A colleague forwarded me a photo that is making the rounds on the Internet. It was taken at a campaign rally in Ohio some weeks ago, and it shows President Bush embracing a 17-year-old girl named Ashley Faulkner, whose mother had been killed in the 9/11 World Trade Center attack.

The accompanying story, written by a Missouri journalist bylined CK Rairden, is a moving account of the brief meeting between the girl and the president. Bush, told of her mother’s fate, took Ashley in his arms in an unscripted, spontaneous expression of sympathy. As she buried her face in the president’s chest, the girl’s father snapped the picture.

The online version of Rairden’s story is titled, “Bush Photo with Teen Shows Conviction and Compassion.” He writes: “This touching photo has gone largely ignored by the mainstream media. But the alternative media has made this touching powerful photo one of the most e-mailed photos of last week. The Internet once again took over where the elite media failed.”

That dig at the big media — Fox News and the Drudge Report are specifically absolved — has become boilerplate. But here it seems not so much part of a ritual slap at liberal elitism than a denunciation of something more fundamental. That is the refusal to recognize and affirm the importance of sentiment — of truly caring, of the obligation that our leaders have to connect with us emotionally and sincerely — in public life.

The subject is especially pertinent in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s passing. Whatever his failings and inconsistencies as president, it’s impossible to deny that Reagan was hugely successful at establishing an enduring emotional connection with a great many people. As a leader, his preferred language was not that of policy or principle. He talked about dreams and hopes, he said that he cared about us, he looked unwaveringly into the camera, and he made it hard to doubt that he meant it.

For a lot of people, that is what mattered, the strength of his sincerity.

Now, I was not a fan. Indeed, I date a great many developments that have produced a coarser, greedier and globally more-arrogant America to the Reagan years. And I can’t help but remember that the sincerity and emotional engagement that he radiated like a benediction when he spoke to the public on TV were all but completely absent from his relations with his own children.

It is those kinds of inconsistencies that convince me that we should be far more careful about assuming that a leader who seems to have a sincere and generous spirit will necessarily be the author of policies that are as wise and compassionate.

Sincerity can be faked, too, but the danger isn’t really hypocrisy. Reagan was deeply principled. Rairden’s account makes it clear that Bush was genuinely moved. The problem is that the path linking private and public spheres isn’t straight. It’s twisted, overgrown and sometimes totally impassable.

Lyndon Johnson may have wept privately over the mounting casualties in Vietnam, but he sent more and more troops to their deaths. He was capable of great cruelty in his personal relations and could not, to save his life, sound truthful when he went before the television cameras. Yet the Great Society that he engineered represents one of the most ambitious efforts at institutional compassion in the country’s history.

Jimmy Carter had made the appearance of piety and unpretentiousness into an art form, but it did not ensure leadership that was wise and effective, for all his pledges about creating “a government as good as its people.”

There is something truly fine about the public’s longing for leaders with heart. But sincerity can deceive, and it can mislead us into believing that purity of motive is what counts.

In the final analysis, Bush’s opening his arms to Ashley, though a comfort to her, will matter little. What will matter desperately is whether his actions and those of his administration needlessly cause more suffering and loss like those that Ashley endured. That is the true test of Bush’s, or any leader’s, sincerity.

Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University. He wrote this column for The Miami Herald. His e-mail address is edward–wasserman@hotmail.com.