ASHINGTON, March 8 — President Bush struck back at Senator John F. Kerry today, accusing the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee of indecision, of being "deeply irresponsible" on intelligence spending and of being the wrong person to lead America in a time of peril.
"My opponent clearly has strong beliefs," Mr. Bush told a friendly gathering at a campaign fund-raiser in Dallas. "They just don't last very long."
And when Mr. Kerry has been consistent, the president said, he has been consistently wrong. "My opponent is against personal retirement accounts, against putting patients in charge of Medicare, against tax relief," Mr. Bush said. "He seems to be against every idea that gives Americans more authority, more choices and more control over their own lives.
"It's the same old Washington mindset," Mr. Bush went on. "They'll give you the orders, and you pay the bills."
The president's criticisms followed a weekend in which Senator Kerry, of Massachusetts, was equally disdainful of the president. Campaigning in the South in advance of Democratic primaries on Tuesday, including contests in Texas and Tennessee, Mr. Kerry asserted that Mr. Bush was still resisting a full inquiry into the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the intelligence failures that preceded it.
"Why is this administration stonewalling?" Mr. Kerry said on Sunday in Tougaloo, Miss.
In striking back today, Mr. Bush recalled Mr. Kerry's vote in 1995, two years after the first bombing of the World Trade Center, to cut the overall intelligence budget by $1.5 billion.
"His bill was so deeply irresponsible that he didn't have a single co-sponsor in the United States Senate," Mr. Bush said. "Once again, Senator Kerry is trying to have it both ways. He's for good intelligence, yet he was willing to gut the intelligence services. And that is no way to lead a nation in a time of war."
A Kerry spokesman, Chad Clanton, told The Associated Press that the senator voted as he did in 1995 because the bill in question contained a "billion-dollar bloat" that was essentially "a slush fund for defense contractors." Furthermore, Mr. Clanton said, Mr. Kerry has supported a 50 percent increase in spending on intelligence-gathering since 1996.
Mr. Bush carried the Lone Star state, where he used to be governor, by 59 to 38 percent in 2000. "If you can't count on your home state in politics, you're in deep trouble," Mr. Bush remarked today.
Al Gore learned that only too well. Had he carried his home state, Tennessee, in 2000, he would be president today. |
