Cheney, WA Post, 09-08-04: "If Kerry is elected, we'll get hit again" [View All]

Cheney: Kerry Victory Is Risky
Democrats Decry Talk as Scare Tactic

By Dana Milbank and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 8, 2004; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2917-2004Sep7.html

COLUMBIA, Mo., Sept. 7 -- Vice President Cheney warned on Tuesday that if John F. Kerry is elected, "the danger is that we'll get hit again" by terrorists, as the Bush campaign escalated a furious assault on the Democratic presidential nominee that has kept Kerry from gaining control of the election debate.

In Des Moines, Cheney went beyond previous restraints to suggest that the country would be more vulnerable to attack under Kerry. "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again," the vice president said, "that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we are not really at war."

In Missouri, meanwhile, President Bush seized on Kerry's statement Monday that Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," noting that Kerry had borrowed the words of his former rival Howard Dean. Kerry "woke up yesterday morning with yet another new position, and this one is not even his own," Bush said to laughter from supporters during a three-city Missouri bus tour. ". . . He even used the same words Howard Dean did, back when he supposedly disagreed with him. No matter how many times Senator Kerry flip-flops, we were right to make America safer by removing Saddam Hussein from power."

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards, interviewed aboard his plane after leaving Ohio, said of Cheney's comments: "What he said was meant to scare voters, period. And it's completely contrary to what's in the best interest of the American people. . . . It was way over the top and I think un-American." Cheney spokeswoman Anne Womack labeled that comment an "overreaction" and said Cheney "wasn't trying to connect the dots" between a Kerry victory and a terrorist attack. "Whoever is elected in November faces the prospect of another terrorist attack," she said. "The question is whether or not the right policies are in place to best protect our country. That's what the vice president was saying."