesture of sorrow over the death of a neighbor who also happened to be a soldier under his command.

Of course, that would not have been as stylish as, say, staging a landing on an aircraft carrier. And being seen at a soldier's funeral probably wouldn't make it look like the war was over, as Bush declared on the flight deck of that ship.

But it would have been the right thing to do.

Perhaps Bush could not figure out a way to make political hay out of Dent's funeral -- although he does seem to have a knack for turning sorrow over the casualties of war into talk of more war.

In March, he and British Prime Minister Tony Blair held a news conference at Camp David at which they reportedly "exchanged condolences" over each other's war dead, but then they went on to declare that they would stay the course -- no matter how much blood is shed.

If Bush appears to treat the loss of human life like a lost pawn on a chess board, he has certainly created the backdrop for such perceptions. With tax cuts for those already at the peak of the nation's economy and high unemployment for those in the pits -- to say nothing of the deceptions used to justify a war that has so far produced little more than fat contracts for Bush's fat-cat friends -- Bush has demonstrated his obvious disdain for average Americans.

During a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center earlier this year, Bush dropped in on Michael McNaughton, a platoon sergeant in the Louisiana National Guard who lost a leg when he stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan. Bush reportedly invited McNaughton to go for a jog with him once he received his artificial leg.

Surely, there are better ways for a president to show concern for injured veterans -- such as advocating for better health care benefits instead of opposing them, as the Bush administration does.

For the most part, Bush's appearances in unofficial Washington nearly always involve using the city as a backdrop for some political scheme. He'll visit a private school to promote school vouchers or a public school during Black History Month to show black voters he cares.

But he missed the opportunity -- if not the obligation -- to show respect for an African American who proudly gave his life in a war that the vast majority of African Americans oppose, including many of the residents in the city where Dent grew up.

It's one thing for Bush to ignore the District, where he received only about 9 percent of the vote; it's something else altogether when that city has sent a disproportionately high percentage of its young men and women into the military.

Dent's elected representative in Congress could not even vote on the question of going to war. Had Bush attended the funeral, he might at least have seen the contradiction in Dent's casket -- a man who died trying to bring democracy to Iraq while being disenfranchised at home.