E.J. DIONNE JR. THE WASHINGTON POST
Just call him a liberal, and you'll win
October 15, 2004
(snip)
The three presidential debates altered the campaign in Kerry's favor because Bush could no longer run and hide from his own record and could no longer cast Kerry as a cardboard character. The debates showcased Kerry as steady and presidentially consistent through his three performances. Bush kept changing his act. He scowled in the first debate. He practically shouted in the second. He pasted a strange smile over the scowl in the third.
And Bush's new message is so old that it is as if he ran across a tattered catalogue for Republican political consultants from the 1980s or early '90s and ordered up a pre-owned campaign plan. You could imagine the headline in the catalogue: "Falling behind your Democrat opponent? Don't know what to say? Just call him liberal, liberal, liberal. Compare him with Ted Kennedy. It works every time – especially if your opponent is from Massachusetts."
(snip)
Kerry's explanation of his health care plan, which would allow people to buy into the health plan that covers federal employees, was especially crisp in the face of Bush's efforts to turn Kerrycare into Clintoncare. But Bush showed that he cared far more about caricaturing Kerry's plan than solving the problems of the uninsured. Inventing out of whole cloth a scheme that has nothing to do with what Kerry is proposing, Bush noted that the federal employee plan "costs the government $7,700 per family." Then he took a leap into the mathematics of political distortion. "If every family in America signed up, like the senator suggested," Bush said, "it would cost us $5 trillion over 10 years."
Pardon the word, but that's a lie because Kerry has "suggested" no such thing. As Kerry quickly noted, families who could afford to buy into the federal plan under his proposal would have to pay for it. Incidentally, Kerry estimates the cost of his plan at $650 billion over 10 years. And even the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which did a critical analysis of the Kerry proposal, couldn't come up with a number close to Bush's $5 trillion. It estimated the 10-year cost of the Kerry plan at $1.5 trillion.
More..
Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041015/news_lz1e15dionne.html Dionne can be reached via e-mail at postchat@aol.com.
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