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A bruised Bush team does damage repair

Brian Knowlton/IHT
Monday, October 4, 2004

WASHINGTON With major polls showing that Americans see Senator John Kerry as the clear victor over President George W. Bush in their first debate, the president's aides worked Sunday to repair the damage, fiercely attacking the Democratic challenger for saying that any pre-emptive U.S. action against another country should meet a "global test."

Democrats angrily rejected the Republican criticism, saying that Kerry's words were being misrepresented.

The new polls, by Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, gave Kerry a lopsided edge in the debate - as large as 61 percent to 19 percent, according to Newsweek - and they showed the two men in a statistical tie in terms of voters' intentions.

But the same polls, Republican advisers repeatedly noted, indicated that voters felt greater confidence in Bush on fundamental issues like Iraq and terrorism. Although Kerry appeared to score points against Bush on Iraq, a post-debate Gallup poll said that Americans believed, by 54 percent to 43 percent, that the president would better handle Iraq.

It was substance that mattered, the Republicans said, not the debating skills that they conceded to Kerry. "This is an election," said Ed Gillespie, the Republican national chairman, "this isn't a moot court or a college debate club." Bush counselors including Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, assailed the Democratic senator repeatedly over what they called the "Kerry doctrine" - the senator's assertion that pre-emptive U.S. action against another country should meet a "global test" that persuades others of its legitimacy.

"What does that mean?" Rice asked on CNN. "Does that mean the consensus of the international community, of Cuba and countries like that?"

"Can you imagine trying to pass a global test in a Security Council that Syria had sat in?"

The Bush campaign, apparently believing that the issue was the closest thing to a potentially damaging gaffe by Kerry, quickly produced a campaign ad suggesting that a "global test" doctrine under a President Kerry would make any U.S. response to terrorism subject to other countries' whims. Democrats angrily rejected that charge - Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman, called it an "out-and-out lie" - and said Kerry's words were being misrepresented. "He said that if I have to go act preemptively, I will go do it as president of the United States," McAuliffe said on CNN.

McAuliffe, who was harshly critical of Bush's debate performance, said that the president had "shredded the foreign policy of this nation."

Kerry was campaigning Sunday in one of the hardest-fought battleground states, Ohio, before heading to New Hampshire. The president had no events scheduled. The two vice presidential candidates, Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, will hold their sole debate of the campaign on Tuesday. With four weeks of doubtless bruising rhetoric remaining before the Nov. 2 elections, Democratic spokesmen sought Sunday to reinforce Kerry's criticisms of Bush while beginning to shift focus toward domestic issues like the economy and health care, where polls show that the Democratic senator has stronger public support. The next Bush-Kerry debate, on Friday in St. Louis, Missouri, is expected to deal with such matters.

In a major opinion survey conducted since the Thursday debate, the Los Angeles Times found that Kerry had overtaken a 4-point lead held last week by Bush to take a slight edge, by 49 percent to 47 percent. That, however, was within the poll's margin of error of 4 percentage points. The survey questioned 1,368 registered voters.

The Newsweek poll, conducted Thursday through Saturday among 1,013 registered voters, had a similar result. It gave Kerry a 49 percent to 46 percent lead over Bush. That, too, was within the 4-point margin of error.

Bush aides had sought, before the debate, to portray Kerry as a man of unique debating skills, but lacking in core convictions; they continued this line Sunday.

"Senator Kerry has been preparing for this debate for his entire life," Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said on Fox-TV. He added, however: "President Bush still has a lead in the big issues on terrorism, on Iraq, leadership. And these are the issues which the president is going to get re-elected on." But McAuliffe said that Kerry had won the debate not only on style but on substance, and added, sharply, that the president's performance was "almost embarrassing." "He had a smirk on his face, he looked arrogant, he was hunched over the podium," McAuliffe said on CNN. The president, he added, "had trouble putting a sentence together." While both Bartlett and Rice challenged Kerry's reference to passing a "global test" before taking pre-emptive action, the senator's aides, and a new Democratic advertisement assembled over the weekend, emphasized the context of the remark. "No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to pre-empt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America," Kerry said in the debate.

Tad Devine, a senior Kerry strategist speaking on Fox-TV, said Kerry had made it clear "he will not hesitate to use pre-emptive force to defend the nation - made it crystal clear." But Bush's aides pressed the issue. "I don't know how you pass a global test give that, by the way, you couldn't even get consensus on the fact that after Saddam Hussein had defied the international community for all of those years," Rice said.

A CNN interviewer asked Rice about Bush's related comment Friday that "the use of troops to defend America must never be subject to a veto by countries like France." Was it appropriate, he asked, for the president to ridicule a longtime ally?

"There's no ridicule here," she replied. "It's a statement of fact. The French didn't agree." And Bartlett said, "We ought to have American security interests decided by the president of the United States, not by foreign capitals." But the CNN interviewer also asked Rice about a matter on which Bush appeared to have spoken carelessly. Referring to efforts to stop nuclear weapons proliferation, Bush said in the debate, "The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice." But Abdul Qader Khan, considered the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, and whose network secretly shared nuclear secrets with Libya, Iran and North Korea, has been pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf, and none of his associates yet brought to justice, the interviewer said.

Rice said that several people were in custody, and that Khan was "out of the business that he loved most" and "nationally humiliated."

International Herald Tribune

Copyright © 2004 the International Herald Tribune (emphasis added)

http://www.iht.com/articles/541735.htm