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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (58614)	8/7/2004 9:11:55 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793927

Advantage, Bush The White House can control the agenda in ways that Kerry cannot. If the president plays it right, he can wrap up the race WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY By Eleanor Clift Newsweek Updated: 3:41 p.m. ET Aug. 6, 2004 Aug. 6 - Republicans are better at the game of politics. Take this week's elevated terror alert. Whether you think it was warranted or not, it's a win-win for George W. Bush. He says we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here in our country. Yet we're told to prepare for an attack that could come any time and exceed the 9/11 toll in death and destruction. The subliminal message of the Bush campaign is that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for Osama bin Laden. You can buy T-shirts that say that. They're advertised on the web site of the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper owned by the Unification Church. Bush wants us to believe that terrorists the world over are cringing at the thought of four more years of his tough-guy policies. If there's no terrorist attack between now and the election, Bush can claim he kept us safer. If there is an attack on our soil of the magnitude of 9/11, most analysts agree that the American public would rally around the president at least in the short term. Either way, Bush wins the election. No wonder Democrats are paranoid about the Bush campaign manipulating events to benefit the president. The sudden burst of arrests of Al Qaeda operatives this past week increases the odds that three years after 9/11, the capture of bin Laden could become the October Surprise. American soldiers will still be dying in Iraq in a war that may not have been necessary, but if the White House plays it right, Bush could be in the Rose Garden in late October signing an overhaul of the intelligence community. Never mind that he's watered down the 9/11 commission's recommendations to the point where they're almost meaningless; given the way Congress works, that makes legislation easier to pass, and Bush will look in command. There are other ways Bush can burnish his leadership credentials. Rumors that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is burned out and looking to leave the administration could open the door for a quick elevation of the man who personifies leadership to Americans of all political stripes, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Bush and Giuliani campaigning together on a pledge to keep the country safe could erase whatever gains Kerry makes as a challenger during a time of war. Some Democrats still believe Bush could replace Vice President Dick Cheney after the convention, say in late September, which would be so unprecedented in presidential politics that everybody would accept it was Cheney's choice for health reasons. If Bush named John McCain as his running mate, game over. The point is that Bush can control the agenda in a way that Kerry cannot. The real story this week is not that Al Qaeda is scouting out buildings. We've known for some time that Al Qaeda wants to attack financial sites in New York and Washington. They say so on their web sites, and Osama said as much in one of his videos. The surveillance that Ridge interrupted a peaceful Sunday afternoon to announce with the urgency of Armageddon is almost all ancient history, which doesn't mean that these buildings aren't legitimate targets. The proper response is to step up security at these sites. What marks the administration's response as purely political is that they said nothing until pressed to indicate that this isn't a new threat that requires immediate action. Ridge in his press conference said that anybody who saw the intelligence would respond in the same way. Prompted by Ridge's assertion that seeing is believing, a congressional staffer with top-secret clearance read everything the administration made available to Congress about this latest threat. "Either the administration is keeping it from Congress, which would be illegal, or they don't have what they claim to have," this staffer told NEWSWEEK. "Not that there isn't a threat, but it's not news. The intel is old and you don't need to be an intelligence analyst to know Al Qaeda wants to strike financial centers." Howard Dean was right when he said that the administration has cried wolf so many times, it's difficult to know what's real and what is fake. Kerry rightly distanced himself from Dean's comment. Voicing such a suspicion gives the opposition an opening to question your patriotism, and when you assert a negative, you're almost begging to be proven wrong. We're going to see more alerts. Anytime the administration wants to, it can change the subject. This week's alert drove the Democratic ticket to an after-thought in the news cycle, halting whatever modest momentum Kerry had coming out of Boston. The advantage goes to Bush unless the public gets wise to the game. Eventually the wolf will appear. Eventually we will have a real attack, and the administration by crying wolf time after time lessens our zeal to respond. Here at Newsweek's Washington Bureau, in a city identified as a prime target, we don't need an orange alert to tell us Al Qaeda is still plotting against us. © 2004 Newsweek, Inc. URL: msnbc.msn.com