5 years ago
NEW YORK (AP) -- As President Bush prepared to accept the Republican nomination for a second term, Vice President Dick Cheney portrayed his boss as a decisive commander in chief. "He doesn't waffle, he doesn't agonize," Cheney said Thursday.
"That's exactly what we need in a president. We don't need indecision or confusion," Cheney said at a breakfast with Ohio delegates on the concluding day of the Republican National Convention.
Bush was attending a worship service at a Park Avenue church and then making a brief visit to the Madison Square Garden convention site for a microphone and podium check ahead of his prime-time speech.
Meanwhile, about 100 anti-Bush demonstrators staged a quick, loud and well-organized protest at Grand Central Terminal during Thursday's rush hour, unfurling banners and colorful balloons that called on the president to do more in the fight against AIDS. Nineteen people were arrested after they refused police orders to leave.
Convention-related arrests for the week number more than 1,700, far surpassing those made in much more violent circumstances at Chicago's 1968 Democratic convention.
Cheney, who unleashed a withering attack on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in his speech to the convention Wednesday night, cited Ohio's importance in deciding the election and why he believes Bush is the right person to be president.
"When he has to make a decision, he doesn't waffle, he doesn't agonize over it," Cheney told the Ohio gathering.
No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio. Bush carried the state narrowly in 2000 but polls show it to be a dead heat this year. Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, a close friend of the Bush family, will play the part of Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards in Cheney's preparation for this fall's vice presidential debate.
Bush planned to use his convention address to encourage Americans to keep him on the job and to offer himself as a resolute wartime commander in chief with ambitious plans for a second term. His speech will touch off a two-month dash to the finish line in a nation that seems as closely divided now as it was four years ago.
Bush, who arrived in this fortified convention city Wednesday night at the end of a three-day, six-state campaign dash, will boast of his record and sketch the domestic agenda he would pursue if re-elected, a goal that eluded his father. He'll also talk - sometimes in personal terms, his advisers said - about how the terrorist attacks altered him and the world.
"Government must change with the changing world to make people's lives easier - to give people a chance to be able to realize the full promise of tomorrow," Bush told thousands of cheering supporters at a campaign rally Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio.
The speech also will offer an agenda that includes initiatives to simplify the tax code and help people buy homes, start businesses, hone job skills and set up tax-free retirement and health care accounts, aides said.
Ahead of Bush's acceptance address, Cheney and convention keynoter Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., unleashed a scathing barrage of attacks on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
"His back-and-forth reflects a habit of indecision and sends a message of confusion," Cheney told GOP delegates in a prime-time address Wednesday night. "Senator Kerry says he sees two Americas. It makes the whole thing mutual. America sees two John Kerrys."
Delegates roared their approval of Cheney's broadside against Kerry, some joining in the taunts by shouting "flip flopper, flip flopper" and waving flip-flop sandals in the air.
Kerry, vacationing on Nantucket island in Massachusetts, was asked whether he took some blows from the speeches.
"I don't think so," said Kerry, who planned to campaign in Ohio on Thursday.
Kerry's running mate, John Edwards, made the round of morning talk shows Thursday to defend the ticket. He said the "over the top" GOP attacks distorted Kerry's record and made him mad.
"What we heard from the Republicans in that hall last night was an enormous amount of anger," Edwards said on CBS's "The Early Show." "If you got up and went to the refrigerator, you would have missed any discussion of what they're going to do about health care, what they're going to do about jobs, what they plan to do about this mess in Iraq."
Trying to slow Bush's momentum, the Kerry campaign plans a seven-state advertising blitz in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Wisconsin as the first installment of a $50 million, 20-state fall ad buy. The campaign will air new ads that seek to shift the focus of the campaign to the economy. In the ads, Kerry pledges to "stand up for the middle class" and suggests that Bush "sides with the special interests."
Within minutes of his arrival in New York on Wednesday, Bush was embracing city firefighters. At a community center in Queens, the president's eyes misted as he stood among the firefighters and held a black fire helmet that read "Commander in Chief." The firefighters chanted "four more years."
"To see the courage and compassion and decency of our fellow Americans during an incredible time of stress has shaped my thinking about the future of this country," Bush said.
Much has changed since Bush stood at Ground Zero three days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and told construction workers through a bullhorn: "I can hear you. ... And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."
That speech helped lead to a surge of national unity before the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that went after al-Qaida terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and his Taliban supporters.
But as Bush seeks re-election, he is confronted by a death toll of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq that is likely to reach 1,000 by Nov. 2; a failure to find bin Laden; investigations into pre-Sept. 11 and prewar intelligence lapses; and an economy that has yet to fully rebound.
Cheney promoted the administration's first-term successes, asserting that "businesses are creating jobs, people are returning to work, mortgage rates are low and homeownership in this country is at an all-time high. The Bush tax cuts are working."
The Democratic National Committee fired back with a statement noting that in his speech Cheney "said the word `job' only twice, and once was in reference to his own."
Miller's keynote address praised Bush's performance in office while blasting his Massachusetts colleague's two-decade Senate record.
"For more than 20 years, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure," Miller said.
Reacting to the pounding by Cheney and Miller, Kerry spokesman Joe Lockhart said: "Slash and burn politics didn't work in 1992. They won't work now. Dick Cheney and Zell Miller looked like angry and grumpy old men."
Associated Press