Sept. 11 Widow Joins Campaign
On Tuesday, the 33-year-old New Jersey widow was stumping in swing states with Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards for the second day in a row. It's here that Breitweiser's fresh face and emotional story are becoming an integral part of an effort to convince "security moms" that the Democratic ticket of Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and Edwards can make them safer and that four more years with President Bush is dangerous.
Wearing her husband's wedding band, the only evidence of his life to be recovered at Ground Zero, Breitweiser said she steeled herself to hit the campaign trail this week with Edwards, a North Carolina senator. She fought back a fear of flying born out of the World Trade Center disaster and overcame her jitters about public speaking to become a blunt instrument of attack against a president she once supported.
"I would love to have heard President Bush and the Republicans in Congress say, 'Here's what we'll do better.' But they didn't do that. They circled the wagons, they stonewalled, they blocked, they foot-dragged," she said in an interview aboard the Edwards campaign plane.
Before large, sympathetic crowds here, as well as in Iowa and New Hampshire, she offered a blistering account of the obstacles she says she faced during a three-year battle to start the nation toward a new intelligence system. Her presentation is raw with anger and grief, and it registered strongly with the Democratic loyalists. At a town hall meeting, under a hot midday sun in downtown Manchester's Victory Park, she moved museum volunteer Fran Gordon, 84, to tell Edwards: "You should put her on a TV commercial. People need to hear her."
On the rope line later, as Edwards shook hands, Breitweiser was swamped. Jane Ryan, 54, of Hollis, Maine, begged her to stick with the campaign. "They need you," Ryan said. "You are so powerful."
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