BUSH'S BRAINS

John Nichols writes: Bush/Cheney '04, the President's election campaign, is supposed to be the smartest, smoothest political operation since Reagan/Bush in 1984. But the campaign stumbled when it aired television ads that featured images of the dead being removed from Ground Zero. The Bush team knew it would take hits for branding the President as the 9/11 candidate but planned to dismiss the criticism as partisan carping. Instead, the Bush camp found itself doing damage control after families and friends of the dead said what too many Democrats have been afraid to say: that the President was exploiting tragedy for political gain. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was dispatched to describe the ads as tasteful, but he declined to say whether he would exploit images of the dead for political purposes--as most candidates in 2002 Congressional races avoided doing. The people who dressed Bush in a flight suit to declare the Iraq war "mission accomplished" have provided more evidence that national security issues--supposed to be Bush's most explosive weapons in this campaign--are more volatile than imagined.

OL' DOGGETT LEARNS NEW TRICKS

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.