Excerpts from the 2000 Cheney-Lieberman VP Debate

From the 2000 VP debate between Cheney and Lieberman. Questions regarding overextending the Military, and about Saddam Hussein. The full and complete transcript of both candidates' answers to the indicated questions:

MODERATOR:
You and Governor Bush charge the Clinton-Gore administration have presided over the deterioration and overextension of America's armed forces. Should U.S. military personnel be deployed as warriors or peacekeepers?

CHENEY: My preference is to deploy them as warriors. There may be occasion when it's appropriate to use them in a peacekeeping role, but I think the role ought to be limited, a time limit on it. The reason we have a military is to be able to fight and win wars. And to maintain with sufficient strength so that would-be adversaries are deterred from ever launching a war in the first place. I think that the administration has, in fact, in this area failed in a major responsibility. We've seen a reduction in our forces far beyond anything that was justified by the end of the Cold War. At the same time we've seen a rapid expansion of our commitments around the world as troops have been sent hither and yon. There was testimony before the Joint Chiefs of Staff before the Armed Services Committee that pointed out a lot of these problems. General Mike Ryan of the Air Force with 40% fewer aircraft, he's now undertaking three times as many deployments on a regular basis as he had to previously. We're overcommitted and underresourced. This has had some other unfortunate effects. I saw a letter the other day from a young captain stationed in Fort Bragg, a graduate of West Point in '95 getting ready to get out of the service because he's only allowed to train with his troops when fuel is available for the vehicles and only allowed to fire their weapons twice a year. He's concerned if he had to ever go into combat there would be lives lost. It's a legitimate concern, the fact the U.S. military is worse off today than it was eight years ago. It's a high priority for myself and Governor Bush to rebuild the U.S. military and to give them good leadership and build up the forces.

MODERATOR: You're shaking your head in disagreement.

LIEBERMAN: I want to assure the American people that the American military is the best-trained, best-equipped, most powerful force in the world. And that Al Gore and I will do whatever it takes to keep them that way. It's not right, and it's not good for our military, to run them down essentially in the midst of a partisan political debate. The fact is that you've got to judge the military by what the military leaders say. Secretary Bill Cohen and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will both tell you the American military is ready to meet any threat we may face in the world today. The fact is, judging by its results from Desert Storm to the Balkans, Bosnia and Kosovo, to the operations that are still being conducted to keep Saddam Hussein in a box in Iraq, the American military has performed brilliantly. This administration has turned around the drop in spending that began in the mid-'80's and right through the Bush-Cheney administration, but now it's stopped. We passed the largest pay increase in a generation for our military. And the interesting fact here, in spite of the rhetoric that my opponent has just spoken, the reality is if you look at our projected budgets for the next ten years, Al Gore and I actually commit twice as much, $100 billion in additional funding for our military than Governor Bush does. And their budget allows nothing additional for acquisition of new weapons systems. That's the same thing that the chiefs of the services will not be happy about. They need the new equipment, the new systems that Al Gore and I are committed to giving them.

CHENEY: This is a special interest of mine. I would like a chance to elaborate further, if I might. The facts are dramatically different. I'm not attacking the military, Joe. I have enormous regard for the men and women of the U.S. military. I had the privilege of working with them while I was the Secretary of Defense. No one has a higher regard than I do for them. It's irresponsible to suggest we shouldn't have that debate, that we should ignore what is a major, major concern. If you have friends and relatives serving in the U.S. military, you know there's a problem. If you look at the data that's available, 40% of our Army helicopters are not combat ready. The combat readiness level in the Air Force dropped from 85% to 65%. Significant problems of retention. The important thing for us to remember is that we're a democracy and we're defended by volunteers. Everybody out there tonight wearing the uniform standing on guard to protect the United States is there because they volunteered to put on a uniform. When we don't give them the spare parts they need, when we don't give our pilots the flying hours they need, when we don't give them the kind of leadership that spells out what their mission is and let's them know why they're putting their lives at risk, then we undermine that morale. That's an extraordinarily valuable trust. There is no more important responsibility for a President of the United States than his role as Commander in Chief. When he decides when to send our young men and women to war. When we send them without the right kind of training, when we send them poorly equipped or with equipment that's old and broken down, we put their lives at risk. We will suffer more casualties in the next conflict if we don't look to those basic problems now. This administration has a bad track record in this regard, and it's available for anybody who wants to look at the record and wants to talk to our men and women in uniform, and wants to spend time with the members of the Joint Chiefs, wants to look at readiness levels and other -- other indicators. Final point, the issue of procurement is very important because we're running now off the buildup of the investment we made during the Reagan years. As that equipment gets old, it has to be replaced. We've taken money out of the procurement budget to support other ventures. We have not been investing in the future of the U.S. military.

LIEBERMAN: It's important to respond to this. Yes, of course it's an important debate to have as part of this campaign, but I don't want either the military to feel uneasy or the American people to feel insecure. What I'm saying now I'm basing on serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee talking to exactly the people Dick Cheney has mentioned, the Secretary of Defense, the Chiefs of Staff. I've visited our fighting forces around the world. I'm telling you that we are ready to meet any contingency that might arise. The good news here and the interesting news is that we have met our recruitment targets in each of the services this year. In fact, in the areas where our opponents have said we are overextended, such as the Balkans, the soldiers there have a higher rate of re-enlistment than anywhere else in the service because they feel a sense of purpose, a sense of mission. In fact, this administration has begun to transform the American military to take it away from being a Cold War force to prepare it to meet the threats of the new generation of tomorrow, of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, cyber warfare. The fact is that Governor Bush recommended in his major policy statement on the military earlier this year that we skip the next generation of military equipment; helicopters, submarines, tactical air fighters, all the rest. That would really cripple our readiness. Exactly the readiness that Dick Cheney is talking about. Al Gore and I are committed to continuing this acquisition program, transforming the military. There's fewer people in uniform today, but person-to-person, person-by-person, unit-by-unit, this is the most powerful and effective military, not only in the world today, but in the history of the world. And again, Al Gore and I will do whatever is necessary to keep it that way.

MODERATOR: If Iraq's president Saddam Hussein were found to be developing weapons of mass destruction, Governor Bush has said he would, quote, "Take him out." Would you agree with such a deadly policy?

CHENEY: We might have no other choice. We'll have to see if that happens. The thing about Iraq, of course, was at the end of the war we had pretty well decimated their military. We had put them back in the box, so to speak. We had a strong international coalition raid against them, effective economic sanctions, and an inspection regime was in place under the U.N. and it was able to do a good job of stripping out the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction, the work he had been doing that had not been destroyed during the war in biological and chemical agents, as well as a nuclear program. Unfortunately now we find ourselves in a situation where that started to fray on us, where the coalition now no longer is tied tightly together. Recently the United Arab Emirates have reopened diplomatic relations with Baghdad. The Russians and French are flying commercial airliners back into Baghdad and thumbing their nose at the international sanctions regime. We're in a situation today where our posture with Iraq is weaker than it was at the end of the war. It's unfortunate. I also think it's unfortunate we find ourselves in a position where we don't know for sure what might be transpiring inside Iraq. I certainly hope he's not regenerating that kind of capability, but if he were, if in fact Saddam Hussein were taking steps to try to rebuild nuclear capability or weapons of mass destruction, you would have to give very serious consideration to military action to -- to stop that activity. I don't think you can afford to have a man like Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

MODERATOR: Senator.

LIEBERMAN: It would, of course, be a very serious situation if we had evidence, credible evidence, that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. I must say, I don't think a political campaign is the occasion to declare exactly what we would do in that case. I think that's a matter of such critical national security importance that it ought to be left to the Commander in Chief, leaders of the military, Secretary of State to make that kind of decision without the heat of a political campaign. The fact is that we will not enjoy real stability in the Middle East until Saddam Hussein is gone. The Gulf War was a great victory. And incidentally, Al Gore and I were two of the ten Democrats in the Senate who crossed party lines to support President Bush and Secretary Cheney in that war. We're proud we did that. The war did not end with a total victory. Saddam Hussein remained there. As a result, we have had almost ten years now of instability. We have continued to operate almost all of this time military action to enforce a no-fly zone. We have been struggling with Saddam about the inspectors. We're doing everything we can to get the inspectors back in there. But in the end there's not going to be peace until he goes. And that's why I was proud to co-sponsor the Iraq Liberation Act with Senator Trent Lott where I have kept in touch with the Iraqi opposition, broad base. We met with them earlier this year. We are supporting them in their efforts and will continue to support them until the Iraqi people rise up and do what the people of Serbia have done in the last few days, get rid of a despot. We'll welcome you back into the family of nations where you belong.

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All Polls Show Tremendous Surge for Kerry

From the Washington Post

"Debates don't always shake up a presidential race, but this one did -- and there are two more, plus a vice presidential debate yet to come. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, Bush's 49-43 percent lead in a three-way race has been erased, with Kerry now ahead 47-45 percent.

"Electoral politics is a game of comparison, and the first appearance of the two men side by side -- one having a good night, the other a bad one -- did wonders for Kerry's image. His 'favorable/unfavorable' rating, last month a tepid 48-44 percent, rose to 52-40 (while Bush's dropped from 52-44 to 49-46). A whopping 63 million voters watched the Miami debate, and Kerry was scored the winner by 61 percent of them; only 19 percent thought Bush had won. Among viewers, Kerry overwhelmingly was regarded as the better informed and more self-assured. More ominously for Bush, Kerry was seen as the stronger leader onstage (47-44 percent) -- and even as the more likable guy (47-41 percent). Bush aides privately had to admit that it was a race again, understating the obvious."

