Democrats use forum to take aim at Bush
Focus on Iraq, military record
MILWAUKEE -- The two leading rivals to John F. Kerry took distinctly different tacks to challenge the Democratic presidential front-runner at a candidates' forum here last night, with John Edwards pointedly challenging Kerry on his budget plans and his lead in the race and Howard Dean sidestepping several chances to pounce.
The three candidates, along with Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio and the Rev. Al Sharpton, spent most of their time attacking President Bush rather than one another. For much of the 90-minute event, they criticized the president about his Vietnam-era military record and on a dozen foreign and domestic issues.
Edwards said, "The integrity and character of the president of the United States is at issue" in this year's election, and Sharpton repeatedly called the president a liar for his decision to go to war in Iraq and his strategy in winning the disputed Florida vote in 2000.
Edwards, a first-term senator from North Carolina, used blunt language and an energetic stage presence to cast himself as the chief alternative to Kerry going into tomorrow's Wisconsin primary, where an expected Kerry victory may knock Dean out of the race.
"Senator Kerry just said he will beat George Bush?" Edwards said. "Not so fast, John Kerry. We're going to have an election here in Wisconsin this Tuesday and we've got a whole group of primaries coming up, and I for one intend to fight with everything I've got for every one of those votes."
Kerry, cautiously nursing a lead in Wisconsin polls, took a single shot back at Edwards -- noting tartly that he was "not campaigning one state here and one state there," a reference to the game plans of Edwards and Dean to make well-funded stands in single states instead of running an expensive, time-consuming national campaign.
Kerry and Dean had their warmest night of the 14-month race; Kerry referred twice to sharing the same positions as "Howard." Dean notably passed on opportunities to continue his recent, searing attacks on Kerry's financial support from lobbyists. He even defended Kerry from recent GOP attacks about the senator's financial support from lobbyists. "I think George Bush has some nerve attacking anybody about special interests," Dean said.
After Kerry told the Marquette University audience that he would deliver a major health care plan and stand against middle-class tax increases, Edwards alleged Democratic overpromising, saying voters were turned off when they heard candidates offering greater spending, tax relief, and deficit reduction all at once, as Kerry and other candidates have.
"It's just not the truth," Edwards said. "People need to know the truth about what we can afford and what we can't afford. They've been listening to this talk over and over and over for years. It's part of the reason they're so cynical about politics."
A few minutes later, Edwards mocked Kerry for delivering a long, inconclusive answer on whether he felt any responsibility for the Iraq war, which he voted to authorize in 2002. "That's the longest answer I've ever heard to a yes-or-no question," Edwards said. "The answer to your question is, of course, we all accept responsibility for what we did. I did what I believed was right." Edwards, too, voted to support the war.
A Kerry spokesman said later that the senator stood by his 2002 vote on military action in Iraq.
Yet the most intense attacks by the Democrats were trained on Bush. Kerry said the president's conduct of the Iraq war indicates that Bush "regrettably has perhaps not learned some of the lessons of" the Vietnam era -- an artful way of pointing up the current controversy over whether Bush completed his National Guard commitment in the early 1970s.
"One of those key lessons is in how you take a nation to war," Kerry said. "I think this president rushed to war. I don't believe he had a plan for winning the peace. I don't think he kept his promises to America."
Edwards -- who was endorsed today by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the state's largest newspaper -- was even more pointed when asked whether Bush's honesty about his guard service and his Iraq war planning should be at issue in the fall campaign.
"Yes, it is, absolutely it is," Edwards said, noting that an investigation has begun into the intelligence reports used to justify war. "There is a disconnect between what the American people were told by the president and others and what's actually been found in Iraq. Now, I think integrity, character are critical issues in any presidential campaign. And certainly the integrity and character of the president of the United States is at issue -- no question."
Both Kucinich and Sharpton alleged that Bush knowingly lied about prewar intelligence and his justification of the Iraq war based on assessments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, none of which have been found.
"Clearly, he lied. Now if he is an unconscious liar and doesn't realize when he's lying, then we're really in trouble," Sharpton said. "We're talking about 500 lives. We're talking about billions of dollars. So I hope he knew he was lying. . . .
"Clearly, you know I'm a minister. Why do people lie? Because they're liars. He lied in Florida. He's lied several times. I believe he lied in Iraq."
Patrick Healy can be reached at phealy@globe.com.
