Graham takes on Bush on national security
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By Muriel Dobbin
Star Tribune Washington Bureau Correspondent
Published June 1, 2003
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Florida Sen. Bob Graham, the last man to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, was the first candidate to challenge President Bush over his honesty as a leader of the war on terrorism.
The ranking Democrat of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Graham has launched a drumbeat of criticism of the president for allegedly stonewalling Americans on the facts of past and present intelligence failures.
Graham is a quiet man who is considered a long shot among Democratic contenders. But he is the only one to stake out an aggressive position on the basis of classified information he obtained as co-chair of a congressional panel investigating the intelligence community's failure to anticipate the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Not only has he complained that the administration has dragged its feet for five months on declassifying the panel's 800-page report, but he has warned that he will take his case later this month to Vice President Dick Cheney, who oversaw the inquiry.
"I was raising my voice about my concern on this long before I became a candidate," said Graham, the only senator running for president who voted against congressional authorization of the war in Iraq, arguing that the terrorist threat posed by Al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden should be the top priority for the administration.
"The American people deserve to know what their intelligence agencies have done or not done, and Congress needs to know so that reforms can be made," Graham said in an interview.
Arguing that the president had let homeland security slip because of his obsession with toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Graham charged, "The fact is that there was information known to the administration before 9/11 that was not acted on then and isn't being acted on now. The administration is engaging in a cover-up to protect itself from embarrassing disclosures."
Further criticizing Bush's foreign policy, Graham predicted that the United States would face a "quagmire" in postwar Iraq.
Graham said he had no plans to halt his criticisms of the president.
Denouncing Bush's tax cut legislation as a threat to the nation's economic health, Graham said it was evidence of Bush's failure to preserve the strong economy he inherited. Graham has proposed an economic stimulus plan that would provide paycheck relief in the form of a refundable wage-tax credit, and also would temporarily increase the federal share of Medicaid costs.
At 66, Graham is the oldest Democratic candidate and a grandfather. He is a low-key lawmaker, respected for being willing to work across party lines in the Senate, although his stump speeches are considered less than riveting. When he was Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he reportedly was nicknamed "the tortoise" for asking meandering, six-part questions.
Graham announced his presidential candidacy as he recuperated from heart surgery. He now quips that when campaigning on dairy farms he feels as though he is "visiting my grandmother," because his new heart valve came from a Holstein cow.
"I am not a dark horse. I am a centrist with new ideas, and I have executive experience," said Graham, who has never lost an election since he plunged into politics almost three decades ago.
Yet his current role must be that of a political hard-charger, because he is likely to have an uphill battle to become the Democratic choice for 2004. He was governor of Florida for eight years and is now in his third term as a U.S. senator, yet a recent poll in the Sunshine State showed him running 9 points behind Bush; a survey in New Hampshire, home of the nation's first primary, gave him 2 percent name recognition among voters.
Graham's campaign will feature his trademark "work days" to which he attributed his success in 1978, when he rose from 3 percent in the polls to victory in the Florida gubernatorial race. He spent 100 days as a cop, a mechanic, a trucker, a bellboy, a steelworker, a cook, a waiter, a construction worker and a nursing home attendant. The work days were meant to transform his image from "wonky, wealthy and shy" to outgoing and ebullient.
Gearing up for the presidential primaries, Graham has already spent days working as a teacher in New Hampshire and a busboy in Iowa.
"It gives me a different perspective," he explained.
Graham is considered a political eccentric because of a habit of keeping meticulous notes of his daily activities in small, color-coded spiral notebooks. He records what he eats, the name of everyone he meets and even the numbers of his hotel rooms.
According to Graham, the thousands of notebooks he has filled aren't diaries, but a "logistical record" to keep track of things. He got the idea, he recalled, from his cattleman father, who kept similar notebooks about sick cows and broken fences.
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