Last night I heard Joe Trippi say that he believes Kerry's $6.5 mortgage loan made the difference in Iowa results. He said, if not for that last minute injection of personal funds by Kerry, John Edwards would have been the winner, as evidenced by only 2point difference between those candidates.
Kerry gets more careless & places his silver foot in mouth the longer he's on campaign trail. That & his voting record will haunt him for next 8mos:
Tuesday, 09-Mar-2004 1:42AM Story from AP / JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer
HOUSTON (AP) -- President Bush, in painting his Democratic presidential rival as someone who waffles on national security issues, says John Kerry "is trying to have it both ways" on matters of intelligence.
At a re-election fund-raiser Monday, Bush contrasted the Massachusetts senator's oft-stated support for intelligence gathering as a crucial component of the war on terror with his support -- two years after a deadly 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center -- for cutting intelligence funding by $1.5 billion.
"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," Bush told 1,100 donors at a Houston event that raised $1.5 million for his campaign. "And that is no way to lead our nation in a time of war."
The salvo was the result of a methodical mining by the Bush campaign of the long trail of votes and speeches from Kerry's 19 years in the Senate. Bush didn't limit himself to national security issues, and also criticized Kerry's shifts in position on the Patriot Act, trade legislation and an education reform bill.
"My opponent clearly has strong beliefs, they just don't last very long," Bush said.
Kerry's campaign said Bush's accusations have no merit and are misleading.
Advisers to Bush are focusing on national security and terrorism in hopes of bolstering their claims that Kerry would be a weak wartime leader who can't stick to one position. The president's team also aims to capitalize on poll results showing those are Bush's strongest areas with voters.
Bush held a more than 20-point lead over Kerry, 57 percent to 36 percent, among voters who were asked which one would do a better job prosecuting terrorism, according to an ABC-Washington Post poll of 936 registered voters released Monday. The poll was taken March 4-7 has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Bush said Kerry's bill to cut intelligence funding was "so deeply irresponsible that he didn't have a single co-sponsor in the United States Senate," drawing laughter from the GOP crowd.
Yet, an idea similar in size and purpose to Kerry's won Senate approval on a bipartisan voice vote -- a procedure reserved for non-controversial measures -- as an amendment to a larger bill sponsored by one Republican and one Democrat, said Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton. The move came after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when there was wide recognition that intelligence spending needed to shift away from efforts to thwart the Cold War opponent and toward measures to combat terrorism, drug trafficking and weapons of mass destruction.
Kerry's bill would have stripped $90 billion from the overall budget to end programs he called "pointless, wasteful, antiquated or just plain silly," including $1.5 billion in cuts aimed at ending "bloat" in an intelligence budget that had become "essentially a slush fund for defense contractors," Clanton said.
"You bet, John Kerry voted against business as usual in our intelligence community," Clanton said.
Kerry, who has suggested that Bush is impeding a federal commission's investigation into the events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, played more than just defense on Monday.
"If the president of the United States can find time to go to a rodeo, he can spend more than one hour before he commission," Kerry said in Florida, referring to Bush's appearance at a rodeo in between Dallas and Houston fund-raisers. Both events added $3 million to his $160 million-plus campaign war chest.
The White House says Bush is cooperating with the investigation. |
