Before attending a rally to hear US Vice President Dick Cheney, citizens in New Mexico were required to sign a political loyalty oath approved by the Republican national committee.
"I, [full name] ... do herby [sic] endorse George W. Bush for reelection of the United States," the form said. "In signing the above endorsement you are consenting to use and release [sic] of your name by Bush-Cheney as an endorser of President Bush."
President George W. Bush is campaigning at events billed as "Ask President Bush." Only supporters are allowed in. Talking points are distributed to questioners. In Traverse City, Michigan, a 55-year-old social studies teacher who wore a Kerry sticker had her ticket torn up at the door.
"How can anyone in the US deny someone entry?" she asked. "Isn't this a democracy?"
At every rally, Bush repeats the same speech, touting a "vibrant economy" and his leadership in a war where "you cannot show weakness." He introduces local entrepreneurs who praise his tax cuts (more than 1 million jobs have been lost in his term). Then Bush calls on questioners. More than one-fifth of them profess their evangelical faith or denounce gay marriage.
In Niceville, Florida, one said: "This is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House."
"Thank you," Bush replied.
Another: "Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?"
In Albuquerque, he was told: "It's an honor every day when I get to pray for you as president."
And this one: "Thank God we finally have a commander-in-chief."
Others repeat attack lines on Senator John Kerry's military record, to which Bush responds with an oblique but encouraging "Thanks."
Bush's overriding strategy is to bolster his credentials as a decisive military figure and to impugn his opponent's manhood. In his latest TV commercial, he says: "We cannot hesitate, we cannot yield, we must do everything in our power to bring an enemy to justice before they hurt us again."
But, according to the Washington Post, in the last two years Bush has uttered the elusive Osama bin Laden's name only 10 times, and "on six of those occasions it was because he was asked a direct question ... Not once during that period has he talked about bin Laden at any length, or said anything substantive."
At "Ask President Bush" events, he mentions Sept. 11 only to raise the threat of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Cheney sneered at Kerry for even using the word "sensitive" with respect to counterterrorism. Not one war was "won by being sensitive," Cheney mocked.
Kerry, in fact, had called for fighting "a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history."
Cheney's distortion is calculated to attempt to portray Kerry as somehow effeminate.
At the same time, a Republican front group of Vietnam veterans financed by a major Bush contributor is running an ad campaign claiming Kerry's account of his military record is false. But not one of these veterans served with him on his boat.
During the Vietnam war, Bush famously used his father's connections to get a posting as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard because it was filled with the sons of privilege. After refusing to submit to a routine drug test, he was suspended and never flew again. He got himself transferred to the Alabama National Guard, but didn't turn up for his tour of duty. Since then, he has withheld his full military records.
Now he encourages smears that a genuine war hero has lied about his service and is a coward. But this is more than a case of projection. The more profound issue is not who served in Vietnam and who dodged. It is whether the president is a sovereign.
Since the birth of the US party system, presidential candidates have gone directly to the sovereign people to make their case. After the Democratic convention, Kerry traveled from New England to the northwest doing just that. Not one of the hundreds of thousands who attended his open-air rallies had to pledge allegiance to him, and he encountered organized Bush hecklers as part of the price. At his rallies Bush is a pseudo-populist. But these controlled environments reflect his deeper view of the presidency as sovereign, preempting democracy.
Floundering in the polls, without a strategy for Iraq, unwilling to say the name bin Laden, he is secure in the knowledge that the cheering multitudes have been selected. "Ask President Bush" has crystallized the underlying issue, framed succinctly by the greatest American poet of democracy, Walt Whitman, who wrote: "The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him."
Sidney Blumenthal is a former advisor to former US president Bill Clinton and Washington bureau chief of salon.com.
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