Bush campaign sharpens its image in final days

By David L. Greene of The Baltimore Sun

Daytona Beach, FLA—As President Bush and his campaign team rev up their campaign for a race to the finish, they hope to revive the image of the likable, ordinary-guy leader whose calm leadership soothed the country after the Sept. 11 attacks before he went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the same time, the president plans to intensify his criticism of John Kerry, continuing to portray the Democratic candidate as a “Massachusetts liberal'' whose views put him outside the mainstream.

Bush's surrogates probably will be even harsher, searing Kerry with attacks they hope will make him seem like an opportunistic politician who will do anything to get elected.

“We're in a time of war,” Karl Rove, Bush's senior political adviser, shaper of his image and architect of his campaign, said Saturday as he discussed the strategy. “Do you want a leader who vacillates, caves to political pressure and attempts to hide his true feelings behind a veneer of rhetoric? Or do you want a leader who says what he believes and does what he says?”

With barely more than two weeks left in the campaign, the battle for the presidency is as close as any of the bumper-to-bumper NASCAR races that thrill hordes here each spring. Bush has lost his lead and his challenger is sprinting and threatening to overtake him.

The president jokes about not scowling and remembering to stand up straight, but his peevish performance in the first debate—slumping over the podium, grimacing and awkwardly pausing before answering questions—turned off voters and made Kerry look presidential by contrast. His performance in the second two debates improved, but marginally.

In the end, Bush aides say, the president lost a chance to exploit a clear advantage he has had over his opponent: the fact that many Americans—a majority, they hope—simply like him better.

As the race roars into the final turn, Bush will try to connect with voters again on a personal level, trying to turn his campaign into a contest between men, and not one of weighty policy agendas (although Bush intends to continue his incessant charges that Kerry the politician has little to show after 20 years in the Senate and that his health program will increase the size of the federal bureaucracy).

The effort to tarnish Kerry's character, and by comparison burnish Bush's, is in full cry among Bush's campaign aides.

They say that when Kerry discussed Vice President Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, Mary, in response to a question about homosexuality in the final debate, the senator played right into their new strategy.

Immediately, the vice president's wife, Lynne, once a regular on the incendiary CNN debate program “Crossfire,” called Kerry “not a good man.”

“The Mary Cheney flap hurt him in a place where we thought he was vulnerable,” said Nicolle Devenish, the director of communications in the Bush campaign.

“We have had this robust policy debate,” Devenish said of the candidates' face-to-face encounters. “But at the end of the day, you're picking a man. You're picking a leader. You're picking someone on character and on his principles.”

Democrats have retorted that the Republicans' claims of outrage are merely a ploy to distract voters from the real issues of the campaign. Mary Cheney's sexual orientation is no secret and she previously was employed as a liaison to the gay community by the Coors brewing company. She is now a key campaign adviser to her father, who publicly raised the issue of her homosexuality in late August, eliciting public complaints from some social conservatives, including Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes, the party's U.S. Senate nominee in Illinois.

While Bush campaign aides think the ruckus over Mary Cheney might die down, they hope the final two weeks of the campaign will increase the clash of personalities. They are particularly targeting undecided voters who are lukewarm at best toward the president and open to an alternative, but who have had trouble warming up to Kerry.