USA Today calls it a tie:

"The race between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry has tightened dramatically since their first debate Thursday night, with the race now too close to call, according to the latest USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll. The poll shows Bush and Kerry tied at 49% each among likely voters."

The Los Angeles Times has the race tightening as well:

"Sen. John F. Kerry improved his image with voters who watched his debate with President Bush last week, but didn't significantly shift their choice in the presidential race, a Times poll of debate viewers has found.

"Although the debate did not diminish impressions of Bush on most questions, it did restore some of the luster Kerry had lost amid relentless Republican pounding since his party's convention in July, the poll found.

"The key question will be whether those gains will help Kerry peel away voters from Bush in the days ahead.

"Of those who watched Thursday's debate, more than three times as many called Kerry the winner as picked Bush, the poll found. The Democratic nominee also made modest gains with viewers on questions relating to national security and leadership. And the portion of debate viewers with favorable perceptions of Kerry increased from 52% before to 57% after.

"Kerry's most dramatic advance in the survey came in convincing more voters that he had a thorough agenda for the next four years. Asked which candidate had the more detailed plan for the policies he would pursue if elected, viewers gave Bush a 9-percentage-point edge before the encounter; afterward, they preferred Kerry by 4 points."

The Chicago Tribune sees "a campaign that has gained a renewed aura of competitiveness since the two debated last week on television.

"After the first, widely watched Bush-Kerry debate -- and heading into the second in St. Louis on Friday -- observers say the opener gave Kerry a needed boost in a contest in which Bush had enjoyed a late-summer advantage."

When it comes to the mess in Iraq, says Slate's William Saletan, Bush "offers himself -- and you -- a way out. Ignore the bad news, he says. Ignore the evidence that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs had deteriorated. Ignore the evidence that Saddam had no operational relationship with al-Qaida. Ignore the rising casualties. Ignore the hollowness and disintegration of the American-led 'coalition.' If these reports are true, as Kerry suggests, then it was all a mistake. How can we ask our troops to die for a mistake? We can't. Therefore, these reports must be rejected. They must be judged not by evidence, but by their offensiveness to the assumptions we embraced when we went to war.

"In Thursday's debate, moderator Jim Lehrer asked Bush, 'Has the war in Iraq been worth the cost of American lives -- 1,052 as of today?' Bush looked down. He recalled a woman whose husband had died in Iraq. 'I told her after we prayed and teared up and laughed some that I thought her husband's sacrifice was noble and worthy,' the president said. 'Was it worth it? Every life is precious. That's what distinguishes us from the enemy. . . . We can look back and say we did our duty.'

"That's how Bush judges the war's worth: not by costs and benefits, but by character. It shows our nobility. It shows we did our duty. He used the word 'duty' seven times. Kerry never used that word, except to refer to 'active duty' troops. Eleven times, Bush called the mess in Iraq 'hard work.' To recognize error would be to abandon that work and shirk our duty. Again and again, he framed the acceptance of bad news as moral failure. Will. Resolute. Steadfast. Uncertainty. Weakness. Supporting our troops."

Salon's Joe Conason says it's too soon for the Kerry team to break out the Champagne: "Stunned by George W. Bush's lackluster and peevish performance, his media claque had no time to recover to promote an effective line of propaganda on his behalf. On television and the Internet, the president's supporters were unable to conceal their dismay, instantly reinforced by the networks' polling verdicts. By Friday morning, conservative spin had devolved into excuses about his fatigue from comforting Florida hurricane victims -- and the official Republican and Bush Web sites weren't even claiming a victory for their candidate . . .

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Bush and Reality

The New York Times
October 4, 2004

Bush and Reality
By BOB HERBERT

For 90 minutes, at least, democracy seemed to be working. The two men in dark suits took their places at the lecterns. The analysts, the handlers, the spinmeisters and the hangers-on had been cleared out of the way. With no commercial interruptions, more than 60 million Americans got a rare, unedited, close-up look at the candidates in one of the most important presidential elections in the nation's history.

John Kerry got the better of President Bush in last Thursday's debate in Coral Gables, Fla. The president seemed listless, defensive and not particularly well prepared. His facial expressions and body language at times were odd. Some of his strongest supporters were dismayed by his performance, and polls are showing they had reason to be concerned.

There undoubtedly were many reasons for Mr. Bush's lackluster effort. But I think there was one factor, above all, that undermined the president in last week's debate, and will continue to plague him throughout the campaign. And that was his problematic relationship with reality.

Mr. Bush is a man who will frequently tell you - and may even believe - that up is down, or square is round, when logic and all the available evidence say otherwise. During the debate, this was most clearly displayed when, in response to a question about the war in Iraq, Mr. Bush told the moderator, Jim Lehrer, "The enemy attacked us, Jim, and I have a solemn duty to protect the American people, to do everything I can to protect us."

Moments later Senator Kerry clarified, for the audience and the president, just who had attacked the United States. "Saddam Hussein didn't attack us," said Mr. Kerry. "Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaeda attacked us."

Given a chance to respond, Mr. Bush flashed an unappreciative look at Senator Kerry and said, "Of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us - I know that."

With no weapons of mass destruction to exhibit, and no link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, Mr. Bush has nevertheless tried to portray the war in Iraq as not only the right thing to do but as largely successful. The increasing violence and chaos suggest otherwise. Even as the presidential debate was being conducted, details were coming in about car bombings earlier in the day in Baghdad that killed dozens of Iraqis, including at least 34 children.

The children were not in school because the turmoil had prevented the opening of schools.

The political problem for Mr. Bush is that while he is offering a rosy picture of events in Iraq - perhaps because he believes it, or because he wants to bolster American morale - voters are increasingly seeing the bitter, tragic reality of those events. A president can stay out of step with reality only so long. Eventually there's a political price to pay. Lyndon Johnson's deceit with regard to Vietnam, for example, has never been forgiven.

The president likes to tell us that "freedom is winning" in Iraq, that democracy is on the march. But Americans are coming to realize that Iraq is, in fact, a country in agony, beset by bombings, firefights, kidnappings, beheadings and myriad other forms of mayhem. The president may think that freedom is winning, but television viewers in the U.S. could see images over the weekend of distraught Iraqis pulling the bodies of small children from smoking rubble - a tragic but perfect metaphor for a policy in ruins.

Mr. Bush got his big bounce in the public opinion polls from the Swift boat nonsense and the mocking, nonstop criticism of Senator Kerry at the Republican National Convention. Those were distractions from the real world. But reality cannot be kept at bay indefinitely. Readers of The Washington Post got a disturbing dose of it yesterday from a front-page article about the strain being put on the overloaded systems of veterans' disability benefits and health care by the thousands of American troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical injuries and mental health problems.

The article noted that "President Bush's budget for 2005 calls for cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs staff that handles benefits claims."

A staff sergeant who was paralyzed in a mortar attack near Baghdad was quoted as saying: "I love the military; that was my life. But I don't believe they're taking care of me now."

The real world is President Bush's Achilles' heel. He can't keep his distance from it forever.

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Influx of Wounded Strains VA

washingtonpost.com

Influx of Wounded Strains VA
Claims Backlog Besets Returning U.S. Troops

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 3, 2004; Page A01

Thousands of U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical injuries and mental health problems are encountering a benefits system that is already overburdened, and officials and veterans' groups are concerned that the challenge could grow as the nation remains at war.

The disability benefits and health care systems that provide services for about 5 million American veterans have been overloaded for decades and have a current backlog of more than 300,000 claims. And because they were mobilized to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly 150,000 National Guard and reservist veterans had become eligible for health care and benefits as of Aug. 1. That number is rising.

At the same time, President Bush's budget for 2005 calls for cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs staff that handles benefits claims, and some veterans report long waits for benefits and confusing claims decisions.

"I love the military; that was my life. But I don't believe they're taking care of me now," said Staff Sgt. Gene Westbrook, 35, of Lawton, Okla. Paralyzed in a mortar attack near Baghdad in April, he has received no disability benefits because his paperwork is missing. He is supporting his wife and three children on his regular military pay of $2,800 a month as he awaits a ruling on whether he will receive $6,500 a month from the VA for his disability.

Through the end of April, the most recent accounting the VA could provide, a total of 166,334 veterans of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan had separated from military service, and 26,633 -- 16 percent -- had filed benefits claims with the VA for service-connected disabilities. Less than two-thirds of those claims had been processed, leaving more than 9,750 recent veterans waiting.

Officials expect those numbers to increase as the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan continues.

"I think we're doing okay now, but I am worried," VA Secretary Anthony J. Principi said in a recent interview. "It is something you have to be concerned about. We don't have a good handle on the extent to which the demand for care and benefits will be a year or five years from now."

Principi acknowledged that one of the most challenging elements of providing for recently returned veterans is the disconnect between the Defense Department and the VA. His department has been working to streamline the process, he said, placing VA staff members at 136 bases across the country and at military medical centers.

But people such as Westbrook still fall into a no-man's land.

Westbrook was deployed to Iraq in January as a drill sergeant, sent to train Iraqi army recruits. While on duty April 28 south of Sadr City in Baghdad, he was hit by a mortar shell, and the shrapnel severed his spine. He is now paralyzed from the chest down, has limited movement in his right arm, and battles constant infections. His wife takes care of him full time.

