Campaigns clash over bin Laden

The presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry yesterday defended the senator’s remarks blaming President Bush for letting Osama bin Laden escape, while the candidate himself backed off some, saying his surrogates shouldn’t make political use of the al Qaeda leader’s latest videotape.

Senior Kerry adviser Tad Devine was asked on CNN’s “Inside Politics” whether it was “shameful” for Mr. Kerry to say, as he did Friday and Saturday, that “I regret that when George Bush had the opportunity in Afghanistan at Tora Bora, he didn’t choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.”

“Well, that’s just a fact,” Mr. Devine said.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, said on ABC, when asked about Mr. Kerry’s critique of administration military strategy at Tora Bora, that “the fact of the matter is that Osama bin Laden is still at large.”

“That is a failure of the Bush administration,” she said.

Bin Laden in his latest video — the first in months from the al Qaeda leader — aimed his remarks directly at a U.S. audience, saying “Bush is still deceiving you,” and declaring that the security of Americans “does not lie in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands.”

Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, Nebraska Democrat, was asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether it was “appropriate for John Kerry, on the day that this tape came out, to criticize George Bush?”

“Oh, I think it was,” said Mr. Kerrey, a surrogate for the Massachusetts senator. “Look, essential to John Kerry’s campaign has been the assertion that we took our eye off the ball. One thing we know about Osama bin Laden, his whereabouts, he’s not in Iraq.”

In addition, another Kerry surrogate, Gov.Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, yesterday said bin Laden was trying to re-elect Mr. Bush.

But in a sit-down interview to be aired tonight, Mr. Kerry was reminded by Peter Jennings of ABC News yesterday that “some of your surrogates” were making the bin Laden tape into “a political issue.”

“Well, they shouldn’t,” replied Mr. Kerry, who concentrated his speeches yesterday on domestic issues.

“I don’t want them doing that. I think that’s wrong,” he told ABC. “I think that every American is outraged at the sight of Osama bin Laden and at anything that he says about the American electoral process.”

The Bush campaign was even harsher in its condemnation of some surrogates, and Vice President Dick Cheney opened a new line of attack, noting that the Kerry campaign took a poll in response to the bin Laden tape.

“The thing that I find amazing about it was that John Kerry’s first response was to go conduct a poll to find out what he should say about this tape from Osama bin Laden,” he told the audience at a stump speech yesterday in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

“It’s as though he didn’t know what he believed until he has to go and check the poll, stick his finger in the air to see which way the political winds are blowing, and then make a decision and take a position and articulate a point of view,” he said, repeating a constant Bush theme against Mr. Kerry on other issues — that he is indecisive and a flip-flopper.

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