Republicans fear the devastating revelations about their failure to see al-Qaeda as an imminent threat before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have seriously dented US President George Bush's election campaign.
At the end of a week of hugely damaging publicity surrounding the allegations made by Bush's former anti-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, Bush's rating has taken a dive in key opinion polls.
A Rasmussen tracking poll of the race put Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry three points ahead of Bush by 47 points to 44.
That dramatically reversed a 4 percentage point Bush lead of just a week ago. The pollsters put the change down to the fallout from Clarke's claims. At the same time the respected firm Zogby logged Bush's approval ratings as slipping to an all-time low of 46 percent.
Strategists on both sides know there are still seven months to go before election day, but Democratic planners are celebrating a week of hits on the Republicans after Clarke's damning book on Bush's record on fighting terrorism was published.
"The Richard Clarke story is going to go on and on," said Larry Haas, a former aide to Bill Clinton.
The events, compounded by Clarke's emotional testimony before a government commission into Sept. 11, were especially bad for Republicans after a week when Kerry's campaign had run into a series of gaffes. Pundits had been lauding the Republicans for getting their own stuttering campaign on track when Clarke's bombshells promptly derailed it.
White House officials were on the defensive as the media focused on allegations they had not done enough to protect the US. That was compounded by jokes Bush cracked at a Washington dinner, mocking his own inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush's laughing face was plastered on the front page of the New York Daily News under the headline: WMD Joke Flap.
But the key to the week was Clarke. Terrorism advisor to four presidents, he played himself as the conscience-stricken whistle-blower. Images of Clarke apologizing to relatives of victims of Sept. 11 dominated headlines and TV news. Bush's security advisor Condoleezza Rice suffered particularly badly as Clarke claimed she had stymied his efforts to raise the importance of fighting terrorism. Rice, who has refused to testify in public before the Sept. 11 commission, was forced into asking to appear before it in private to rebut Clarke's charges.
The effect was to attack the Bush campaign at the heart of its re-election strategy: fighting the war on terror. Democrats want to fight the election on the economy and jobs but Clarke delivered massive blows to the Republican's main platform of national security, forcing Bush's team unexpectedly on the defensive. Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, now tops bestseller lists across America. More than 500,000 copies have been printed -- a huge amount for a political non-fiction work.
The White House has fought back ferociously, portraying Clarke as a man out to sell books and make a partisan political point.
Republican Senator Bill Frist accused Clarke of "an appalling act of profiteering" and lambasted his "theatrical apology" to the Sept. 11 families. Republicans have begun a move to declassify two-year-old secret testimony Clarke gave to intelligence committees in the hope they differ markedly from what he has published in his memoir. If they do they will accuse Clarke of lying under oath to Congress.
RSS