Though Westbrook praises the way the Army has treated him since his injury, including providing excellent medical care, he has struggled to make it on his regular pay since he returned July 14. "They're supposed to expedite the process, and they have not done that," he said, adding that officers in his Army unit have been trying in vain to help. Charities have been set up in his honor to help defray costs.

"It's very draining, because I don't know what to do, and my family is asking when we'll get the money," he said. "It's the hardest part about this whole thing."

What injured or ill veterans are finding when they return from overseas is a complex set of government processes for reviewing whether they will receive financial help. They have to navigate two of the largest U.S. government bureaucracies in the VA and the Pentagon, and multiple medical review boards assess the extent of their injuries.

Even with the current backlog and the prospect of staffing cuts, VA officials are trying to increase the department's visibility, reaching out to new veterans to make sure they are aware of the services they can receive and urging them to apply.

Principi said he recently sent letters to 178,000 veterans explaining the available benefits. He said the department is doing its best to keep wait times down by giving recent veterans higher priority, aiming for benefit claims that are filled within 100 days. Currently, the VA takes about 160 days per claim, and 60,000 to 70,000 new claims come in each month.

There is also a more concerted effort to identify veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that experts estimate affects about 15 percent of veterans. Principi said he believes mental health concerns could become a dominant issue for the VA as insurgent warfare places new pressures on U.S. troops and as American society places more emphasis on mental health.

A Government Accountability Office report issued Sept. 20 concluded that the VA does not have enough information to determine whether it can handle a rush of PTSD cases.

"The system is already strained, and it's going to get strained even worse," said David Autry, a spokesman for Disabled American Veterans. "It's not a rosy picture at all, and they can't possibly hope to say they're going to provide timely benefits to the new folks if they can't provide timely care to the people already in the system."

For veterans, the VA's system for evaluating disability claims can be the most frustrating element of the process. Through the end of August, the agency had about 330,000 cases waiting to get a "rating," or a percentage figure approved by an evaluation board that decides how much a disabled veteran will receive monthly from the VA.

The ratings system uses a complex guide to calculate, for example, how disabling it is to lose a foot or to be blinded in one eye. Soldiers are rated from zero percent to 100 percent disabled, and compensation varies from nothing to thousands of dollars each month. Those rated 100 percent disabled are eligible to receive indefinite monthly payments aimed at allowing them to live without working.

Board decisions can take months as they weigh the severity of injuries and make sure they were suffered while the veteran was in the service. Appeals of such decisions can take years, and board decisions can be reevaluated.

"Sometimes it takes six months to a year to get your claim decided, sometimes longer," said Cathy Wiblemo, deputy director for health care at the American Legion. "We never think it's enough," Wiblemo said, referring to the disability payments. "It's hard to say that any amount of money can compensate for what these people have lost in defending our country."

Robert Acosta, 21, of Tustin, Calif., said he relies on his disability checks of $2,332 a month to survive, but the VA is now reevaluating his case. Acosta's right hand was blown off and his left leg was shattered when he was ambushed at the gate to Baghdad International Airport on July 13, 2003. The passenger in a Humvee, he grabbed a grenade that had been lobbed through the window, saving his driver.

Acosta said he cannot work because his prosthetic right hand has been giving him trouble, his left leg has not returned to normal and he suffers from nightmares. Initially, he was rated 70 percent disabled -- the medical board did not want to account for his leg injury, his PTSD claims and his hearing loss. After accepting those claims and rating him 100 percent disabled, the VA is questioning them again, asking Acosta to prove that some of his disabilities are service-related.

"They said there was no proof of it," Acosta said, referring to his PTSD claim. It took two months after he left the service for him to get his first disability payment, he said, and he spent his savings in the meantime. "I'm going to therapy every week. I'm working on it. I have bad dreams, I don't sleep at night and I get really jumpy. I don't know what they want me to do."

Rep. Lane Evans (Ill.), ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, said the VA is woefully underfunded and unprepared. The current budget for fiscal 2005, which is still pending in Congress even though the fiscal year ended on Thursday, calls for cutting more than 500 claims processors and does not meet the VA's basic funding requests.

"The VA is not ready for an influx of new veterans from the ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq," Evans said.

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More Troubles for Diebold

The New York Times
October 4, 2004

More Troubles for Diebold

Diebold, the much-criticized electronic voting machine company, got another black eye last week. A federal court in California ruled that it had violated federal law when it falsely charged two students with violating its copyrights by posting critical information about its voting machines on the Internet. The case raises more questions about Diebold's honesty and its commitment to transparency.

The story began early last year when someone - it is unclear who - posted internal Diebold e-mail messages on the Internet that discussed flaws in the company's electronic voting machines. Two students from Swarthmore College then posted those messages on various Web sites. Diebold sent out a flurry of cease-and-desist letters claiming that the postings violated its copyrights. The students sued, charging that Diebold knowingly misrepresented its rights under copyright law.

The United States District Court for the Northern District of California agreed. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is illegal to send a cease-and-desist letter while knowing that the claim of copyright infringement is false. The court held that Diebold knew that its e-mail messages "discussing possible technical problems" with its voting machines were not copyrighted, but went ahead anyway.

This is the second recent setback to Diebold's already troubled reputation. Last month, California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, joined a false-claims suit against Diebold charging it with lying to the state about the security of its voting systems. Now, a federal court has ruled that Diebold made knowing misrepresentations to get damaging information about its machines' security off the Internet.

Diebold has a great deal to do to make its work transparent and its company trustworthy if it wants to remain in the elections business.

Making Votes Count: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/makingvotescount.

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In the Senate, Raising a (Quiet) Republican Voice Against the Administration

The New York Times
October 4, 2004

In the Senate, Raising a (Quiet) Republican Voice Against the Administration
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 - One day after the Supreme Court sealed the 2000 election for George W. Bush, his running mate, Dick Cheney, went to the Capitol for a private lunch with five moderate Republican senators. The agenda he laid out that day in December 2000 stunned Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, sending Mr. Chafee on a painful journey of political conscience that, he said in an interview last week, has culminated with his decision not to vote for Mr. Bush in November.

"I literally was close to falling off my chair," Mr. Chafee said, recounting the vice president's proposals for steep tax cuts, missile defense programs and abandoning the Kyoto environmental accords. "It was no room for discussion. I said, 'Well, you're going to need us; it's a 50-50 Senate, you're going to need us moderates.' He said, 'Well, we need everybody.' ''

For Mr. Chafee, who was a prep school buddy of the president's brother Jeb and whose father, the late Senator John Chafee, was close to the first President Bush, that day was the beginning of an estrangement with the president, whom he had worked to elect. In the months since, he has opposed Mr. Bush on everything from tax cuts to gay marriage and the war in Iraq. Now, this life-long Republican has concluded that he cannot cast his ballot for the leader of his party.

"I'll vote Republican," he said, explaining that he would choose a write-in candidate, perhaps George Bush the elder, as a symbolic act of protest. Asked if he wanted Senator John Kerry to be president, Mr. Chafee shook his head sadly, as if to say he could not entertain the question. "I've been disloyal enough," he said.

On Capitol Hill, some regard Mr. Chafee, a soft-spoken, gentle man who once shoed horses for a living, as the Republican counterpart to Senator Zell Miller, the fiery Georgia Democrat who is campaigning for Mr. Bush. But the truth is more complex. While Mr. Miller is retiring, Mr. Chafee is planning to run again in 2006. His misgivings about his party's conservative tilt have thrust him into a powerful position in Washington, where Republicans' memories are still fresh of how another moderate, Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont, defected in 2001 and became an independent, temporarily giving Democrats control of the Senate.

Mr. Chafee insists he has no intention of defecting. But it is no secret that Democrats would welcome him, and already, Mr. Jeffords is offering him counsel.

"I understand the feelings that he has," Mr. Jeffords said. "I'm going to be talking to him, so I'm not going to say any more. I probably shouldn't have even told you that."

At 51, Mr. Chafee, who was appointed to the Senate after his father's death in 1999 and then won handily in an election the following year, is a curious figure in Washington. Pensive and intellectual, he hardly appears suited for the bare-knuckle world of politics and seems to exist on the periphery of things, ambling about the Capitol like an absent-minded professor making a study of its power-hungry inhabitants.

Some call him quirky; others think of him as the accidental senator, a political version of the loner protagonist in the Anne Tyler novel "The Accidental Tourist."

"I don't think he marches to the same drummer as other politicians," said M. Charles Bakst, a political columnist for The Providence Journal who has followed Rhode Island politics since the 1960's, when John Chafee was governor. "When they march, one of their big drums is party, and I don't think he cares very much what this party says or what another party says."

But Mr. Chafee says he does care. In heavily Democratic Rhode Island, he has been a Republican since birth; his parents named him Lincoln after the first Republican president. He says he is waiting for the moderate wing of the party to rise again; in the meantime, he was asked if he went to bed at night wondering how he could remain a Republican.

"Yes," he said, "I don't deny that."

Born into wealth and privilege, Mr. Chafee never envisioned following his father into politics. Instead, after graduating from Brown University in 1975, he took his grandfather's advice to "get a trade." Having grown up around horses, he settled on a blacksmith school in Bozeman, Mont., and spent seven years working at harness race tracks.

