Two Articles Follow:
#1:
Jonah Goldberg
Gaping holes in Dems' 'security gap' argument
newsandopinion.com | Chewing their way through campaign strategies the way my dog goes through tennis balls, the Democratic front-runners are now borrowing pages from Presidents Kennedy and Reagan in their continuing effort to get ahead by tearing down President Bush.
Both Rep. Richard Gephardt and Sen. John Kerry have started asking the question - in one form or another - "Are you safer today than you were before Bush entered office?"
Gephardt: "George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago." Kerry: "I think the American people have a right to ask the question of whether or not we are safer today than we were three years ago." My dog Cosmo: "Where's the tennis ball I had three minutes ago?"
Sorry, that's not relevant.
Deliberate or not, this is a variation of Ronald Reagan's famous 1980 question, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" which many consider to have been the crystallizing question of that contest and the source of Reagan's victory.
It's also a play on John F. Kennedy's more cynical 1960 campaign strategy, in which he attempted to run to the "right" of President Eisenhower by decrying a "missile gap" with the Soviets. There was no missile gap, and there's every reason to believe Kennedy knew that. Today, many of the Democrats are claiming they're tougher on terrorism than Bush and that they would close the security gap.
There are problems with both of these approaches. The question "are you more secure today" is simply a lot more difficult to answer than the original Reagan formulation. People know whether their economic condition is better or worse than it was four years ago. We are all the best judges of our own economic plight. But the threat from terrorism is abstract. How does the average person know if he or she is in more danger than four years ago?
Also, the question is misleading. Four years ago, people may have felt a lot more secure than they do today, but in part that was because the Clinton Administration had swept much of the threat under the rug.
Bush can make a reasonable - and, to me, persuasive - case that his actions were necessary for our long-term safety because the prior administration kept kicking the can down the road. Indeed, even if people actually do feel less secure today, the president can still make the case that such insecurity is the necessary consequence of addressing threats head-on.
Voters surely felt more insecure after Pearl Harbor, that doesn't mean they thought FDR was wrong to prosecute WWII. Bush can make the case that the risks we face today are worth preventing greater risks tomorrow.
So, Bush's opponents need to make the case that voters are less safe because of Bush's actions and that they would do things better than Bush has. That's a lot different than asking, "Are you better off economically than you were four years ago?"
This brings us to the Kennedyesque "security gap" argument, which is too cynical to fly. Gephardt and Kerry both voted for the war against Iraq, however reluctantly. They can't claim to have been "misled" by those infamous 16 words - "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" - because A) they had access to the same intelligence as the president and B) those 16 words were uttered months after Congress had already authorized the president to go to war.
Indeed, in Democratic circles Gephardt's support for the war, which was crucial as he was the minority leader, is defended on the grounds that Gephardt believed taking war "off the table" as an issue would allow Democrats to make domestic issues the central focus of the 2004 elections. Well, if that's true, Gephardt is obviously guilty of sending our troops to battle for narrow partisan reasons, something Democrats suggest unfairly about Bush.
But even leaving that aside, with the exception of Senator Bob Graham, none of the Democrats can come close to claiming they'd be more aggressive on national security than President Bush (and Graham's record is all over the place). All of the Democrats denounce the Patriot Act as "going too far," and to one extent or another almost all argue for putting the United Nations' interests ahead of our own.
Today we really are supporting any friend and opposing almost any foe in order to spread liberty around the globe, while the Democrats sound like they want detente with the terrorists and their supporters. And that's not an argument for winning the White House in 2004.
Article #2:
New GOP Chair Defends President Bush
Fri Jul 25, 7:58 AM
URL:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030725/ap_on_go_ot/republicans_4
By RON FOURNIER, AP Political Writer
NEW YORK - Rising to President Bush (news - web sites)'s defense, the new GOP chairman says Democrats are force-feeding Americans "a steady diet of protest and pessimism" in absence of real solutions to the economy and Iraq (news - web sites).
AP Photo
AP Photo
Slideshow: Republican National Committee/GOP
"The contest for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination sometimes seems to be a contest to see who can be the most pessimistic, who can protest the most angrily and who can take their party further back in time," Ed Gillespie said in a text of his address to the 165-member Republican National Committee (news - web sites).
Gillespie, who as a young activist manned phone banks in the basement of GOP headquarters, was expected to be voted chairman of the party Friday. The prominent former lobbyist replaces Marc Racicot, who left the RNC to head Bush's re-election campaign.
Gillespie, 41, hoped his maiden address would help turn the tables against Democratic presidential candidates who have raised questions about the president's use of shaky U.S. intelligence to justify war in Iraq. Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) on Thursday made strong defenses of the war, with Cheney telling a conservative think tank in Washington it would have been "irresponsible" not to take on Saddam Hussein (news - web sites).
Democratic Party spokesman Debra DeShong said Gillespie had a lot of nerve calling other politicians negative.
"We have nine candidates crisscrossing the country presenting a positive vision for American. Mr. Gillespie sounds quiet hawkish and adversarial himself," she said.
Gillespie clearly has been cast as Bush's attack dog, the quick-with-a-quote operative who can heatedly denounce Democrats while the president tries to appear above the fray.
"Americans want a president who is forward-looking," Gillespie said in the text obtained by The Associated Press. "They want calm leadership, not heated rhetoric. They want bipartisan accomplishments, not bitter partisanship. And they want a steady hand, not flailing arms."
The finger-pointing closed out a four-day gathering of Republican activists who publicly predicted re-election victory for Bush while privately fretting about political fallout over the ailing economy, the death toll in Iraq and questions about Bush's rationale for war.
Gillespie brushed all that aside with a stinging rebuke of Democratic attacks.
"In place of solutions they serve up raw emotion, and that emotion is anger," he said.
"They're angry that they aren't the majority party in the House or Senate. They're angry that they don't control a majority of the governorships. And they're angry most of all that they don't control the White House," he said.
"As a result, they offer Americans a steady diet of protest and pessimism," Gillespie said. "They're still protesting the 2000 election. Some of their loudest voices protested removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. They protested a jobs and growth package. They protest qualified judicial nominees."
He accused Democrats of counting on a weak economy and trouble in Iraq to beat Bush.
"The once-proud party of Franklin Roosevelt, who famously told us we have nothing to fear but fear itself, now seems to have nothing to offer but fear itself."
Gillespie was a general strategist for Elizabeth Dole (news - web sites)'s successful Senate campaign in 2002 and served as a senior communications adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000. He was a communications director for the RNC in the 1990s and worked for former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, before becoming a lobbyist. |
