NEW YORK, 1 September 2004 — The war on terrorism is permeating this week’s US Republican Party convention.
Indeed, officials with the center-right party sited the four-day pageant in New York, where the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings killed close to 3,000 people.
The 2001 attacks brought the Republican president, George W. Bush, historic levels of public support, which dissipated only after many months and the war in Iraq. His political advisers seek to remind voters of their post-Sept. 11 national unity by launching their fall campaign from New York’s Madison Square Garden, just 6 km from Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center fell.
Yet, just hours before the gavel fell Monday in New York, Bush created a potentially huge distraction from his own message. In an interview on NBC television, he was asked if the so-called war on terrorism was actually winnable.
“I don’t think you can win it,” Bush said. “But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.”
It could be an astonishing political gaffe or a truism about an unconventional war against non-state enemies. But it was red meat to the center-left opposition.
John Edwards, the vice presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, pounced quickly.
“After months of listening to the Republicans base their campaign on their singular ability to win the war on terror, the president now says we can’t win the war on terrorism,” Edwards said. “This is no time to declare defeat. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick, but we have a comprehensive long-term plan to make America safer. And that’s a difference.”
Polls have shown Bush and his opponent John Kerry, a US senator from Massachusetts, in a statistical dead heat leading into this week’s convention, which will end tomorrow with Bush accepting renomination as the Republicans’ candidate in the Nov. 2 presidential election. In the polls, voters mostly gave an edge on the economy and domestic issues to Kerry while Bush remained better regarded on defense and leadership against terrorism.
Bush’s comment dominated the American media on Monday.
“To the extent that it competes with the message coming out of here, it’s a problem” for Bush, Stu Rothenberg, a non-partisan analyst and editor of a newsletter on American politics, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in an interview inside Madison Square Garden.
The impact of the statement “depends on whether you take it to be a change in policy” or an awkward comment by an infamously thick-tongued politician, Rothenberg said. It gives Democrats a new rhetorical line of attack, but the impact with crucial swing voters is likely to be minimal, he added.
“I don’t think Americans think anybody’s going to win the war on terror anytime soon,” Rothenberg said.
The Bush concession is reminiscent of a statement earlier in the summer by Kerry that his government would fight a more “sensitive” war against terrorism. Republicans including Vice President Dick Cheney exploited the opportunity to ridicule the opposition candidate as naive and irresolute.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan took pains Monday to spin Bush’s statement toward an innocuous explanation.
“He was talking about winning it in the conventional sense,” McClellan told reporters in Washington. “You’ve often heard him talk about how this is a different kind of war. We face an unconventional enemy. I don’t think you can expect that there will ever be a formal surrender or a treaty signed, like we have in wars past. ... It requires a generational commitment to win this war on terrorism.”
Bush’s acceptance speech for tomorrow is already written, McClellan said, although he offered few specific hints of the content. The test of the impact from Monday’s news will be whether the president feels the necessity to spend precious time under the convention spotlight to clarify the record himself.