He says it was great training for politics. "In order to shoe six, seven, eight horses a day, you've got to have a lot of grit," Mr. Chafee said. "It's hard work. They're not all going to stand there perfectly." And besides, he added, "to get along with horses, you've got to be flexible."

Mr. Bakst, though, said Mr. Chafee was anything but flexible: "He's very stubborn. He doesn't buckle. Whatever he's going to do, he does it, and he seems impervious to pressures, deals, enticements."

By 1985, having returned to Rhode Island, Mr. Chafee was elected as a delegate to the state's constitutional convention. He loved watching the power brokers at work, even if he was not one of them. By 1992, he was mayor of Warwick. He was already thinking of running for the Senate when his father, who was planning to retire, died.

That year, former President George Bush came to Rhode Island and raised $300,000 for Mr. Chafee, an unheard of sum for a Republican in tiny Rhode Island. Now Mr. Chafee fears he has bitten the hand that fed him. "I don't want to get him angry," he said of the elder Bush. "I'm in enough trouble."

Yet the Rhode Island senator said he was angry himself- at what he regards as broken campaign promises by the current occupant of the White House. He said Mr. Bush's promise to be "a uniter, not a divider" resonated with him, as did Mr. Bush's remark in a 2000 debate that the United States would have to be humble, not arrogant, to be respected in the world.

"As soon as victory was achieved came people with a completely different agenda than being humble," he said. Asked if he regretted supporting the president, he said, "I regret that some of the answers to important questions weren't more forthright and that there wasn't more adherence to campaign rhetoric."

So when Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign chairman, called Mr. Chafee last spring to see if he would serve as co-chairman of the president's re-election effort in Rhode Island, the senator said he just let the matter pass. "I didn't give him a firm no," he said, ''and as time went by, it kind of went away."

In the Capitol, Republicans are trying to keep their disenchantment quiet. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi - who suffered from Mr. Chafee's independence when the Rhode Island senator called for him to step down as majority leader over racially charged remarks - laughed at the mention of Mr. Chafee's name. Pressed for comment, Mr. Lott said tartly, "You have my response.''

In Rhode Island, a recent poll showed Mr. Chafee with a 56 percent approval rating. But the senator is well aware that his critique of the president, coupled with his repeated votes against tax cuts, could spell political trouble for him from the right, of the sort faced by Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania senator who beat back a tough primary challenge this year. Mr. Chafee said he watched the Specter race closely, knowing that the Club for Growth, an antitax group, financed Mr. Specter's challenger.

"Steven Moore, Club for Growth, has said we will not go after Link Chafee," he said. But in an interview, Mr. Moore said the club "would consider" a challenge. He described Mr. Chafee, who, citing concerns about the deficit, was one of just three senators to vote against extending the middle-class tax cuts, as "to the left of Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton."

But Grover Norquist, a leading conservative and president of Americans for Tax Reform, said it would be ludicrous to challenge Mr. Chafee. "A Republican from Rhode Island is a gift from the gods," Mr. Norquist said, "and is not to be looked at askance."

That seems to be the prevailing sentiment among Republicans in the Senate, who are treating the gentleman from Rhode Island gingerly these days. At a recent lunch with colleagues, Mr. Chafee said, he offered them an apology and found himself comforted by a conservative, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.

"I said, 'I'm a pro-choice, antiwar, antideficit Republican,' " he recalled. "And Judd Gregg said, 'The key word there is: Republican.' ''

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Rice Defends Going to War Despite Dispute About Iraqi Weapons

The New York Times
October 4, 2004

INTELLIGENCE EVIDENCE
Rice Defends Going to War Despite Dispute About Iraqi Weapons
By JEFF GERTH

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 - Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, on Sunday defended the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein even while intelligence analysts disputed an important piece of evidence behind a rationale for the war, namely, that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program.

"Whatever the case there," Ms. Rice said on the ABC News program "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, referring to a debate in 2002 over whether Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes were related to nuclear weapons, "I stand by the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein and remove this threat to American security."

Ms. Rice also said she was aware of the dispute in September 2002, when she said in a television interview that the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." But, she said Sunday, it was not until after that television appearance that she learned "the nature of the dispute."

The Central Intelligence Agency said it believed that the tubes were intended for centrifuges used to enrich uranium, an important step in building a bomb. But the Energy Department said it believed that the tubes were more likely intended for rockets.

The difference is important: it would be more troubling if Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program than if it was acquiring small artillery rockets. The "principal part" of the C.I.A.'s conclusion in 2002 that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program was its efforts to acquire tubes, a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee found this summer.

Ms. Rice was reacting to an article in The New York Times on Sunday about the debate. The article said she had been aware before her remarks in 2002 that government experts differed over whether the tubes were intended for nuclear weapons but that she knew that the nuclear theory was strongly backed at the highest level of the intelligence agencies. The article also said experts on her staff, though not Ms. Rice herself, had been told months earlier that Energy Department scientists believed that the tubes were more likely for rockets.

On Sunday, Ms. Rice said of the tubes, "People are still debating this." The Iraq Survey Group, which searched for illicit weapons after Mr. Hussein's fall, told the C.I.A. and Congress that it had found no indications that the tubes were for nuclear weapon development or that Iraq had resumed its weapons program. C.I.A. officials say they still view the tubes as an open question.

By October 2002, intelligence agencies as a whole, including the Energy Department though not the State Department's intelligence arm, agreed that Iraq was resuming its nuclear arms program. That consensus was contained in a then-classified National Intelligence Estimate.

Ms. Rice said the 2002 estimate of nuclear renewal was an assessment "that cannot be ignored." So, she said "a policy maker cannot afford to be wrong on the short side, underestimating the ability of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein."

Members of Ms. Rice's staff told intelligence officials in January 2003 that the case that Iraq had revived its nuclear ambitions "was weak," according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Ms. Rice also defended her 2002 remarks and the decision to go to war on NBC's "Weekend Today" and CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." In both interviews, Ms. Rice said the "intelligence community as a whole" had backed the theory that the tubes were nuclear related.

On CNN, she said George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence at the time, and "the intelligence community as a whole believed that these were for centrifuge parts."

The October 2002 intelligence estimate said "most agencies" had made an assessment that the attempt to acquire tubes was "compelling evidence" of a nuclear weapons effort. But the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that there was an even split during the Sept. 25, 2002, meeting meant to come up with a coordinated estimate. The Senate report said the Defense Intelligence Agency sided with the C.I.A., while the State Department's intelligence arm backed the Energy Department's judgment that the tubes were probably not nuclear related.

The Senate panel, in a unanimous report and after a one-year inquiry, said the State and Energy departments were correct in 2002.

Ms. Rice's spokesman, Sean McCormack, said her remarks on CNN and ABC resulted from conversations with Mr. Tenet, who is now retired. He said in a statement that he shared "alternate views" about the tubes with the administration after he learned of the debate in September 2002.

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Cheney still lying about link between Hussein and bin Laden

Boston.com
The Boston Globe
Cheney presses Hussein-Qaeda link
Despite questions, his claims persist

By James Gerstenzang, Los Angeles Times | October 3, 2004

WARRENTON, Mo. -- The phrases vary. Some days, Vice President Dick Cheney says Saddam Hussein had "long-established" ties to Al Qaeda. Other days, he says the former Iraqi dictator "had a relationship" with the terrorist group.

But the underlying message remains unchanged -- Cheney plants the idea that Hussein was allied with the group responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Although the extent of any relationship between Al Qaeda and Hussein has been widely disputed, Cheney proceeds with his contention with nary a nod toward such questions.

In doing so, he draws a line from the war in Iraq, on which public opinion is divided, to the larger war on terrorism, for which President Bush wins greater support.

"When voters look at Iraq as a stand-alone issue . . . it is a horrible situation for the president," said Charles Cook, a nonpartisan political analyst in Washington. "But when it is woven into the fabric of a global war on terrorism, people are more accepting of it as the price we have to pay."

Cheney slips his reference to Hussein and Al Qaeda into his litany of Hussein's offenses: the regime's production and use of chemical weapons against enemies; support for the families of suicide bombers; and Iraq's defiance of various United Nations resolutions.

Each has largely been established and is subject of little debate, with the exception of the tie to Al Qaeda.

The bipartisan commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks said it had found no evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between Hussein and the terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden. Its staff has said it had found "no credible evidence" that Iraq had cooperated with Al Qaeda in targeting the United States.

To back up Cheney's contention of a "relationship" between Al Qaeda and Hussein, the vice president's aides point to the presence in pre-invasion Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant thought to be behind much of the insurgency in postwar Iraq. But although Zarqawi is widely thought to have had ties to bin Laden's group -- Cheney calls him "a senior Al Qaeda associate" -- the extent of his links to Hussein, if any, has never been established.

Cheney's staff notes that former CIA director George J. Tenet testified in Congress about a relationship between Hussein and Al Qaeda. And, his aides say, Cheney has been careful to avoid stating that Hussein was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. Still, Cheney's references to a "relationship" between Al Qaeda and Hussein may obscure that distinction for many voters.

Surveys of Americans consistently have found large numbers who say Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, despite repeated declarations by a variety of investigators to the contrary. As recently as June, a Gallup Poll indicated that 44 percent of those surveyed said Hussein was personally tied to the terrorist strikes; 51 percent said he was not.

