Terror-Fight Criticism Tests Bush’s Best Asset

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-assess25mar25,1,689011.story?coll=la-home-headlines

With polls showing most voters unhappy about President Bush's handling of the economy and divided over his course in Iraq, the president's strongest asset in the 2004 campaign has been the unwavering sense among most Americans that he is providing resolute leadership against terrorism.

But two days of public testimony before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- along with the release earlier this week of a critical book by the president's former top counterterrorism adviser -- have offered the most forceful challenge yet to Bush's record in combating the terrorist threat.

The allegations from former adviser Richard Clarke -- that Bush slighted the war against terror to focus on Iraq -- dovetail so closely with so many Democratic criticisms of the president that some party strategists believe this week's events could mark a turning point in public attitudes about the administration's national security record.

"Their entire presidency is based on whatever leadership they can point to as a result of September 11," said one senior Democratic strategist familiar with the thinking inside the campaign of Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, that party's presumptive nominee. "If the credibility of that leadership is questioned, his entire presidency hangs in the balance."

<snip>

As if to underscore the partisan backdrop, the liberal group MoveOn.org announced late Wednesday that it would sponsor a television ad next week built on Clarke's criticism of the president.

[truthisfreedom]

1. hanging in the balance? bush is teetering on broken floorboards, trying

to avoid gaping holes to the basement below. the tactic of "throwing a rug over it" is only going to work so long as those patches don't become booby-traps and pitfalls, and i can't see bushco's lie-upon-lie approach lasting until fall.