[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Bush's Mocking Drowns Out

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Kerry on Iraq Vote 
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Bush's Mocking Drowns Out 
Kerry on Iraq Vote

August 12, 2004
 By DAVID E. SANGER 



 

WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 - For five days now, as the
long-distance arguments between President Bush and Senator
John Kerry have focused on the wisdom of invading Iraq, Mr.
Kerry has struggled to convince his audiences that his vote
to authorize the president to use military force was a far,
far cry from voting for a declaration of war. 

So far, his aides and advisers concede, he has failed to
get his message across, as Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney have mocked his efforts as "a new nuance" that
amount to more examples of the senator's waffling. 

Mr. Kerry's problems began last week when President Bush
challenged him for a yes-or-no answer on a critical
campaign issue: If Mr. Kerry knew more than a year ago what
he knows today about the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, would he still have voted to authorize
the use of military force to oust Saddam Hussein? 

As Mr. Bush surely knew, it is a question that can upset
the difficult balance Mr. Kerry must strike. He has to
portray himself as tough and competent enough to be
commander in chief, yet appeal to the faction of Democrats
that hates the war and eggs him on to call Mr. Bush a liar.


It is a problem that has dogged Mr. Kerry since he walked
through the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire, and suffered
the barbs of Vermont's former governor, Howard Dean, who
made Mr. Kerry's vote to authorize action an issue. Now Mr.
Bush has taken up where Dr. Dean left off. 

"Kerry has always had this vulnerability of looking
flip-floppy on the issue and Bush is using this very
shrewdly," said Walter Russell Mead, a scholar at the
Council on Foreign Relations. He added "Being silent on the
question makes him look evasive, and saying something,
anything, gets him in trouble with one side of his party or
another." 

Mr. Kerry's friends concede the first rounds have gone to
the president - "it's frustrating as hell," Senator Joseph
R. Biden Jr. of Delaware said on Wednesday - but Mr. Bush
has his own problems, since the argument re-ignites the
question of whether he rushed to war without a plan about
what to do next. 

It is an issue on which Mr. Bush can still sound defensive.
On Wednesday in Albuquerque, he responded to Mr. Kerry's
suggestion that the United States could begin pulling
troops out of Iraq next year by saying, "I know what I'm
doing when it comes to winning this war, and I'm not going
to be sending mixed signals" by discussing pullouts. 

Mr. Bush also reaffirmed his stance on the war when he
challenged Mr. Kerry. "We did the right thing,'' the
president said on Friday, "and the world is better off for
it." 

Across the weekend, the Kerry campaign debated how Mr.
Kerry should respond. "There were a lot of ideas," said one
official, "from silence, to throwing the question back in
the president's face." 

But the decision, in the end, was Mr. Kerry's. He chose to
take the bait on Monday at the edge of the Grand Canyon.
Asked by a reporter, he said he would have voted for the
resolution - even in the absence of evidence of weapons of
mass destruction - before adding his usual explanation that
he would have subsequently handled everything leading up to
the war differently. 

Mr. Bush, sensing he had ensnared Mr. Kerry, stuck in the
knife on Tuesday, telling a rally in Panama City, Fla.,
that "he now agrees it was the right decision to go into
Iraq." The Kerry camp says that interpretation of Mr.
Kerry's words completely distorted the difference between a
vote to authorize war and a decision to commit troops to
the battlefield. 

Mr. Kerry's answer is being second-guessed among his
supporters, some of whom argued that he should have been
more wary of the trap. 

"I wish he had simply said no president in his right mind
would ask the Senate to go to war against a country that
didn't have weapons that pose an imminent threat," said one
of Mr. Kerry's Congressional colleagues and occasional
advisers. 

Senator Biden argued that Mr. Kerry is being "asked to
explain Bush's failure through his own vote. I saw a
headline that said 'Kerry Would Have Gone to War.' That's
bull. He wouldn't have. Not the way Bush did. But that
wasn't the choice at the time - the choice was looking for
a way to hold Saddam accountable." 

Such distinctions don't exactly ring as campaign themes. On
Wednesday, Vice President Cheney did his best to worsen Mr.
Kerry's troubles. He issued a statement noting that Mr.
Kerry "voted for the war" but turned against it "when it
was politically expedient" and now has his aides "saying
that his vote to authorize force wasn't really a vote to go
to war." 

"We need a commander in chief who is steady and steadfast,"
he said. 

Rand Beers, a former National Security Council official in
the Clinton and Bush administrations before he left to help
Mr. Kerry formulate his foreign policy positions, said in
an interview on Wednesday: "We have said we think there are
four elements" in Mr. Bush's approach to the war that are
clearly different from how Mr. Kerry would have handled the
confrontation with Mr. Hussein. 

"Rushing to war is one, doing it without enough allies is
two, doing it without equipping our troops adequately is
three, and doing it without an adequate plan to win the
peace is a fourth," Mr. Beers said. "If you want to add a
fifth, it's going to war without examining the quality of
your intelligence." 

In fact, in interviews since the start of the year, Mr.
Kerry has been relatively consistent in explaining his
position. 

Mr. Bush may be seeking his moment now because polls show
that Mr. Kerry's approach to Iraq is resonating with voters
as strongly as Mr. Bush's - in some cases more strongly.
That may explain why Mr. Kerry is willing to suggest some
dates for the start of troop withdrawals, something he
would not do a month ago. 

Mr. Bush still has an edge, polls show, in the handling of
terrorism. On Wednesday his campaign released a new
television ad in which the president discusses the need for
pre-emptive action then says "I can't imagine the great
agony of a mom or a dad having to make the decision about
which child to pick up first on September the 11th.'' 

It is the third spot the campaign has released in the last
two weeks that refers to terrorism, the first in which Mr.
Bush speaks of it himself. 

Democrats said that the Bush campaign's decision to have
the president refer so much to the Sept. 11 attackswas a
sign of desperation. But Mr. Kerry's team is still trying
to figure out how their man can crystallize a message on
Iraq. "You have to hand it to Bush and Cheney,'' Mr. Biden
said. "When it comes to using the big megaphone of the
presidency, they are the masters.'' 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/12/politics/campaign/12memo.html?ex=1093347251&ei=1&en=aa23e859a39d5a3d


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