Bush’s Main Strategy: Try to Make Kerry Guilty of Bush’s Own Sins
The campaign trail is littered with examples:
- For months, Bush-Cheney ads, exploiting Kerry's mush mouth and a couple of crumbs in his voting record, branded the Democrat as a "flip-flopper." Yet the four-year record of Bush's changes of position could give even a bull-necked middle linebacker a serious case of whiplash.
Bush first said he attacked Iraq to save America from the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Then it was to save the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator. Then it was to save the world from instability by imposing democracy on an oil-rich Middle Eastern country.
Bush first opposed the creation of a department of homeland security; then he supported it. First he opposed an independent 9/11 Commission; then he supported it. First he said gay marriage was an issue for the states; then he said it required an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He campaigned promising to control pollution from carbon dioxide, but once elected, he had it reclassified as a non-pollutant.
- Bush has spotlighted Kerry's vote against an unfunded bill for equipment and supplies for troops already fighting in Iraq. Yet it was Bush who sent reserve and National Guard units into battle in the first place without adequate body armor, without adequately armored vehicles and without adequate training.
- Bush refused to condemn an ad campaign that attacked Kerry - a decorated Vietnam veteran who saved lives and was wounded in combat - as a coward and a liar. Yet it is Bush who avoided service in Vietnam, who refused an order to take a physical exam while serving in the Texas Air National Guard, who failed to keep a promise to serve in a guard unit in Massachusetts while he was in graduate school and whose military record remains conveniently incomplete.
- Bush has accused Kerry of using scare tactics by raising the possibility that Bush might reinstitute a military draft and ruin Social Security if he's re-elected. Yet it is Bush who used the ultimate nightmare of nuclear annihilation to scare Americans into supporting his decision to attack Iraq, even though the administration had plenty of evidence debunking the notion that Saddam had any nuclear capability at all.
- At campaign stops this week, Bush is repeating his accusation that Kerry's "pre-9/11 mindset" makes him incapable of conducting a war against terrorism. Yet it was Bush's own pre-9/11 mindset - he has admitted he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization prior to the attacks - that contributed to our vulnerability that awful day.
As for managing the ongoing war on terrorism, Bush is now on his fifth chief of counterterrorism in the White House in less than four years, and the first four he appointed - Richard Clarke, Rand Beers, Ret. Army Gen. Wayne A. Downing and John A. Gordon - are on record as criticizing aspects of Bush's approach. Only the person currently in the job, Frances Fragos Townsend, praises her boss.
In sharp contrast, four years before 9/11, Kerry published a book - "The New War: The Web of Crime that Threatens America's Security - about how terrorists, drug lords and others use the international banking system to launder the money that allows them to carry out their plots. By that time, he had already spent 10 years as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations.
- Perhaps no charge reeks more of "I know you are, but what am I"-ism than Bush's current effort to paint Kerry as an ultra-liberal. Of course, it was Kerry's mainstream, centrist track record that created such a tough primary battle for him with Howard Dean.
Meanwhile, Bush has spent four years governing so far to the right that even some lifelong traditional conservatives and libertarians have publicly condemned his international recklessness, fiscal irresponsibility, interference in citizens' private lives, the dismantling of 30 years of Republican-Democratic progress on environmental protection and his blatant disrespect for the U.S. Constitution.
As revealed in Tim Golden's chilling New York Times stories earlier this week, when it came to handling prisoners taken on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq - or, for that matter, terrorism suspects seized on American streets - Bush's attitude was that the Constitution and a 200-year legacy of law were annoying inconveniences. White House lawyers, abetted by like-minded colleagues in the Justice Department, worked in secret to devise tortured legal arguments circumventing constitutional guarantees and established American military codes of justice, to say nothing of international treaties signed by the U.S. and honored by every president since Harry Truman. The policies they concocted remained in force and unchallenged - producing precious little of value, by the way - until slapped down, in part, by the U.S. Supreme Court last summer.
Bush's shorthand explanation for why terrorists oppose the United States is that "they hate freedom." His four-year record offers scant evidence that he truly appreciates what American freedom means.
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