‘Fiesta Mexicana’: El-Sayed campaign plans festive 9/11 while remembrance is missing from public schedule

Somebody on Abdul El-Sayed's campaign has a calendar and apparently didn't look at it very hard. County fair stops and a "Fiesta Mexicana" event, scheduled for September 11th, the 25th anniversary of the day nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered. Meanwhile there's nothing on his public schedule marking the day itself. That's not a conspiracy. It's just careless, and carelessness on that particular date says something.

You can plan a festive campaign swing on plenty of days in September. Choosing this one, on this anniversary, is the kind of unforced error that makes voters wonder if the people running your operation think about anything beyond the next photo op. Michigan has one of the largest Arab American and Muslim populations in the country, and there's a real, serious story to tell there about grief and memory that doesn't get told enough. Instead the campaign handed critics an easy headline by doing the opposite of what basic instinct should have told them to do.

It also raises the obvious question of priorities. A quarter century out, 9/11 remembrance shouldn't be a box campaigns check reluctantly because a reporter noticed the omission. It should be automatic, the same way a candidate wouldn't schedule a carnival on Memorial Day without thinking twice. If nobody on El-Sayed's team caught this before the schedule went public, that's a staffing and judgment problem, not a gotcha invented by opponents.

None of this means El-Sayed personally disrespects the day. But campaigns are judged by what they actually put on paper, not by what they say they meant. Michigan voters deciding a Senate race are entitled to notice when a campaign's public face and its public schedule don't line up, and they will.