Obama lashes out at Bush, McCain over appeasement comments

Sen. Barack Obama today slammed President Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain for suggesting that Democrats were willing to negotiate with terrorists.

Speaking before a forum on agricultural issues, Obama strongly responded to what he described as an unprecedented attack from President Bush during an address to the Knesset on Thursday and McCain’s comments later in the day.

“They’re trying to scare you and trying to keep you from seeing the truth,” Obama told a cheering crowd, “and the reason is they can’t win a foreign policy argument on the merits.”

Obama today continued to link McCain to the Bush administration, a key theme the Democrats have loudly sounded as the political battles have focused more on the general elections in November. Both men “have a lot to answer for” in foreign policy, Obama said.

“Our Iran policy is a complete failure right now. I’m running for president to change course, not to continue George Bush’s,” he said.

Saying that what’s needed in U.S. policy toward Iran is “tough principled diplomacy,” Obama said that is what was advocated by former presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan and Bush’s own defense secretary, Robert Gates.

In a speech to the Israeli Knesset on Thursday marking the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding, Bush attacked those who wanted to negotiate, though he never named anyone.

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along… . We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history,” the president said.

At a televised news conference, Obama said he was offended by Bush’s comments and noted that past presidents, including Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon and Reagan, had talked directly to dictators.

“There is a strong, bipartisan tradition of engaging in that kind of diplomacy,” Obama told reporters.

The White House today continued to deny that Bush meant to single out Obama, arguing that aides wondered if some might take the remark as a slap at former President Jimmy Carter, who raised eyebrows last month when he met with the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

“We did not anticipate that it would be taken” as an anti-Obama comment, said White House aide Ed Gillespie on Air Force One as Bush flew to Saudi Arabia. “It’s kind of hard to take it that way if you look at the actual words of the president’s remarks, which are consistent with what he has said in the past.”

But Democrats have insisted the remarks were meant to target them. Obama today accused Bush of “exactly the kind of appalling attack that’s divided the country and that alienates us from the world.”

Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, also blamed McCain for his speech on Thursday that accused Obama of “not being fit to protect this nation.”

“So much for civility,” Obama said. “In the Bush-McCain worldview, anybody who disagrees is an appeaser.

“You can’t suggest you want to be bipartisan and then run the kinds of campaign tactics we’ve seen in the last few days,” Obama said of McCain.

The Illinois senator said he would welcome a debate about protecting U.S. interests “anytime, anywhere, and that’s a debate I will win because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for.”

Noting that Osama bin Laden is still at large, that weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq and that Al Qaeda “is stronger than ever because we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan,” Obama said that the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq had made Iran stronger.

Obama, who has made a campaign pledge to reach out to regimes and dictatorships, quickly issued a statement saying he had no intention of negotiating with terrorists and accusing Bush of launching “a false political attack.”

McCain campaigned in West Virginia and Kentucky today. At a stop in Louisville, Ky., at the annual meeting of the National Rifle Assn., he said: “It is reckless to suggest that unconditional meetings will advance our interests.

“It would be a wonderful thing if we lived in a world where we don’t have enemies. But that’s not the world we live in. And until Sen. Obama understands that reality, the American people have every reason to doubt whether he has the strength, the judgment and the determination to keep us safe.”

The McCain campaign earlier accused Obama of mischaracterizing Gates’ position.

Democrats today accused McCain of hypocrisy, saying the Arizona senator has also advocated dealing with Hamas, as he did in an interview with Britain’s Sky News two years ago when he said: “They’re the government. Sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another.”

McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said McCain has long said he would impose preconditions before meeting with Hamas. “John McCain has always believed that serious engagement would require mandatory conditions and Hamas must change itself fundamentally, renounce violence, abandon its goal of eradicating Israel and accept a two-state solution,” Bounds said in a statement.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Obama picked up another superdelegate endorsement today from Rep. Pete Stark (D-Fremont), whose East Bay district voted heavily for New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I have the greatest respect for Sen. Clinton and for her many years of service, but I believe the time has come to unify our party,” he said in a statement. “The outcome we need in November is a Democratic president. To achieve that, we must turn our focus squarely on Sen. McCain and his quest to continue another four years of the failed Bush agenda.”

Another recent Obama advocate, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, said today he would not be a vice presidential candidate again, as he was in 2004. “Won’t happen,” Edwards said on NBC’s “Today” show. “This is not something I’m interested in.”

Asked if he would take a role in an Obama administration, Edwards said the two had only discussed the issue “in the most abstract way.”

Edwards said Obama had told him: “I want you on my team.”

 nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com

 michael.muskal@latimes.com

Riccardi reported from South Dakota and Muskal from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Johanna Neuman contributed from Washington.