Street closure is not a necessity
Bush needs to re-open Pennsylvania Avenue to aid traffic woes

For more than five years, an entire block of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House has been closed to through traffic. Even though President Clinton’s closing of the avenue created a traffic nightmare of sorts in the city of Washington (believe it or not, Pennsylvania Avenue is a main thoroughfare in Washington, D.C.), the street became a sort of Venice Beach from the Twilight Zone.

There, right in front of the home of the most powerful man on Earth, a bizarre, uniquely American sort of humanity played itself out. Tourists could meander along and take photographs. Protesters both peaceful and belligerent could vie for the camera’s attention. And, most deliciously, skateboarders could scoot around all they wanted, only hundreds of feet from federal property.

Of course, free pedestrian rein over Pennsylvania Avenue also meant that total wackos could wreak havoc in kamikaze terrorist attempts like the one we saw last week — at the White House gate, of all places. Forty-seven year-old Robert Pickett of Evansville, Ind., a man otherwise described as quiet and mild-mannered, fired a couple of shots into the air Feb. 7, jumped in some bushes and engaged in a tense stand-off with Secret Service agents before being wounded in the leg. Thankfully, no one was hurt, save for Pickett, who is recuperating in a nearby hospital.

At first glance it would seem like President Clinton might have had good reason to close down the avenue, given events like these. It’s enough that the man was getting assaulted by right-wingers. But who wants to be shot at?

However, in keeping with the discarding of anything dealing with Clinton in the Second Bush Era, President Bush has expressed a great desire to re-open the avenue to vehicular traffic. The Republican Party went as far as making it one of their pledges at the Philadelphia convention last summer. And in spite of yet another case of someone interpreting their right to bear arms a bit too liberally, re-opening Pennsylvania Avenue would probably be a very good idea.

Critics initially decried Clinton’s closing of the avenue as anti-American, citing a certain Thomas Jefferson quote (“Kings live in park enclaves, presidents live in street”) so often that the words would’ve lost all meaning — had it not already lost all its meaning. Jefferson passed on before he got the pleasure of having dark-suited Secret Service men ringing around him. The modern president is a king, a target of both idolization and contempt in equal measure. And, in the period following the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, things suddenly started to feel a lot less secure.

President Clinton didn’t necessarily overreact when he closed off Pennsylvania Avenue, but it was perhaps an overly cautious move. The White House is set 350 feet back from the street, meaning that it would take an impossibly powerful car bomb to harm the president. Not only does the president reside in rather glorious isolation, but also, as The Weekly Standard reported in an editorial, in “a large mansion with bulletproof windows set back across 100 yards of open lawn studded with surveillance cameras and motion detectors and swarming with armed sentries led by bomb-sniffing police dogs.” Maybe Jefferson was right about presidents living in streets — they’re just streets with a really good Neighborhood Watch program.

Clearly, it would take quite a Herculean effort by any terrorist to do any major harm to the leader of the free world while the president is actually inside the White House. The safety of the president, with the increased awareness of terrorism since Oklahoma City and the constant presence of the Secret Service, is no longer really an issue. But what is at issue is the safety of those who actually stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue — and in many ways, the closing of the street to through traffic makes it all the more dangerous.

About a mile down the road from the White House, the U.S. Capitol was the sight of a terrifying event in 1998, when an armed gunman snuck in behind some tourists and opened fire, killing two Capitol policemen who attempted to subdue him. Imagine an incident like that out in front of the White House, where a wider, less secure, completely open promenade jammed with pedestrians might look like the next best place for target practice for a deranged person.

Closing the avenue in May 1995 wasn’t unreasonable. It was borne out of an unheard of fear — from a time when people suddenly realized that many of the things Americans held sacred were more fragile than they thought. But we’ve made progress in the prevention of terrorism since then, and there’s really no reason to keep Pennsylvania Avenue closed off. So here’s hoping that while he pushes tax-cut plans and faith-based initiatives, President Bush finds time to officially re-open Pennsylvania Avenue. And if he can’t find the time, I promise I’ll give the man $5 if he goes out front and does a few ollies on his skateboard.

Jack Bullion is a junior English major from Columbia, Mo.
He can be reached at (j.w.bullion@student.tcu.edu).

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