Q Does the President feel that over the last couple of days he's made an effective and convincing case that Cindy Sheehan is misguided in her feelings about the war and what should happen to the troops?
MR. DUFFY: Well, first of all, the President has spoken continuously about the way he approaches this war, following September 11th, 2001. On September 14th, 2001, he stood at the National Cathedral and told all of America that this was going to be a very long and difficult war, and that there were going to be some very trying moments; but that because of what happened on 9/11, that we had to view the world in a different way.
The bipartisan 9/11 commission wrote all about this in chapter two. The name of that chapter is called, "The Foundation of the New Terrorism." And the bipartisan commission members wrote about the U.S. reaction to terrorist acts overseas in the years leading up to 9/11. They reached a fundamental conclusion: When America takes a single step backwards in the face of terrorism overseas, it brings the terrorists 50 steps closer to our own shores. We saw that after the result of embassy bombings of American embassies overseas, after the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, after Beirut, after Somalia.
The President reiterated that on Tuesday. He empathizes with Ms. Sheehan and those who have lost loved ones. He said Tuesday, again, that they do not represent the view of all mothers and fathers and husbands and wives and children. But we certainly empathize with Ms. Sheehan and those who oppose the war. The President feels fundamentally differently.
The psychological state of sympathy is closely linked with that of empathy, but is not identical to it. Empathy refers to the ability to perceive and directly experientially feel another person's emotions as they feel them, but makes no statement as to how they are viewed. Sympathy, by contrast, implies a degree of equal feeling, that is, the sympathiser views the matter similarly to how the person themselves does. It thus implies concern, or care or a wish to alleviate negative feelings others are experiencing.
Thus it is possible to be:
Empathetic but not sympathetic, by internally experiencing their feeling but not being motivated to alleviating action as a result (eg, a lust killer who is aroused by his victim's fear, or a con artist who knows how his "mark" feels but uses it to manipulate not support),
and it is also possible to be:
Sympathetic but not empathetic by realising (perhaps cognitively) someone is upset and wanting to alleviate that, but not experiencing their sense of upset directly and internally as an emotional state within themselves (eg, a person at a help desk who sees another in distress, does not feel distress themselves, but tries to find what is wrong and help them anyway).
