Bush stresses war on terror

President Bush yesterday said the race for the White House comes down to “clear choices” between him and John Kerry on five issues: “your family’s security, your budget, your quality of life, your retirement and the bedrock values that are so critical to our families and our future.”

Despite his new stump speech on tax cuts, education spending, Social Security reform and abortion, Mr. Bush still leaned heavily on a single topic — the war on terror — the issue his campaign thinks the president must emphasize to win re-election.

“The enemies who killed thousands of innocent people are still dangerous and determined to strike us again,” Mr. Bush said in Wilkes Barre, Pa. “The outcome of this election will set the direction of the war against terror, and in this war there is no place for confusion and no substitute for victory.”

In Milwaukee, Mr. Kerry, facing a potential gender gap of “security moms,” yesterday told an audience of Wisconsin women that he would end the culture of worry over domestic issues such as wages and college costs that Mr. Bush has created.

“America never was a country that had to live with that kind of worry, and we deserve to be a country that doesn’t have to in the future,” he said. “Today, for far too many women, the American dream seems a million miles away because you’ve barely got time to sleep, and when you’ve barely got time to sleep, you’ve barely got time to dream.”

Repackaging his stump speech for this audience, Mr. Kerry reduced his references to national security. He briefly mentioned his intention to hunt down and kill terrorists, which drew scattered applause, and his commitment to work with allies, which drew a much broader round of applause.

Instead, he said, Americans, and women in particular, face increasing domestic pressures.

“They work hard every single day, every single night, but still each new day brings on a new set of worries,” the Massachusetts Democrat said. “Worry, when their children go out to play, that they might get injured and health insurance won’t cover it; that elderly parents can’t afford prescription drugs; that jobs will be lost; and that they can’t afford college tuitions.”

A new Bush campaign ad that began airing yesterday, called “Wolves,” criticizes Mr. Kerry for voting to cut defense and intelligence spending.

“In an increasingly dangerous world, even after the first attack on America, John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America’s intelligence operations by $6 billion,” the ad’s narrator said over video of a wolf lurking in the woods.

“Cuts so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses,” the ad continues. “And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.”

The ad was inspired by Ronald Reagan’s “Bear in the Woods” ad in 1984, accusing Democrat Walter Mondale of being too liberal to deal with the threat of Soviet communism.

Mr. Bush, speaking to a crowd of about 15,000 in this heavily Democratic northeast corner of Pennsylvania, aggressively painted Mr. Kerry as unable to take the actions necessary to protect Americans from another catastrophic terrorist attack.

“His top foreign policy adviser has questioned whether it’s even a war at all, saying that’s just a metaphor, like the war on poverty,” Mr. Bush said. “I’ve got news: Anyone who thinks we are fighting a metaphor does not understand the enemy we face and has no idea how to win the war and keep America secure.”

The Kerry campaign responded sharply, saying that despite Mr. Bush’s claims that he has killed or captured three-fourths of the al Qaeda leadership, “the organization is resurging and morphing.”

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