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The following is from NPR’s Talk of the Nation on September 1, 2009. Tom Ridge is the guest, promoting his book “The Test of Our Times.” The host, Neal Conan, questions Ridge about the raising and lowering of the DHS terror alert level during the elections of 2004. You can read about Code Orange and other aspects of this story from The Waterglass archives.
You can examine the electoral map from 2004 here.
I heard this when it originally aired. I remember thinking it was a weird interview. Haven’t listened to it yet on the youtube channel. Maybe I’ll feel differently about it the second time around.
It was a weird interview, especially since Ridge forgot key aspects of the situation. It is clear he carefully planned a response to the AP story (that asserted that he asserted politics played a role in raising and lowering the threat level), but amazingly enough he couldn’t remember when he raised it and when he lowered it. The timing of the raising and lowering is a major point of the “threat level politics” issue, and he would have been far more convincing if he hadn’t completely stumbled over that part of the interview. He wasn’t sure if he lowered it before or after the election.