A senior Republican who served in top White House positions during the Ford and Reagan administrations cited the Gallup findings in discussing Cheney's campaign comments on Al Qaeda and Hussein. Cheney, the senior Republican said, is "talking about something that is credible with the American people, despite the intelligence. And the intelligence community is so under attack that he can say whatever he wants."

"What he gets out of it is making the case even stronger for why we went into Iraq, and it fits a pattern of what the American people want to believe," said the Republican, who requested anonymity because his comments could be interpreted as being critical of the vice president, with whom he has worked in the past.

Many Democrats are infuriated by what they view as an effort by Cheney to exaggerate the link between Al Qaeda and Hussein.

"This is one of his major issues. He tries to blur the lines between Al Qaeda and 9/11, and Saddam Hussein and Iraq," said Michael B. Feldman, a senior aide four years ago to Al Gore who is not active in this year's presidential race.

"From the very beginning of the effort to sell the [Iraq] war, this has been Cheney's role. He's also . . . at odds with the facts. . . . That doesn't stop him. I don't think it's an accident. I don't think it's a slip of the tongue."

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Fox News Posts Bogus Kerry Story; Apologizes

The New York Times
October 3, 2004

Fabricated Kerry Posting Leads to Apology from Fox News
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 - Plenty of news media analysts thought Senator John Kerry looked good at Thursday night's presidential debate, but Fox News went a step further, posting a made-up news article on its Web site that quoted Mr. Kerry as gloating about his fine manicure and his "metrosexual" appearance.

Fox News quickly retracted the article, saying in an editor's note on its Web site that the article "was written in jest and should not have been posted or broadcast.'' It said, "We regret the error, which occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not malice."

The article, posted on Friday on foxnews.com, was written by Carl Cameron, the chief political correspondent for Fox News, and included several bogus quotes from Mr. Kerry, supposedly assessing his performance in the debate.

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!" the article quoted Mr. Kerry, the Democratic candidate, as telling his supporters in Florida after the event.

"Women should like me! I do manicures," the story also quoted him as saying. It also had Mr. Kerry contrasting himself with President Bush: "I'm metrosexual - he's a cowboy."

Before the debate, several Fox News commentators remarked on the air about how Mr. Kerry had reportedly gotten a manicure that day.

Mr. Cameron has been reprimanded over the incident, said Paul Schur, a spokesman for the network. "This was a stupid mistake and a lapse in judgment, and Carl regrets it," Mr. Schur said.

He declined to say how Mr. Cameron had been reprimanded or whether action had been taken against others at Fox News who reviewed the article before it was posted. Mr. Cameron, who is well respected in news media circles, declined to discuss the incident when reached on Saturday. He is continuing to report from the campaign trail.

The gaffe comes at a time when journalistic errors and lapses both big and small have called into question the credibility of a number of major news organizations.

Less than two weeks ago, CBS News and Dan Rather - who is a frequent target of conservatives who accuse him of liberal bias - apologized for a "mistake in judgment" in relying on unsubstantiated documents for a report about President Bush's National Guard service.

On Saturday, it was Democrats who were chuckling over the incident at Fox News, a network that portrays itself as "fair and balanced" but is often accused by liberals of having a pro-Republican bias.

The Kerry campaign sought to turn the Fox retraction against Mr. Bush.

"Fox is doing the right thing by admitting its mistake and correcting the record," said Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign. "George Bush would be well served to heed the lesson and admit to his own mistakes."

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Friends, Americans, Countrymen...

The New York Times
October 3, 2004

Friends, Americans, Countrymen...
By STEPHEN GREENBLATT

Two bitter rivals stand up to address an immense, anonymous crowd. The rules have been set in advance: they will speak from the same platform; they will not address each other directly; they will limit their discourse to certain set topics. The stakes are immensely high: no less than the fate of the nation and of the whole world.

Sound familiar? The scene is from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," written and first performed more than 400 years ago as the opening play in the newly built Globe Theater. Brutus and Antony stand over the corpse of the assassinated Caesar. Nothing will bring Caesar back. The question is the future course of the damaged republic.

It is worth noting that Shakespeare lived in a monarchy, not a republic. Elizabethan society had little or nothing comparable to what observers of modern democratic societies call the public sphere - the shared space where competing views on politics, economics, foreign policy and moral values are aired. (Parliamentary debates were closed to the public, and transcripts were strictly prohibited.)

This makes it all the more striking that Shakespeare depicts the world's destiny as determined by the rhetorical performances of two men standing up at a pulpit and speaking out to an agitated populace that demands a public reckoning: "We will be satisfied! Let us be satisfied!''

The crowd wants to know why Caesar has been murdered. The honorable, principled Brutus addresses himself to the wisdom of his listeners. Assuming that his audience is capable of assessing and rationally judging his actions, he lays out a complex and seemingly contradictory argument: "As Caesar loved me, I weep for him. As he was fortunate, I rejoice at it. As he was valiant, I honour him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love, joy for his fortune, honour for his valour, and death for his ambition."

In the heat of the moment this is a lot for anyone to process: how could Brutus have shifted from friend to foe? Are his deeds the mark of inconsistency or thoughtfulness? How could he be for and against the same man? How is it possible to keep in focus the noble principle for which he says he has acted?

Antony takes a different tack. He addresses not the listeners' heads but their gut feelings. And, weeping ostentatiously, he puts his own feelings on display: "Bear with me. My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar." Never mind that anyone looking closely and coolly should be able to see through the pretense. The wily politician Antony manages to convince the crowd of his absolute sincerity: "I am no orator as Brutus is - But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man."

His cunning speech appeals at once to his listeners' fears, aroused by the ghastly spectacle of violence, and to their greed. To every Roman citizen he gives 75 drachmas. The handout, absurd at such a moment of public crisis, is magically effective. The mob erupts and, as Antony had calculated, Rome is plunged into a cycle of violence that he can exploit for his own political ends.

Did it have to end like this? What if Brutus had honed his message more successfully? And what if the crowd had glimpsed something in Antony's face when he did not know he was being observed that gave away his cynical scheme? The course of history - the collapse of order, years of bloodshed, wasted lives and treasure, the loss of liberty - would have been startlingly different.

Have we learned something about listening to political oratory that Shakespeare's "friends, Romans, countrymen" did not know? Thursday night's debate seemed to me surprisingly revealing. I expected boilerplate, and of course was not totally disappointed in that, but there was something more. To my surprise, substantive differences between President Bush and Senator John Kerry emerged.

One man, the incumbent, insisted again and again on the need at all costs to avoid mixed messages. Everything for him was reduced to an apparently simple war-making strategy and a single enemy. The other man, the challenger, had a more complex account of the task. He expressed commitment to winning the war, but doubted its wisdom; he honored the sacrifice of our troops, but lamented our relative isolation from the rest of the world.

And then something entirely unexpected happened: the lengthy rulebook had called for the television cameras to focus exclusively on whichever man was speaking, but the networks flouted the ban and allowed the audience to see how each candidate responded to his rival's words. The effect was startling.

Senator Kerry principally addressed his remarks to the moderator, Jim Lehrer, and when President Bush was speaking he watched attentively and jotted occasional notes. The president, for the most part, seemed more effective at facing the camera directly when he spoke; he understood that the task was not to persuade Mr. Lehrer to vote for him but to persuade the crowd. However, as many have noted, when he evidently thought he was unobserved he disclosed an astonishing range of emotions: confusion, annoyance and something like rage.

It was a revealing and unnerving sight, something like seeing into Antony's head when he addresses the Roman crowd. Will it make a difference to have seen what we have seen? I believe it will.

Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of humanities at Harvard, is the author of "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare."

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Iraq: Politics or Policy?

The New York Times
October 3, 2004

Iraq: Politics or Policy?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Sorry, I've been away writing a book. I'm back, so let's get right down to business: We're in trouble in Iraq.

I don't know what is salvageable there anymore. I hope it is something decent and I am certain we have to try our best to bring about elections and rebuild the Iraqi Army to give every chance for decency to emerge there. But here is the cold, hard truth: This war has been hugely mismanaged by this administration, in the face of clear advice to the contrary at every stage, and as a result the range of decent outcomes in Iraq has been narrowed and the tools we have to bring even those about are more limited than ever.

What happened? The Bush team got its doctrines mixed up: it applied the Powell Doctrine to the campaign against John Kerry - "overwhelming force" without mercy, based on a strategy of shock and awe at the Republican convention, followed by a propaganda blitz that got its message across in every possible way, including through distortion. If only the Bush team had gone after the remnants of Saddam's army in the Sunni Triangle with the brutal efficiency it has gone after Senator Kerry in the Iowa-Ohio-Michigan triangle. If only the Bush team had spoken to Iraqis and Arabs with as clear a message as it did to the Republican base. No, alas, while the Bush people applied the Powell Doctrine in the Midwest, they applied the Rumsfeld Doctrine in the Middle East. And the Rumsfeld Doctrine is: "Just enough troops to lose." Donald Rumsfeld tried to prove that a small, mobile army was all that was needed to topple Saddam, without realizing that such a limited force could never stabilize Iraq. He never thought it would have to. He thought his Iraqi pals would do it. He was wrong.

For all of President Bush's vaunted talk about being consistent and resolute, the fact is he never established U.S. authority in Iraq. Never. This has been the source of all our troubles. We have never controlled all the borders, we have never even consistently controlled the road from Baghdad airport into town, because we never had enough troops to do it.

