Cheney Fires Back in Debate Over Values
03-Jul-2004 AP
WHEELING, W.Va. - Firing back in the debate over American values, Vice President Dick Cheney used his first campaign bus tour Saturday to label Democrat John Kerry "on the left, out of the mainstream and out of touch with the conservative values of the heartland."
Kerry in recent days has been invoking values with increasing frequency, promising a crowd in Minnesota on Friday, for example, that he would "honor the values that built our country."
Cheney, serving notice that the Bush campaign won't cede what has traditionally been a favorite Republican issue, told a cheering crowd at Wheeling Park High School: "Sometimes I think John Kerry developed amnesia out on the campaign trail. His latest thing is to tell audiences that he holds conservative values.
"Did he forget his voting record, a voting record that makes him the most liberal member of the United States Senate?" Cheney asked. He cited Kerry's vote against a ban on flag-burning, tax relief and banning what opponents call partial birth abortion.
"On these and a whole host of values, John Kerry's votes and statements over the decades that he's been in office put him on the left, out of the mainstream and out of touch with the conservative values of the heartland."
Cheney declared it "a great day for a bus ride" at the outset of a two-day tour in a red, white and blue bus through Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, three battleground states in the electoral politics of 2004. In fact, it was a day of dueling bus tours as John Kerry's campaign staked out the highways of Wisconsin and Iowa.
First stop for Cheney: the sweltering banquet hall of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Parma, where hundreds of GOP faithful bellowed cheers for the Republican ticket and plentiful boos at the mere mention of Kerry.
"This is the good part of the speech," Cheney grinned, as he launched into a scathing critique of Kerry's economic policies.
"His big idea for cheering up the country? Raise your taxes," Cheney declared.
Cheney repeated the Bush campaign's often-repeated assertion that Kerry in his three terms as senator has voted for higher taxes 350 times.
"That's an average of a vote for higher taxes every three weeks for the last 20 years," he said. "At least the folks back in Massachusetts knew he was on the job."
In Parma, he told about 1,000 people gathered under the church's dome that "Ohio voted for President Bush in 2000, and we're counting on you again in 2004."
Seventy-year-old Florence Orris, among those at the Parma rally, said she's backing Bush because of his integrity. She lamented the "ugly" tone of the campaign but nonetheless said she didn't blame Cheney for blurting out an expletive during an angry encounter with Sen. Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor last month.
"I'm almost getting to that point with my Democratic friends," she declared. "One of them told me this week she hates President Bush." |
