Kerry lashes out at Bush
BY ANNE Q. HOY
WASHINGTON BUREAU
September 16, 2004
DETROIT - Democrat John Kerry yesterday delivered a stinging indictment of George W. Bush's economic record, charging that he's offered "more excuses than jobs" and presided over record employment losses and a swollen deficit.
In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, a traditional stop for presidential candidates, Kerry cast himself as "an entrepreneurial Democrat" and said Bush "consciously, willfully" turned the $5.6 trillion surplus he inherited into a deficit that former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said has climbed to more than $9 trillion.
Kerry said his rival's "failed policies" have reversed economic gains won during the Clinton administration and have hit the middle class particularly hard.
"Now the president wants you to believe that this record is the record of the victim of circumstances, the result of bad luck, not bad decisions," Kerry said.
"This president has created more excuses than jobs. His is the excuse presidency: Never wrong, never responsible, never to blame ... He's blamed just about everybody but himself and his administration for America's economic problems as well as other problems like Abu Ghraib," Kerry added.
The speech was remarkable less for specific proposals - it recited plans Kerry has previously unveiled - than for hard-nosed rhetoric, which was tougher than any of his earlier critiques of Bush's economic policies.
Earlier, in an interview with radio host Don Imus, Kerry also sought to deliver a more definitive pronouncement on Iraq, saying nothing has occurred that would have led him to exercise the authority Congress granted Bush to take the nation to war.
Even so, Kerry defended his vote in support of giving Bush that authority. He said Bush deceived the American public about the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The formulation altered in a politically significant way Kerry's statement in August that he still would have voted to authorize the Iraq war even if he had known that weapons of mass destruction were not to be found. In contending that no circumstances justified actually going to war, the senator shifted the focus back on the president.
In the radio interview, Kerry vowed to take on his rival in other ways. "We are punching back. I am absolutely taking the gloves off," Kerry said.
His words seemed to answer the recent urgings of Kerry's Democratic allies to respond more robustly to Bush and answer questions raised by an outside group about the Massachusetts senator's Vietnam record.
On Iraq, Kerry raised doubts about whether elections can be held in January, a central aim of the Bush administration. "It is very difficult to see today how you're going to distribute ballots in places like Fallujah, and Ramadi and Najaf and other parts of the country, without having established the security," he said.
Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager, said Kerry's Iraq comments, taken with his vote to give Bush war authority and another against the more than $87 billion to fund that effort, have devolved "into complete and total incoherence."
In a telephone news conference, Mehlman quoted Imus as saying, " 'I asked him a number of questions about Iraq and I can't tell you what he said.' "
Mehlman said Kerry's comments on the economy painted "more pessimism" and offered only "rehashed old, tired ideas of higher taxes, of more regulation and of more government control of people's lives." He said 1.7 million jobs have been created this year, leaving aside the jobs lost since Bush took office.
Kerry, during a raucous rally later in Madison, Wis., another pivotal state, where a poll shows him losing ground, vowed to fight a more effective war on terror than Bush.
In his Detroit speech, Kerry listed a litany of setbacks for the nation's economy since Bush took office in 2001. He said 1.6 million Americans have lost jobs, making Bush "the first president in 72 years to actually lose jobs on his watch."
Saying the Bush administration "says we should celebrate an economy of job loss," Kerry charged the president has done nothing to stop American jobs from moving overseas, failed to clamp down on currency manipulation by China and Japan and taken no steps to reverse rising energy and health care costs.
The senator said he would roll back the part of Bush's tax cuts that lowered taxes on those earning more than $200,000 a year. He said his plans to lower the cost of health insurance and reduce American independence on foreign oil would help middle-class Americans.
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