Bush enters attack mode against Kerry

Bush addresses supporters during a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, Saturday. PHOTO: NY TIMES

US George W. Bush inaugurated a new lean, mean stump speech last week that aimed the AK-47s directly at his Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry. On Wednesday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Bush charged that Kerry's policies would make the world a more dangerous place, and that he had a "20-year history of weakness" in the US Senate and a "strategy of defeat" in Iraq.

The speech, Bush's campaign officials said, revealed a president on an all-out offensive in the final stretch of the race.

But what was really revealing was what the president left out.

Gone one of Bush's favorite phrases, used just four days earlier in Ohio, about the "transformational power of liberty." Gone was his familiar line that freedom is "the Almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world." Gone, too, was his sunny prediction that someday a US president would sit down with "a duly elected leader of Iraq" to talk about how to keep the peace in the "greater Middle East."

Campaign insisted that Bush was not ditching his well-worked lines -- all of them in the hopeful language of his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson -- to keep pace with reality on the ground in Iraq. Instead, the officials said that with all the new attack lines against Kerry, something had to go.

And now, with the race in a dead heat, Gersonian poetry can sound off-pitch as accompaniment to daily hand-to-hand combat.

"We're certainly in a tougher part of the campaign," said Nicolle Devenish, the Bush campaign's communication's director. "John Kerry called us a liar on the stump. We're going to go on the offensive every chance we get."

(Actually, Kerry has stopped short of using the word "liar," as he pointed out in the first presidential debate. But he has repeatedly said Bush is "not telling the truth.")

A Republican close to the Bush campaign said that the changes in the 40-minute stump speech were made on the "strong recommendation" of Karl Rove, the president's chief strategist, and that the new presidential attack was working.

"It's resonating with voters more than the language about the bigger issues and bigger goals of a Bush presidency," asserted the Republican, who asked not to be named, because the campaign does not want its advisers publicly discussing strategy. "You know it from polling, you know it from focus groups."