Liberation | Presidential Campaign: The Bush Camp Panics
truthout.org
By Fabrice Rousselot
Liberation FR
Thursday 12 February 2004
The Democrat Kerry's Breakthrough Forces the President to Defend a Disputed Record
Last week, the White house promised a "surprise", George W. Bush's counter-attack to the repeated assaults of campaigning Democrats. Sunday, he invited himself on to NBC's star show, Meet the Press, to defend from the Oval Office his political record and decision to launch the war in Iraq.
Today, as the threat of a John Kerry Democratic candidacy materializes, Bush has never seemed so vulnerable. According to a number of commentators, his NBC appearance did not help him. The New York Times didn't hesitate to condemn the President's "incoherencies and approximations", even accusing him of "revisionism" in economic matters. Time magazine's cover questions the President's "credibility gap".
By asserting two weeks ago that American intelligence services "had been mistaken" and that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, David Kay, the now resigned chief of American inspectors, relaunched the debate on the justifications for an intervention against Saddam Hussein. Bush has repeated in vain that he thought he had "taken the best decision given the intelligence available"; he hasn't convinced anyone. At best, he looks like a president who started a war on the basis of contradictory intelligence; at worst, like a president who deliberately exaggerated the threat to justify a war he had already decided to wage.
Skepticism
The controversy goes well beyond Iraq. Suddenly, Bush's whole record is being passed through a fine tooth comb. Monday, while he was making assurances in Missouri that the economy "was getting better and better", the Democrats, starting with John Kerry were asking, "Who can believe a president who's caused three million jobs to be lost in three years?" The same skepticism greets Bush's promise to reduce the deficit in half in the next five years, while experts expect that the deficit, estimated to be 375 billion dollars this year, will actually increase. Tuesday, Bush was even compelled to publish twenty-year-old documents to try to prove that he hadn't deserted and had really served in the National Guard during the Vietnam War.
Criticism
"The public has the impression of having been fooled," explains Robert Shapiro, Political Science professor at Columbia University. "About Iraq, but also about other problems, such as the cost of health care system reforms, or the real state of the economy. And Bush is criticized for that." In the polls, the President's popularity rating has gone below 50% for the first time since the beginning of his term. His problems spare no one in the inner circle of his administration. The press has asked several times whether it is in the President's interest to keep Dick Cheney on as Vice President in the November election. Perceived in 2000 as the one who brought experience and expertise to the candidacy of Bush who had only been governor of Texas, Cheney is now the object of multiple questions linked to Halliburton oil company, which he used to head. The company is the subject of several investigations for having profited from "favoritism" in the award of contracts in Iraq and elsewhere.
Tensions which had been perceived before the war seem to be reappearing at the White House. Anonymous sources have allowed it to be understood that Colin Powell, one of the most reluctant to launch an offensive against Saddam, is today "very irritated' with CIA failures on the subject of weapons of mass destruction and would consider leaving the Bush team should it be reelected. "For sure, the coming weeks could be touchy for Bush," Robert Shapiro concludes. "But the campaign is only beginning. If the Iraq situation improves and if the economy creates jobs, he'll be difficult to beat."
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Translation: Truthout French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher. |
