The president's ad team, led by Austin, Texas-based media maven Mark McKinnon, had carefully road-tested the spots in focus groups, and Bush himself signed off.One scene shows footage of a flag-draped coffin of a terror victim; another has an American flag waving in front of World Trade Center wreckage. Publicly, Bush aides were dismissive and insisted the flap had only strengthened their plan to make 9/11 "a central topic of the campaign."Another less-publicized aspect of the ad flap: the use of paid actors—including two playing firefighters with fire hats and uniforms in what looks like a fire station. "There's many reasons not to use real firemen," retorted one Bush media adviser. "Mainly, its cheaper and quicker."But privately, some GOP strategists were disturbed by the backlash and suggested the ad team had misjudged how the imagery would play. "It's quite shocking to a number of Republicans to watch them stumble out of the block like this," said one veteran GOP consultant, who added that the big question in GOP circles is "Do they [the Bush-Cheney campaign] know how to spend" their huge budget?"