Being away has not changed my belief one iota in the importance of producing a decent outcome in Iraq, to help move the Arab-Muslim world off its steady slide toward increased authoritarianism, unemployment, overpopulation, suicidal terrorism and religious obscurantism. But my time off has clarified for me, even more, that this Bush team can't get us there, and may have so messed things up that no one can. Why? Because each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology. More troops or radically lower taxes? Lower taxes. Fire an evangelical Christian U.S. general who smears Islam in a speech while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army or not fire him so as not to anger the Christian right? Don't fire him. Apologize to the U.N. for not finding the W.M.D., and then make the case for why our allies should still join us in Iraq to establish a decent government there? Don't apologize - for anything - because Karl Rove says the "base" won't like it. Impose a "Patriot Tax" of 50 cents a gallon on gasoline to help pay for the war, shrink the deficit and reduce the amount of oil we consume so we send less money to Saudi Arabia? Never. Just tell Americans to go on guzzling. Fire the secretary of defense for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, to show the world how seriously we take this outrage - or do nothing? Do nothing. Firing Mr. Rumsfeld might upset conservatives. Listen to the C.I.A.? Only when it can confirm your ideology. When it disagrees - impugn it or ignore it.

What I resent so much is that some of us actually put our personal politics aside in thinking about this war and about why it is so important to produce a different Iraq. This administration never did. Mr. Kerry's own views on Iraq have been intensely political and for a long time not well thought through. But Mr. Kerry is a politician running for office. Mr. Bush is president, charged with protecting the national interest, and yet from the beginning he has run Iraq policy as an extension of his political campaign.

Friends, I return to where I started: We're in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we'll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world.

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Kerry vs. Bush on Health Care

The New York Times
October 3, 2004

Kerry vs. Bush on Health Care

The faults in the American health care system become more glaring with each passing year. Large numbers of Americans have no health insurance at all, and those who do have insurance are faced with soaring premiums that threaten to make coverage unaffordable for individuals, families and employers. The two presidential candidates have responded to these problems with health plans that differ markedly in scope and philosophy. Both tinker at the edges of the current system rather than seeking a broad, nation-shaking change. Sadly, the fervor for sweeping reform died a decade ago with the disastrous demise of the Clinton health plan.

That said, President Bush and Senator John Kerry clearly want to nudge the nation's health care system in different directions. Senator Kerry would build on the status quo by expanding existing government programs for the poor and by increasing subsidies for employer-based coverage, the core of the current system. This is hardly a government takeover that would put bureaucrats in charge of your health care, as President Bush has shamelessly contended. Indeed, the strength of the Kerry approach is that it relies primarily on well-tested health-insurance arrangements.

President Bush would also continue to rely on - and even expand - employer-based coverage. But he would supplement this approach with tax credits to help individuals and families buy their own policies or invest in so-called health savings accounts backed by high-deductible coverage. This is the health care version of the president's "ownership society.'' If adopted widely, such individual coverage would represent a radical alternative to employment-based policies, but for now the Bush plan takes only small steps in that direction.

Over all, Mr. Kerry's approach would do more and cost more than Mr. Bush's. One independent analysis pegs the cost to taxpayers of the Kerry plan at $650 billion over a decade. Mr. Kerry says he would cover the cost by canceling the administration's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, those earning more than $200,000 a year. However, the price tag could be higher - one conservative research group calculates the cost at $1.5 trillion, a level that would certainly force Mr. Kerry to scale back his plans. Independent estimates put the cost of the Bush plan at $90 billion to $130 billion over a decade.

The Uninsured

On the vexing issue of how to provide coverage for the 45 million Americans who currently lack health insurance, Senator Kerry would do a far better job. His plan would extend coverage to some 27 million of the uninsured, mostly by expanding Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program to include children and adults whose income is twice to three times the poverty level. Mr. Kerry would also provide subsidies to encourage more employers to offer coverage. In a bow to a favorite nostrum of conservative health analysts, he would set up a new health plan modeled on that serving federal employees. It would be open to individuals and businesses and subsidized with tax credits.

President Bush would rely primarily on a tax credit of up to $3,000 to help lower-income families buy health insurance and on a tax deduction to encourage people to buy high-deductible policies. But the credit will not go far toward paying for policies that can cost $9,000 to $10,000 a year. Independent estimates suggest that the Bush plan would cover at most seven million of the uninsured.

Affordability

For the vast majority of Americans and most businesses as well, the chief worry is soaring premiums. Here Mr. Kerry has proposed an innovative solution. He would have a federally funded "reinsurance" program reimburse employers for 75 percent of all medical bills exceeding some catastrophic limit - say, for example, $30,000 a year. That would mean companies and group health plans would no longer have to shoulder the most costly cases that account for a huge chunk of all health expenditures. In return, the companies would have to pass the savings on in reduced premiums, cover all workers and set up disease management programs. The Kerry camp estimates this might reduce premiums by 10 percent, mostly by shifting the cost to the taxpayers.

President Bush would try to make insurance more affordable partly through his tax credits and partly by enabling small businesses to band together in "association health plans" that would give them greater purchasing power to bargain for low insurance rates. He would also encourage an expansion of tax-free health savings accounts, coupled with insurance to cover catastrophic illnesses. The notion is that catastrophic coverage is relatively cheap and that the savings accounts would be used to pay routine medical bills, making the individual more prudent in spending for health care services. Such accounts are an unjustified tax break for those who least need it. They would primarily benefit those in high tax brackets and would most likely attract only the healthiest people with few medical needs, leaving traditional health plans to deal with the sickest and costliest patients, inevitably forcing an increase in their premiums.

Cost Control

Neither plan looks like it would make a major dent in the ever-escalating cost of medical care. Both candidates would promote electronic record keeping in a laudable effort to drag the paper-driven medical system into the modern age of computers. Analysts of all political persuasions agree that widespread use of the newest information technologies could save money through reduced paperwork, greater productivity and a probable reduction in costly medical errors, but how much and how soon are uncertain. Both candidates also favor better disease management, especially of such costly chronic ailments as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. This is a reform espoused by many health analysts and would surely help control costs in the long run. In a remedy that seems more ideological than practical, Mr. Bush also stresses the need for a cap on medical liability damages, whereas Mr. Kerry rejects caps and proposes other ways to rein in malpractice litigation costs. Liability litigation is a small element in the overall cost picture, and neither approach would produce much savings.

New Drug Benefit

President Bush had expected to get campaign mileage from the Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted last year - indeed, that was the main reason the Republicans forced it through Congress - but the Democrats have focused so much attention on its shortcomings that it may have become a political liability. Voters can be sure the two candidates would approach the issue of drug prices differently. President Bush has opposed the importation of cheaper drugs from abroad and supports the Medicare drug law that prohibits the federal government from negotiating drug prices with the manufacturers. Mr. Kerry supports drug importation and believes the federal government should use its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. This page has endorsed both importation and federal negotiation as sensible ways to restrain drug prices, the fastest-growing segment of medical costs. However, if the Republicans retain control of Congress, a President Kerry might be powerless to crack down on the drug companies.

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Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush

The New York Times
October 3, 2004

FRANK RICH

Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush

You can run but you can't hide: Oct. 5 will bring the perfect storm in this year's culture wars. It's on that strategically chosen date, four Tuesdays before the election, that the DVD of "Fahrenheit 9/11" will be released along with not one but two new Michael Moore books. It's also the release date of the equally self-effacing Ann Coulter's latest rant, of a new DVD documentary, "Horns and Halos," that revisits the Bush mystery year of 1972, and of an R.E.M. album, "Around the Sun," that gets in its own political licks at the state of the nation.

When Dick Cheney and John Edwards debate in Cleveland that night, Bruce Springsteen will be barnstorming in another swing state, as the Vote for Change tour hits St. Paul. All that's needed to make the day complete is a smackdown between Kinky Friedman and Teresa Heinz Kerry on "Imus in the Morning."

Of the many cultural grenades being tossed that day, though, the one must-see is "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House," a DVD that is being specifically marketed in "head to head" partisan opposition to "Fahrenheit 9/11." This documentary first surfaced at the Republican convention in New York, where it was previewed in tandem with an invitation-only, no-press-allowed "Family, Faith and Freedom Rally," a Ralph Reed-Sam Brownback jamboree thrown by the Bush campaign for Christian conservatives. Though you can buy the DVD for $14.95, its makers told the right-wing news service WorldNetDaily.com that they plan to distribute 300,000 copies to America's churches. And no wonder. This movie aspires to be "The Passion of the Bush," and it succeeds.

More than any other campaign artifact, it clarifies the hard-knuckles rationale of the president's vote-for-me-or-face-Armageddon re-election message. It transforms the president that the Democrats deride as a "fortunate son" of privilege into a prodigal son with the "moral clarity of an old-fashioned biblical prophet." Its Bush is not merely a sincere man of faith but God's essential and irreplaceable warrior on Earth. The stations of his cross are burnished into cinematic fable: the misspent youth, the hard drinking (a thirst that came from "a throat full of Texas dust"), the fateful 40th-birthday hangover in Colorado Springs, the walk on the beach with Billy Graham. A towheaded child actor bathed in the golden light of an off-camera halo re-enacts the young George comforting his mom after the death of his sister; it's a parable anticipating the future president's miraculous ability to comfort us all after 9/11. An older Bush impersonator is seen rebuffing a sexual come-on from a fellow Bush-Quayle campaign worker hovering by a Xerox machine in 1988; it's an effort to imbue our born-again savior with retroactive chastity. As for the actual president, he is shown with a flag for a backdrop in a split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message isn't subtle: they were separated at birth.

