NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The White House and Republicans are setting the stage for a security-heavy September, with President Bush preparing a series of speeches to bolster the war on terror and with Congress ready to debate defense spending and terrorist detention.
Mr. Bush begins his campaign today with a speech to the American Legion designed to drive a pointed message of standing firm against terrorism amid recent violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and the foiled London terrorist plot. He will also talk about the progress made through the Patriot Act and other intelligence reforms, the White House said.
Mr. Bush yesterday insisted the upcoming speeches aren’t about politics, but Democrats said the well was already poisoned by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s speech Tuesday to the American Legion, in which he warned against repeating the mistakes of pre-World War II appeasement and, without explicitly citing Mr. Bush’s critics, said “it is apparent that many have still not learned history’s lessons.”
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Those remarks outraged Democratic politicians, who said Mr. Rumsfeld was equating them and other critics with Nazi sympathizers.
“Maybe there are some people who don’t want to fight the war on terror, but I don’t know them,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, who said “99 percent” of Democrats, as well as Republicans, support fighting terrorists.
The White House didn’t back away from Mr. Rumsfeld’s comments, but neither did officials embrace them. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the Defense Department issued a statement challenging one version of the Associated Press’ story of Mr. Rumsfeld’s speech, and said, “I’ll let [the Defense Department] and the reporters who covered that sort that out.”
Still, she said that in general Mr. Rumsfeld and the president are on the same message.
“What Rumsfeld was talking about was clearly making the case that we remain vigilant in fighting the war on terror and confronting the threats to free societies,” Mrs. Perino said.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, called the defense secretary’s speech “a fresh embarrassment to the nation” and Sen. Jack Reed, Rhode Island Democrat, called it a “calculated political argument.”
Just hours later, Mr. Bush made his call to keep politics out of his speeches.
“These are important times, and I seriously hope people wouldn’t politicize these issues that I’m going to talk about,” he said.
Less than two hours later, the Republican National Committee fired off a memo questioning “Defeatocrat division” among Democrats, and pointing to lawmakers such as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, who led a filibuster of the Patriot Act before later allowing it to pass.
Mr. Schumer, who is in charge of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Democrats, said Republicans used the same national security arguments with some success in the 2002 and 2004 campaigns. But he said 2006 is different.
“Back then, most Americans were content with the direction the war in Iraq and the war on terror were taking. Now they’re not content,” he said.
Coupled with Congress’ plans to debate treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, defense and homeland security spending bills, and the possibility of a debate on the administration’s terrorist surveillance program, Republicans say they are happy to find themselves talking security just weeks before the midterm congressional elections.
“If they want to even further delineate the bright line between where they are and where the rest of the country is on that issue, be my guest,” one Senate Republican leadership aide said.
But the administration may be facing an uphill battle in trying to make its case on Iraq. Just last week a CBS-New York Times poll found that a majority of Americans no longer say the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror, which means they disagree with the central argument the administration makes for remaining engaged in Iraq.
The politics trickles down to this year’s battle for Congress. As Mr. Bush came to Nashville for a fundraiser for Republican Senate candidate Bob Corker and state Republicans, the front page of the Tennessean carried an article examining whether Mr. Bush’s fundraising help — more than $1 million — would be outweighed by support lost from voters upset over the Iraq war.
Speaking at the fundraiser, Mr. Bush said Americans must understand the stakes in Iraq.
“The security of the United States of America, the capacity for our children to grow up in a peaceful world, in large part depends on our willingness to help this young Iraqi democracy succeed,” he said.
He also brought the war on terror into his campaign rhetoric, calling for Mr. Corker’s election because “I need people in Washington, D.C., who are willing to give those who are responsible for protecting America all the tools they need — tools such as the Patriot Act.”
The war-on-terror speeches will culminate in Mr. Bush’s annual address to the United Nations General Assembly, scheduled for Sept. 19. Mr. Bush hopes to have better luck this time than the last series of speeches about the war on terror he did in the spring.
The CBS-New York Times poll found that 45 percent of those surveyed in early March approved of Mr. Bush’s handling of the war on terror, and after two months of speeches, that had risen just one percentage point.
His handling of the war in Iraq was at 31 percent before that series of speeches, and was still at 31 percent after them.
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