After three days of suspended political activity, the Bush campaign began openly incorporating Ronald Reagan's death into its reelection message yesterday, revamping its website to give Reagan a dominant role and distributing official campaign letters that invoke the former president. Since Reagan's death Saturday, Bush has repeatedly offered glowing praise of the 40th president in ways that echo his own reelection efforts, but were not overtly political.
Yesterday, his campaign took the refrain into the political realm. Bush officials sent an e-mail inviting supporters to add to a "living memorial" on the campaign website -- one click away from the page that solicits campaign donations and recruits volunteers. Visitors to the official campaign site were automatically redirected to the Reagan tribute, paid for by the Bush/Cheney committee. It replaced the spot usually occupied by the campaign home page.
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Bush has long sought to portray himself as Reagan's ideological heir, and with Reagan's death, he has augmented those efforts. When Bush was asked about Reagan yesterday, he responded in terms largely reflecting his own reelection theme. "Ronald Reagan will go down in history as a great American president because he had a core set of principles from which he would not deviate," Bush said from the G-8 summit in Georgia, during a joint appearance with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan. "He understood that a leader is a person who sets clear goals and makes decisions based upon principles that are etched in his soul."
Republicans say it would be impossible to separate Reagan's death from the current presidential race, or to take politics out of his death and burial this week. "It's unavoidable," said Grover Norquist, conservative activist and Reagan champion.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/06/09/campaigns_seize_on_reagans_legacy/