This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Who in Utah still has their 9/11 Olympic lapel pin?
The Cricket still has one (like the one pictured) in his pin collection. It was a big seller in late 2001, a show of solitarity after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.
The pins are now a part of Mitt Romney's patriotic campaign pitch, according to the progressive blog Think Progress.
Romney — who, let us never forget (because he'll always remind us), ran the Salt Lake City Olympics — mentioned the pins during a speech at a Virginia fund-raiser, as an example of how he wants to unite Americans:
And so we created a little pin and we notified people that we're now going to be selling these pins and the proceeds are going to go [to charity]. … I just remember going downstairs after it was announced — we were in a big, tall skyscraper in Salt Lake City, and it must have been next door I think where they were selling these pins, and there was a line all the way down the street.
What's not quite so patriotic is that the pins were made in China. (This fact is mentioned on the Utah State History website, and was unearthed in a tweet by Talking Points Memo's Evan McMorris-Santoro, Think Progress noted.)
So Romney's appeal for patriotism becomes, inadvertantly, a discussion about outsourcing U.S. jobs — and the Salt Lake Olympics, once a unifying event for all Utahns, becomes a partisan talking point.