Free Republic

It's only fitting that Mason, Ohio, teenager Ashley Faulkner will get a chance to see President Bush's inauguration firsthand this week. After all, her ad helped make it happen. Ashley Faulkner was the focus of Ashley's Story, a pro-Bush campaign ad that aired nearly 30,000 times in the month before the election Nov. 2. In the Faulkner family's own words, it told how Ashley had lost her mother, Wendy, in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. When President Bush learned of this at a Lebanon, Ohio, campaign rally, he gave her a spontaneous, emotional hug. Her father snapped a photo that...

In Ohio last night (columbus) my wife and I saw a new Bush ad (it was paid for another organization of which I can't remember the name of). This is by far the most effective and personal ad I've seen this election year. The ad depicts the Ashley Faulkner, daughter of a 9/11 victim hug photo here at a rally in ohio a while back that made some headlines.. the ad showed personal interviews with the father and the daughter. It literally brings tears to your eyes. The ad was well put together and very genuine, it is a real...

A colleague forwarded me a photo that is making the rounds on the Internet. It was taken at a campaign rally in Ohio some weeks ago, and it shows President Bush embracing a 17-year-old girl named Ashley Faulkner, whose mother had been killed in the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. The accompanying story, written by a Missouri journalist bylined CK Rairden, is a moving account of the brief meeting between the girl and the president. Bush, told of her mother's fate, took Ashley in his arms in an unscripted, spontaneous expression of sympathy. As she buried her face in the...