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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rick Faurot who wrote (35766)	1/21/2004 9:08:53 AM
From: Rick Faurot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

On Campaign Trail, Union Is Not So Rosy Democrats Bash Bush on Iraq, Taxes By Dan Balz and Paul Schwartzman Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, January 21, 2004; Page A20 MANCHESTER, N.H., Jan. 20 -- From Iraq to taxes, from the USA Patriot Act to prescription drugs, President Bush and the Democrats running to replace him clashed over the state of the union on Tuesday night. Even as Bush was delivering his 54-minute address to a joint session of Congress, the reviews were rolling in. At a downtown theater before an audience of about 800 people, retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark offered his own state of the union. Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) watched the address with a New Hampshire family. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean dismissed Bush's blueprint as "empty proposals" even before the president entered the House chamber -- and sounded a theme that other candidates embraced, charging that Bush's America is dominated by powerful interests, not ordinary, middle-class families. After the speech Dean said in a statement, "Tonight, President Bush made the case only for his defeat in November. President Bush offered a stale agenda that aids the special interests and does very little for working Americans." Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) said Bush has no plan for creating jobs -- "just more tax cuts for the people who don't need them, comforting the comfortable and once again leaving the middle class in the lurch." Worse, Lieberman said, Bush seeks to enlarge the already record budget deficit, saying there is a greater likelihood of "finding aliens on Mars than making this fantastical, fiscally reckless plan work." Standing on the steps of the public library at midday, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) offered a pre-speech rebuttal, noting that Bush would call the state of the union strong. "The question is which union," he said. "The union of the special interests and the insiders in Washington is strong. The problem is there are a lot of Americans who are struggling every single day, and they're the people who need our help." Kerry, speaking on ABC-TV from the home of a Concord, N.H., firefighter and nurse, chastised Bush for failing to confront the fact that 43 million Americans have no health insurance. "There's nothing the president said tonight that will make health insurance more affordable or more available," he said. "There's just a gap here between the world that the president describes and the world in which people are living." In his town hall meeting, Clark excoriated Bush over Iraq and the deficit. "Two years after President Bush coined the term 'axis of evil,' we've got a new axis of evil, and it's one our president himself created," he said. "It's an axis of fiscal policy that threatens our future, foreign policy that threatens our security, and domestic policy that puts families dead last."