Karol,
Just in case people don't follow trackbacks (ha), I thought I'd point out how The Galvin Opinion framed this:

***
9/11 Timeline
9:03 Flight 175 (2nd plane)crashes into World Trade Center
9:10 President Bush gets up to leave group of school children
9:20 John Kerry is still watching TV, "nobody could think"
9:30 John Kerry is still watching TV, "nobody could think"
9:40 John Kerry is still watching TV, "nobody could think"
9:43 Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon"
***

Ouch! And as my good friend Dead Serious often points out, even if Bush WANTED to do something--like grab an eraser and run out of the room screaming "We will vanquish the infidel!"-- hasn't it occurred to anyone that there's the small matter of the Secret Service. After all, just getting the President INTO the school to read a book probably took a month of planning. Getting him out of the school while the country is under attack...

Well, nevermind.

That's an interesting point about the security concerns.

Uh, somehow I think the Secret Service has the ability to move the President from an elementary school to his limo at a moments notice.

I think we all were pretty shaken up listening to the events of 9/11 as they happened and wondered what the heck was going on. But we weren't the President of the United States and we hadn't just been told by a close advisor that the country was, in fact, under attack.

Think about this analogy for a minute. You're at a social gathering with a number of your friends. One of them suddenly appears at your side and informs you that a close relative has just been involved in a terrible vehicle accident. Do you sit there and do nothing for the next 10 minutes and continue socializing or do you excuse yourself and take care of your personal matters?

Look, you can all give Bush a bye on every mistake he's ever made in his life. Like Ron Reagan said in Esquire recently, W could be caught canoodling with Paris Hilton and Bush apologists could excuse his behavior someway. But it will never negate the fact that the man could not manage to do anything at one of the most significant moments in this nation's history.

That alone justifies a vote for Kerry in my mind.

Your analogy is not quite the same thing. The room full of people would not panic if you god forbid had something happen in your family but would be supportive as there is no threat to them. People look to the president to be calm, collected and not panic in an emergency. In 7 Minutes I don't think there was much more he could have done by being there in person than his team was already doing.

The teacher in the class room is voting for Kerry but has publicly said that she thinks he did just the right thing. She is not voting for him for other reasons but said she can not fault him for how he behaved on 911 or in her classroom.

I agree the analogy is not exactly the same. But I think the point I was trying to make was that events of the magnitude of 9/11 or a close relative dying do not allow for contemplative thought. They are events that most people would objectively agree spark some type of immediate response.

As Kerry said, Bush could have calmly excused himself from the reading, but instead he did nothing. Did it make a difference in the large scale of things? Probably not. But, in my opinion, it shows a character flaw of not being able to make rational decisions on his own in high pressure situations. For me, that's a critical requirement for the President of the United States.

Unless his decision was that he did not want to panic people and had faith in the people on the ground to handle it. We can't know that he did or did not make a rational decision as we were not in his head at the time.

I have made decisions in the past particularly in the army where people's lives were at stake that turned out to be wrong (fortunately I never got anyone killed because of it). It is easy to look back and say I or someone else made the right or wrong decision but until you are in the same situation it is impossible to know if someone decided not to do something for tactical reasons or due to being unable to make a decision.

"Didn't want to panic a room full of people" is the worst possible reason for his inaction. It isn't like he had to run from the room screaming "We're under attack! We're under attack!!!" It was a sad display of how a man of "action" really acts when under pressure.

10 minutes of silence and then he disappeared from view while Rudy reassured us all.

Respectfully, I think you are all missing the main point. The president is not allowed to balk or space out when he is in danger. At the moment he was informed the second plane hit (the start of the 7 minutes) the secret service should have assumed he was in danger & gotten him out of there. He was in a disclosed position, he had the launch codes - the "football" - why didn't anyone assume a plane was headed for the school? And it's not like they boogied out of there when the 7 minutes were up - they took another 30 minutes in that same disclosed location signing photos and making a speech - no reason not to assume a truck full of TNT was coming. This is what I find most disturbing. Where were the secret service? Why did they think they were safe?