"Faith in the White House" purports to be the product of "independent research," uncoordinated with the Bush-Cheney campaign. But many of its talking heads are official or unofficial administration associates or sycophants. They include the evangelical leader and presidential confidant Ted Haggard (who is also one of Mel Gibson's most fervent P.R. men) and Deal Hudson, an adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign until August, when he resigned following The National Catholic Reporter's investigation of accusations that he sexually harassed an 18-year-old Fordham student in the 1990's. As for the documentary's "research," a film positioning itself as a scrupulously factual "alternative" to "Fahrenheit 9/11" should not inflate Mr. Bush's early business "success" with Arbusto Energy (an outright bust for most of its investors) or the number of children he's had vaccinated in Iraq ("more than 22 million," the movie claims, in a country whose total population is 25 million).

"Will George W. Bush be allowed to finish the battle against the forces of evil that threaten our very existence?" Such is the portentous question posed at the film's conclusion by its narrator, the religious broadcaster Janet Parshall, beloved by some for her ecumenical generosity in inviting Jews for Jesus onto her radio show during the High Holidays. Anyone who stands in the way of Mr. Bush completing his godly battle, of course, is a heretic. Facts on the ground in Iraq don't matter. Rational arguments mustered in presidential debates don't matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter. The president - who after 9/11 called the war on terrorism a "crusade," until protests forced the White House to backpedal - is divine. He may not hear "voices" instructing him on policy, testifies Stephen Mansfield, the author of one of the movie's source texts, "The Faith of George W. Bush," but he does act on "promptings" from God. "I think we went into Iraq not so much because there were weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Mansfield has explained elsewhere, "but because Bush had concluded that Saddam Hussein was an evildoer" in the battle "between good and evil." So why didn't we go into those other countries in the axis of evil, North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such questions is to be against God and "with the terrorists."

The propagandists of "Faith in the White House" argue, as others have, that the president's invocation of religion in the public sphere, from his citation of Jesus as his favorite "political philosopher" to his incessant invocation of the Almighty in talking about how everything is coming up roses in Iraq, is consistent with the civic spirituality practiced by his antecedents, from the founding fathers to Bill Clinton. It's not. Past presidents have rarely, if ever, claimed such godlike infallibility. Mr. Bush never admits to making a mistake; even his premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in error, as he recently told Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you believe "God wants me to be president" - a quote attributed to Mr. Bush by the Rev. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable of making mistakes. Those who say you have are by definition committing blasphemy. A God-appointed leader even has the power to rewrite His texts. Jim Wallis, the liberal evangelical author, has pointed out Mr. Bush's habit of rejiggering specific scriptural citations so that, say, the light shining into the darkness is no longer God's light but America's and, by inference, the president's own.

It's not just Mr. Bush's self-deification that separates him from the likes of Lincoln, however; it's his chosen fashion of Christianity. The president didn't revive the word "crusade" idly in the fall of 2001. His view of faith as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war against evil is synergistic with the violent poetics of the best-selling "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson's cinematic bloodfest. The majority of Christian Americans may not agree with this apocalyptic worldview, but there's a big market for it. A Newsweek poll shows that 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To Karl Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known as "the base."

The pandering to that base has become familiar in countless administration policies, starting with its antipathy to stem-cell research, abortion, condoms for H.I.V. prevention and gay civil rights. But ever since Mr. Bush's genuflection to Bob Jones University threatened to shoo away moderates in 2000, the Rove ruse is to try to keep the most militant and sectarian tactics of the Bush religious program under the radar. (Mr. Rove even tried to deny that the wooden lectern at the Republican convention was a pulpit embedded with a cross, as if a nation of eyewitnesses could all be mistaken.) The re-election juggernaut has not only rounded up the membership rosters of churches en masse but quietly mounted official Web sites like kerrywrongforcatholics.com as well. (Evangelicals and Mormons have their own Web variants on this same theme, but not the Jews, who are apparently getting in Kerry just what they deserve.) Even the contraband C-word is being revived out of sight of most of the press: Marc Racicot, the Bush-Cheney campaign chairman, lobbed a direct-mail fund-raising letter in March describing Mr. Bush as "leading a global crusade against terrorism."

In this spring's classic "South Park" parody, "The Passion of the Jew," in which Mr. Gibson's movie tosses the community into a religious war, one of the kids concludes: "If you want to be Christian, that's cool, but you should focus on what Jesus taught instead of how he got killed. Focusing on how he got killed is what people did in the Dark Ages, and it ends up with really bad results." He has a point. It's far from clear that Mr. Bush's eschatology and his religious vanity are leading to good results now. The all-seeing president who could pronounce Vladimir Putin saintly by looking into his "soul" is now refusing to acknowledge that the reverse may be true. The general in charge of tracking down Osama bin Laden, William G. Boykin, has earned cheers in some quarters for giving speeches at churches proclaiming that Mr. Bush is "in the White House because God put him there" to lead the "army of God" against "a guy named Satan." But all that preaching didn't get his day job done; he hasn't snared the guy named Osama he was supposed to bring back "dead or alive."

"George W. Bush: Faith in the White House" must be seen because it shows how someone like General Boykin can stay in his job even in failure and why Mr. Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of an abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview, faith, or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and a biblical mission, or at least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than the secular goal of waging an effective, focused battle against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists. That no one in this documentary, including its hero, acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church and state is hardly a surprise. To them, America is a "Christian nation," period, with no need even for the fig-leaf prefix of "Judeo-."

Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to acknowledge any boundary that might separate Mr. Bush's flawed actions battling "against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What that level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the imagination, and "Faith in the White House" gives the imagination room to run riot about what a 21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh. A documentary conceived as a rebuke to "Fahrenheit 9/11" is nothing if not its unintentional and considerably more nightmarish sequel.

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Bush Trumpets Signing of Tax Cut Extensions; Lies about Kerry Tax position

The New York Times
October 3, 2004

Bush Trumpets Signing of Tax Cut Extensions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 - One month before Election Day, President Bush sought Saturday to make sure that Americans knew he was signing into law a fourth tax cut in four years.

On Monday in Iowa, Mr. Bush will sign legislation extending three popular middle-class tax breaks and reviving some expired business tax incentives.

Ahead of that signing ceremony, he used his weekly radio address on Saturday to get maximum political mileage out of the cuts.

"This bipartisan law is good news for America's families," the president said. "It keeps in place major portions of the tax relief we passed over the last three years."

The tax package, which Congress passed last month, will affect an estimated 94 million Americans, mainly through its provision to extend a broader 10 percent tax bracket. It also keeps the per-child tax credit at $1,000 and retains the provisions providing married couples relief from the so-called marriage penalty.

The package extends the child credit for five years, the marriage penalty relief for four years and the expanded 10 percent bracket for six years. All were to have expired Jan. 1.

Mr. Bush revived a tactic from his 2000 campaign, when he regularly rolled out "tax families" to put a human face on his proposals. In the radio address, he cited a Springfield, Mo., family he said would benefit.

Mr. Bush said his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, had opposed the tax cuts. In fact, Mr. Kerry agreed on the need to retain the personal income tax cuts.

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Congress Moves to Protect Federal Whistleblowers

The New York Times
October 3, 2004

Congress Moves to Protect Federal Whistleblowers
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 - Over strenuous objections from the Bush administration, Congress is moving to increase protections for federal employees who expose fraud, waste and wrongdoing inside the government.

Lawmakers of both parties say the measures are needed to prevent retaliation against such whistleblowers, who reveal threats to public health, safety and security.

But the administration says the bill unconstitutionally interferes with the president's ability to control and manage the government.

On Wednesday, a House committee approved a whistleblower protection bill. In July, a Senate committee approved a similar measure offering more extensive protections to whistleblowers.

Representative Todd R. Platts, Republican of Pennsylvania, the sponsor of the House bill, said: "We need to protect public servants who expose fraud and intentional misconduct. Court decisions in the last 10 years have eroded whistleblower protections, so that if you're a federal employee, you're often risking your job - and the wrath of your superiors - if you come forward with evidence of wrongdoing.''

The Senate bill gained momentum when Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, chairwoman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, joined Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, in pushing it.

"The campaign for this legislation went from dormant to active when Senator Collins embraced the bill a few months ago,'' said Thomas M. Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a watchdog group that works with whistleblowers. "That was the turning point.''

While the legislation has broad support and a compromise appears to be within reach, it is impossible to know whether the measure will become law. As evidence of a need for legislation, lawmakers cited dozens of cases, including these:

¶Federal investigators found that two Border Patrol agents, Mark Hall and Robert Lindemann, were disciplined after they disclosed weaknesses in security along the Canadian border.

¶Teresa C. Chambers was dismissed from her job as chief of the United States Park Police after she said the agency did not have enough money or personnel to protect parks and monuments in the Washington area.

¶The nation's top Medicare official threatened to fire Richard S. Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, if he provided data to Congress showing the cost of the new Medicare law, which exceeded White House estimates.

Airport baggage screeners say they have been penalized for raising concerns about aviation security. But in August, an independent federal agency, the Merit Systems Protection Board, ruled that they had none of the whistleblower rights available to other federal employees. The government, it said, can "hire, discipline and terminate screeners without regard to any other law.''

