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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (4056)	8/12/2003 11:23:06 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

Democrats Clash Over Iraq War, Tax Cuts By Dan Balz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 12, 2003; Page A04 URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47024-2003Aug11.html The Democratic presidential candidates clashed with one another last night over the war in Iraq and President Bush's tax cuts, but unanimously denounced the effort in California to recall Gov. Gray Davis (D) as a partisan effort by Republicans to undo the results of last year's gubernatorial election. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) who said he is the only Democratic candidate who supported both wars against Iraq, sharply challenged Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), accusing his rival of ambivalence about whether Bush should go to war after having voted for the congressional resolution authorizing military action. Saying the threat posed by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was clear after 12 years of Iraqi defiance of U.N. resolutions, Lieberman said to Kerry, "It was time for decisiveness, which is what people expect in their president, not uncertainty and ambivalence." Kerry defended his vote for the resolution, saying he voted to give Bush the threat to use force "to hold Saddam Hussein accountable," but that Bush "didn't understand how to do that properly." He said his reservations about going to war when Bush did so have been justified by the post-conflict instability that continues in Iraq. "We're now learning they went to war without an adequate plan to win the peace," he said. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean defended his opposition to the war, which Lieberman has said threatens to consign Democrats to certain defeat in 2004 if Dean is the party's nominee. "My trumpet's pretty certain," Dean said, noting that he had supported the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the war in Afghanistan after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but opposed the Iraq war because he did not believe Hussein represented an imminent threat. "I will defend the United States with the full military might of this country," he said, but he added that he would never send U.S. troops to war "without telling the American people the truth." The exchanges over Iraq came at the end of a debate that lasted nearly two hours and was sponsored by the Sheet Metal Workers' International Association. Held at the new National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia, the debate was moderated by MSNBC's Bill Press, a former chairman of the California Democratic Party. Last night's debate was the first of five presidential candidate forums that will be held this week. It provided some of the liveliest moments in the Democrats' campaign since their encounter in South Carolina last spring. The event also included Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio), former senator and ambassador Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton. Sens. John Edwards (N.C.) and Bob Graham (Fla.) did not participate. Kerry challenged Dean and Gephardt, both of whom have called for repealing all of Bush's tax cuts, saying that would mean tax increases on middle-class Americans. "I think that's bad economics, I think that's bad social policy and I think it's bad politics," he said. But Gephardt said that he would use the money from Bush's tax cuts to provide near-universal health care and that his program would help create jobs and provide substantial funds to cash-strapped states. "Don't you think that's a better idea?" he asked the audience. Lieberman said Gephardt's plan amounted to a return to big government. "These proposals are so big, so enormous, so expensive, they don't have a chance of passing Congress," he said. Kucinich, Sharpton and Braun all spoke in favor of a bigger plan, a single-payer system, but Gephardt said those plans were politically impractical. The debate opened with a question about whether action film star Arnold Schwarzenegger would make a good governor of California, but the candidates all used the question to denounce the Republicans and call for the recall initiative to be defeated. Kerry labeled the recall "right-wing, ideological interference" with the political process and likened it to the Supreme Court's intervention in the 2000 presidential election. Gephardt joined in by saying, "This is an attack on the institutions of our government. That's what Republicans do." Dean said Davis is taking the blame for problems in his state that are the responsibility of Bush's failure to restore economic growth throughout the country. "If you want to recall somebody, it ought to be George Bush," he said, "and we'll get that opportunity." © 2003 The Washington Post Company