Required reading

Voters should know the contents of The 9/11 Commission Report | by Joel Belz


With Election Day just three months away, some folks are campaigning for stiffer standards at the polls. I couldn’t agree more. When my wife and I voted in the North Carolina primary a few days ago, no identification of any kind was asked for. We could have been Islamic terrorists appropriating the names Joel and Carol Belz. If it’s OK in America to ask for a photo ID to drive a car, why not to vote?

But for Election Day 2004, I have a much better idea. Just this once, let’s ask everyone to show up with his or her own copy of the paperback version of The 9/11 Commission Report. It should be slightly dog-eared to prove that it’s actually been read. Maybe poll watchers should even ask each prospect to point to one underlined paragraph that the reader thinks is especially pertinent.

Just for 2004: No book, no vote.

Citizenship, after all, should be a little costly. If the right to cast a free ballot has cost some of our forerunners their very lives, is it so bad to put a couple of speed bumps in the road to the voting booth? Is it wrong to ask would-be voters to offer a little proof that they’ve thought things through?

Having read The 9/11 Commission Report myself, I have a mild confidence that requiring 100 million voters to sit down and read through it for themselves would produce an immediate and dramatic shift in the pre-election polls. George W. Bush would leap instantly to a 60-40 lead in the projections of how people will actually vote on Nov. 2.

But that is not the biggest reason for suggesting that Americans read The 9/11 Commission Report. Much more to the point is that such an exposure, by all voting Americans, would take their focus off the trivial and secondary issues that have been raised both by the mainstream media and the administration’s Democratic adversaries, and put that focus instead where it desperately needs to be: on the continuing threat against our nation.

The implicit drumbeat from both the Kerry campaign and the mainstream media suggests that the Bush team overreacted after the events of 9/11. “We should have been more patient,