Inside Politics

Paige’s message

“I have a message for the NAACP’s Julian Bond and Kweisi Mfume, who have accused black conservatives of being the ’puppets’ of white people, unable to think for ourselves: You do not own, and you are not the arbiters of, African-American authenticity,” Education Secretary Rod Paige said yesterday in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.

“I am a lifelong member of the NAACP. I have great respect for the organization. Its historical leaders, all visionary thinkers, have been responsible for helping to advance the struggle of African Americans over the past century, making our nation a more equitable and race-blind society. Sadly, the current NAACP leadership has managed to take a proud, effective organization in a totally new direction: naked partisan politics, pure and simple,” Mr. Paige said.

“In particular, Mr. Bond and Mr. Mfume have done a great disservice to our organization, and to the founders of the civil rights movement, with their hateful and untruthful rhetoric about Republicans and President Bush. How ironic that they would direct this vitriol at a president who has appointed more African Americans to high-profile posts, has committed more funds to fight AIDS in Africa, has championed minority homeownership, and has supported more trade and aid for African and Caribbean nations than any other administration.”

Reporting rumors

“Democrats who want John Kerry to be elected spend a lot their time these days fascinated and frightened by the prospect that President Bush will replace Vice President Cheney on the ticket,” ABC’s The Note, a daily roundup written by the network’s political team, said yesterday at https://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/TheNote/TheNote.html.

“Acknowledging that it all may be inside the Beltway clamor, the New York Times’ Elisabeth Bumiller looks at a new ’rumor’ in Washington that ’Mr. Cheney recently dismissed his personal doctor so that he could see a new one, who will conveniently tell him in August that his heart problems make him unfit to run with Mr. Bush.’

“How the talented Ms. Bumiller gets just above the front-page fold of her paper today with a story that includes the word ’rumor’ in the headline is really beyond us,” The Note said.

“Look — the only reason to replace Mr. Cheney is if the calculus is made that doing so would increase the chances of Bush re-election.

“And that calculation could NEVER be made precisely, since removing him would bring on at least some amount of base unhappiness (particularly if he were replaced by a moderate); some accusations of implicit concession of error on Iraq and other policies; and some charges of political cravenness.

“Bumiller’s story has some clever suggestions that Republicans are a part of a three-way conversation on this, but for the most part, this is a Democrat-and-media dialogue.”

Attack boomerangs

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, whose campaign demanded to know on Wednesday whether President Bush read a key Iraq intelligence assessment, did not read the document himself before voting to give Mr. Bush the authority to go to war, Reuters news agency reports, citing aides to Mr. Kerry.

“Along with other senators, he was briefed on the contents of the [National Intelligence Estimate],” said Kerry spokesman Phil Singer.

The Kerry campaign stepped up the attack on Wednesday, sending out an e-mail with the headline, “Did anyone in the White House read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq?”

In a conference call organized by the campaign, Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat and member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said Mr. Bush should have read the 90-page report issued in October 2002.

Asked whether Mr. Kerry had read it, Mr. Durbin responded, “I don’t know.”

Wilson’s dishonesty

“We’re awaiting apologies from former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and all those who championed him, after his July 2003 New York Times op-ed alleging that Mr. Bush had ’twisted’ intelligence ’to exaggerate the Iraqi threat,’ ” the Wall Street Journal says, noting that both a U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report and a British government report have absolved the president and his British counterpart.

The British report also found that President Bush was accurate in saying in his 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium in Africa.

“The news is also relevant to the question of whether any crime was committed when a still unknown administration official told columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA employee and that’s why he had been recommended for a sensitive mission to Niger. A Justice Department special prosecutor is investigating the case, with especially paralyzing effect on the office of the vice president,” the newspaper said in an editorial.

Mr. Wilson appears to have been untruthful about how he concluded there was nothing to the Iraq-Niger uranium story, and about his wife’s role in winning him the assignment, the newspaper said.

“All of this matters because Mr. Wilson’s disinformation became the vanguard of a year-long assault on Mr. Bush’s credibility. The political goal was to portray the president as a ’liar,’ regardless of the facts. Now that we know those facts, Americans can decide who the real liars are.”

Search committee

Illinois Republicans, empty-handed in their search for a U.S. Senate candidate, were left yesterday trying to pick from a field littered with political novices and previously failed office-seekers.

Former National Football League player and coach Mike Ditka, who took himself out of the running hours earlier, urged the party leadership not to concede the GOP-held seat without a fight, Reuters news agency reports.

But there was no sign a search committee was any closer to picking someone for the increasingly uphill battle.

Republican primary winner Jack Ryan was driven off the ballot three weeks ago after unsealed divorce records claimed he took his wife to sex clubs and asked her for trysts in front of strangers.

’Long-lost friend’

It wasn’t just the aspersions cast on his integrity that caused Vice President Dick Cheney to curse Sen. Patrick J. Leahy last month on the Senate floor, Mr. Cheney told a C-SPAN interviewer this week.

“Well, my set-to with Senator Leahy was, I’d say it was a private moment. The Senate wasn’t in session. We were waiting to take our picture, but he had challenged my integrity. And I didn’t like that,” Mr. Cheney told Steve Scully in an interview to be aired Sunday night. “But what I really didn’t like was after he had done so, then he came over — and he had done that in a public forum — and then he came over on the Senate and tried to put his arm around me and treat me as though I was his best long-lost friend. And I didn’t appreciate it. And I spoke rather forcefully of what I thought about his action, and then walked off.”

• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.