Candidates parry as 3d debate looms
SANTA FE -- As both men campaigned yesterday for New Mexico's five electoral votes, President Bush tried to inflict new damage on challenger John F. Kerry for saying that terrorism should be reduced to a "nuisance" instead of routed altogether -- an attack the Democrat ignored as he championed energy independence and stem-cell research.
While Kerry hoped to gain advantage for tomorrow night's domestic policy debate by focusing on those issues, his campaign sought to deflect Bush's attack yesterday with a counterassault over the strength of US forces in Iraq. The Kerry camp seized on a report in yesterday's Baltimore Sun that disclosed a US brigadier general in Iraq had asked for more troops twice this year, a request that was supported by his superiors but ultimately refused. Kerry advisers accused Bush of breaking his pledge, made in a Rose Garden appearance with Iraq's interim prime minister last month, that "when our commanders say that they need support, they'll get support."
Admiral William Crowe, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who spoke to reporters on Kerry's behalf, blasted Bush over the troop request and a separate report, in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, that the administration plans to delay major attacks on Iraqi insurgent strongholds until after Election Day. Crowe said that plan, if true, would be "dangerous" and "unethical," and added, "Senator Kerry will not make a distinction between casualties before an election and casualties after an election."
A Bush campaign spokesman said the Pentagon denied there is a plan not to have offensives before the election.
Kerry advisers said they would not be drawn into a direct confrontation over the Democratic nominee's "nuisance" remark, and appeared hopeful that they could reframe the debate to Bush's detriment. To that end, they launched a new television commercial highlighting a controverisal remark of Bush's, in an August interview with NBC's Matt Lauer, when the president said he did not think it was possible to win the war on terror. Bush aides had quickly clarified that he meant he did not foresee a traditional sort of surrender from terrorist groups.
The Bush camp was unbowed yesterday, however, with the president's advisers certain that Kerry's own remarks would do the greater harm. In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Kerry was asked what it would take to reach a level of security where Americans would feel safe again.
"We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry said. "As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."
Bush, at a rally in New Mexico and a visit to another closely fought state, Colorado, said that the Times magazine article shows that Kerry "fundamentally misunderstands" the war on terror.
"Just this weekend, Senator Kerry talked of reducing terrorism to, quote, nuisance, end-quote, and compared it to prostitution and illegal gambling," Bush said at an outdoor rally in Hobbs, N.M., several hundred miles from where Kerry spoke about domestic issues. "See, I couldn't disagree more. Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terrorists by staying on the offensive, destroying terrorists' networks, and spreading freedom and liberty around the world."
In the latest indication that the Republicans want to keep terrorism at the forefront of the presidential contest -- even though the issue is not expected to come up at tomorrow night's debate on domestic issues -- the Bush camp also dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney to assail Kerry's remark as "naive and dangerous," and lined up former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to portray Kerry as in denial that terrorism was ever a major threat. "I'm wondering exactly when Senator Kerry thought they were just a nuisance -- maybe when they attacked the USS Cole?" Giuliani said. "Or the innumerable number of terrorist acts that they committed in the '70s, the '80s, and the '90s, leading up to Sept. 11th?"
The Kerry campaign criticized this attack as part of a broader strategy of distortion by the president. Early this month, Bush and his allies used a Kerry remark to charge that the Democrat would deploy US troops only if the plan first passes a "global test" -- a phrase the Democrat used to describe building support among allies for a preemptive strike, which Kerry emphasized he reserved the right to launch if US interests were at stake.
"John Kerry is going to hunt and kill the terrorists before they can come after us, and no amount of selective editing by the Bush campaign can change that basic fact," Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said.
Kerry himself avoided the "nuisance" remark yesterday, instead hitting Bush on pocketbook concerns like the cost of gas and record-high oil prices that he said only helped the president's donors in the energy industry.
"High energy costs have pushed up prices across the board -- from the food that you have on your table to the clothes that you and your children wear," Kerry told an audience of several hundred Democrats in Santa Fe. Borrowing a recent attack line of Bush's, Kerry added: "When it comes to George Bush's record on gas prices, he can run but he can't hide. Facts -- as President Ronald Reagan reminded us -- are stubborn things, Mr. President."
At one point Kerry cast energy policy as a national security issue, saying the United States was "in a state of crisis and emergency" because of its reliance on oil from Middle East nations that could use the specter of violence to hike oil prices. The Democrat equated the search for alternative, domestic fuel sources with the World War II-era Manhattan Project that led to the atom bomb -- a comparison that brought cheers from voters whose state was the site of much of the atomic research, and whose five electoral votes are a prize that Al Gore just barely won in 2000.
"How quickly and how rapidly we gain our independence, and how quickly and how rapidly we improve our security, depends on the kind of Manhattan Project leadership that Franklin Roosevelt provided our nation," Kerry said.
Kerry opened his remarks by mourning the death Sunday of the actor Christopher Reeve. He choked up recalling a phone message he received from Reeve on Saturday, thanking Kerry for supporting stem-cell research in the second presidential debate Friday night (where Kerry also mentioned Reeve by name).
Kerry and Reeve have both pressed for greater federal financing and freedoms for scientists in the promising field of embryonic stem-cell research to cure degenerative diseases. Bush in 2001 became the first president to support such funding, but scientists have criticized him for limiting it to a handful of existing stem-cell lines.
"His tireless efforts are always going to be remembered and they're always going to be honored -- and in part because of his work, one day people will walk again," Kerry said of the wheelchair-bound Reeve.
Late yesterday, the White House also released a statement by Bush hailing Reeve's "personal courage" and "dedicated advocacy for those with physical disabilities," though it did not mention stem-cell research.
Healy, traveling with Kerry, can be reached at phealy@globe.com. Klein, with Bush, can be reached at rklein@globe.com. 