The United States Office of Special Counsel, which investigates complaints of reprisal before they go to the board, has a large backlog of whistleblower cases, including many pending more than a year.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have made the government more secretive, but have also prompted whistleblowers to come forward in greater numbers. "They feel they can no longer stand by knowing that people's lives are at risk,'' said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, another watchdog group.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said he knew of several instances in which federal agencies had retaliated against whistleblowers by revoking their security clearances. Because they can no longer do their jobs, Mr. Grassley said, "the pulling of a security clearance effectively fires employees.''

Administration officials gave several reasons for opposing the bills. Peter D. Keisler, an assistant attorney general, said the legislation would encourage frivolous complaints by disgruntled employees, crippling the ability of senior officials to manage the federal work force.

"The bill would convert every federal employee into a potential whistleblower and every minor workplace dispute with a supervisor into a potential whistleblower case,'' Mr. Keisler said.

Mr. Akaka said the objections came as no surprise. "The Justice Department has an institutional conflict of interest'' because it is responsible for defending agencies accused of retaliating against whistleblowers, he said.

Congress has repeatedly tried to protect conscientious civil servants, under laws adopted in 1978, 1989 and 1994. But lawmakers said these efforts had been frustrated by the court that hears appeals from aggrieved federal employees, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

The court often assumes that a federal agency acted properly unless an employee offers "irrefragable proof to the contrary.''

The Senate committee cited this as one of many issues on which the court had misinterpreted the law and the intent of Congress. "By definition,'' it said, "irrefragable means impossible to refute. This imposes an impossible burden on whistleblowers.''

By contrast, the House and Senate bills would protect the disclosure of any information that a whistleblower "reasonably believes'' to be evidence of government illegality or misconduct.

The legislation would also clarify the right of federal employees, like Mr. Foster, the Medicare actuary, to provide information to Congress, free of threats or reprisals.

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Domestic Issues Pushed to Front of Campaigns

The New York Times
October 3, 2004

Domestic Issues Pushed to Front of Campaigns
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 - With a barrage of new advertisements and speeches, Senator John Kerry's aides are moving to shift the battle with President Bush to what they said was stronger ground - domestic policy - as the two men head into a second debate that is expected to focus on the economy, job creation and health care.

Mr. Bush's aides said they would continue to try to anchor the presidential campaign to foreign policy and national security, and the president on Saturday, campaigning in Ohio, escalated his attacks on what he said was Mr. Kerry's vacillating foreign policy.

But the aides said they would gladly engage Mr. Kerry on domestic issues as well. The president's weekly radio address on Saturday was devoted to tax cuts, and Mr. Bush will fly to Iowa on Monday to sign into law the latest round of cuts.

Mr. Kerry's campaign upended its menu of television advertisements on Saturday, replacing spots attacking Mr. Bush on Iraq and national security with ones in which Mr. Kerry talks about health care and job creation, while attacking Mr. Bush as a tool of "the powerful and well-connected."

And Mr. Kerry delivered a speech on domestic issues in Orlando on Saturday morning that aides said was intended to usher in this new phase of his campaign, denouncing Mr. Bush as "the first president to lose jobs in our country in 72 years."

Mr. Kerry will hold a town meeting in Ohio on Sunday on the outsourcing of jobs and is planning speeches on health care early in the week.

"We know that there are a lot of people out there who are more worried about their jobs and paying their health care bills than worrying about what's going on the other side of the world," said Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry adviser. "This is not brain surgery."

After weeks of growing increasingly confident about victory, some Republicans said in interviews that they were concerned that Mr. Kerry's showing at the debate - combined with images that have been repeatedly televised showing Mr. Bush frowning and fidgeting as his opponent criticized him - might have tilted the landscape, and that Mr. Bush might once again have a fight on his hands.

Even Republicans said Mr. Kerry had gained ground in Thursday's debate on foreign policy, though aides to both campaigns said it was unclear what long-term effect that would have. Mr. Bush's senior advisers argued that the debate would not be enough to overcome what they described as voter concerns about Mr. Kerry stirred by six months of Republican attacks, and said they were unconcerned about his effort to move the discussion to domestic issues.

"We think we are on firm ground on domestic policy and on foreign policy," said Mr. Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman.

Not by coincidence, this shift in emphasis by Mr. Kerry comes as he and Mr. Bush head for a second debate, on Friday in St. Louis, in which the candidates will be questioned by an audience of voters, and which is expected to include a heavy focus on domestic issues.

That morning, the government will issue the last set of unemployment figures before the election. And on Tuesday in Cleveland, the two vice-presidential candidates will debate, and aides to Senator John Edwards, the Democrat, said he hoped to keep the focus on domestic issues in his only debate with Vice President Dick Cheney.

This is hardly the first time that Mr. Kerry's advisers have sought to gain the advantage in what has been a long tug-of-war with the White House over whether the campaign should be fought over domestic issues or national security. Mr. Kerry's advisers acknowledged that he had been largely unsuccessful at this effort for much of the year, in no small part because of the spiral of violence in Baghdad.

And some Democrats questioned whether it made sense for Mr. Kerry to try to turn the subject away from Iraq at a time that continuing violence there was raising doubts among some voters about Mr. Bush's credentials to manage foreign policy crises.

But Mr. Kerry's aides and Congressional Democrats argued that Thursday's presidential debate - confined to foreign policy issues at the insistence of Mr. Bush's aides - gave Mr. Kerry credibility on this subject, allowing him to pivot to the critique of Mr. Bush on the home front that Mr. Kerry has long thought is his path to victory.

Mr. Bush's senior aides said that no matter what Mr. Kerry did, the president would continue to challenge his foreign policy fortitude, seizing in particular on Mr. Kerry's suggestion in the debate that he might not engage in a pre-emptive war without putting it to a "global test."

Mr. Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, described the remark as "a blunder," adding, "It was an insight into his foreign policy soul."

"Look, does he want a continuing dialogue about these things?" Mr. Rove continued. "No. But we'll pin him down. We'll keep pounding him."

The positioning came as both sides sought to measure the lasting impact, if any, of a debate in which Mr. Kerry offered what even Republicans described as a crisp and articulate case against the president. With a handful of exceptions - Mr. Rove being chief among them - there appeared to be a consensus among both parties that Mr. Kerry's performance had at the least jimmied open a window that Democrats feared had been closing on his candidacy.

At the same time, a number of Republicans said that they were worried by what they called a lackluster debate performance by Mr. Bush, and television images of the president grimacing as his rival challenged his handling of the war in Iraq and threats of terrorism at home.

"I was yelling at the television set," said one Republican associate of Mr. Bush, who said he did not want to be identified, describing his distress with Mr. Bush's performance. An administration official, speaking anonymously because he also did not want to be identified as critical of Mr. Bush's debate performance, said he had been astounded to see Mr. Bush repeatedly display on television a disdainful look that was familiar to people who work with him in the White House, but which aides, in preparing him for the debates, warned against.

And Paul M. Weyrich, the conservative organizer, wrote in his newsletter: "I reluctantly agree with overnight polls that suggest that, by a plurality, voters believe that Senator John Kerry won his debate with President Bush Thursday night. Both candidates did well. But Senator Kerry got away with murder and that is why it is frustrating."

Aides to both campaigns said they were waiting over the weekend to see how the perception of the debate settled in with the public, as well as the first full-fledged opinion polls.

A Newsweek magazine poll conducted after the debate showed Mr. Kerry in a statistical tie with Mr. Bush. Earlier Newsweek polls had shown Mr. Bush with a clear, if modest, edge.

Instant polls done the evening of the debate, found that most viewers said Mr. Kerry had won, but Republicans were quick to note that there was no immediate sign that he had chipped into what most polls show as a lead by Mr. Bush.

"There are two clear story lines," said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster. "One is that that Kerry did very well in the debate. The more important story line is that it didn't affect anyone's opinion."

Mr. Rove said: "It's like his convention speech. I remember all the hubbub about this being a terrific convention speech. And in the end, it did not serve him well."

But Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said that Mr. Bush, as a result of the debate, was now vulnerable in a way he had not been before.

"This was going to be their knockout punch, their issue, the chance to make their strongest case with the people, and it didn't happen," Mr. Durbin said, adding: "I think there will be a momentum shift now."

And even some Republicans said that Mr. Kerry had at the least ended any hope Mr. Bush had of a quick and easy victory.

"I don't think anything changed, but I think Kerry kept himself in the race," said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican, adding, "I think the American people are making a distinction, and they accept that Kerry is more skillful on his feet, but they still trust the president more."

Gary Bauer, a conservative Republican who ran for president in 2000, said, "I think Kerry did well enough to prevent the possibility of a meltdown, which I think he was facing."

Interviews with Democrats suggested that Mr. Kerry's supporters who had been dispirited by the continued reports of upheaval in the Kerry campaign were invigorated by their candidate's performance.

"For the first time in concise terms he laid out a clear alternative path," Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said.

""Several Republicans said they had hoped that Mr. Bush, after having forced the first debate to be fought out on foreign policy, would have effectively squashed Mr. Kerry's challenge by now. Whether that goal was realistic or not, Republicans said there seemed little hope of that before the last debate is held in Arizona on Oct. 13.

"We had him down and we had our foot on his throat," Ron Kaufman, who served as political adviser to Mr. Bush's father, said of Mr. Kerry. "He got up, but he's still wounded."

Todd S. Purdum and Robin Toner contributed reporting for this article.

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