Kerry's liberalism a weapon for Bush

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President Bush's re-election campaign has begun a concerted effort to divide the Democratic Party by forcing its congressional candidates to either embrace or reject Sen. John Kerry's liberalism.

"This is one of the huge stories of the campaign," said Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman. "You're going to see a lot of efforts by Republican candidates and by the campaign to ask where people stand."

Earlier this month, for example, Rep. David Vitter, a Republican who is seeking to replace retiring Democratic Sen. John B. Breaux of Louisiana, challenged his three Democratic rivals to endorse Mr. Kerry's support for higher taxes and opposition to a constitutional amendment banning homosexual "marriage."

In a conference call with Louisiana reporters that was set up by the Bush campaign, Mr. Vitter also demanded that his rivals take a stand on recent remarks by billionaire Democratic financier George Soros, who last week compared the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"I think that's an outrageous statement," Mr. Vitter said. "We need to hear what John Kerry thinks about that statement, what the U.S. Senate candidates in Louisiana from the Democratic Party think about that statement."

Such demands have particular resonance in the South, where Democrats tend to be more conservative than in other parts of the country, said Bush campaign spokesman Reed Dickens.

"It's not just a Louisiana story," he said. "We're going to broaden it out to maybe about four other states in the South and maybe the Midwest.

"We're going to start to try to highlight the fact that Senate candidates are going out of their way not to endorse Kerry and not to say a word about him," he added. "Or if they do endorse him, they keep their distance."

Mr. Mehlman suggested that the strategy has the potential to split the Democratic Party along ideological fault lines.

"The way that Democrats are able to get elected in states like Louisiana and South Dakota and Georgia and North Carolina and South Carolina is by running as Louisiana or South Dakota or North Carolina Democrats, not as liberal Democrats from Washington," he said.