Democrats’ Post-Sept. 11 Gloves Officially Come Off

In the most sweeping Democratic critique of George W. Bush since last year’s terrorist attacks, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe on Saturday condemned the president’s ethics and record, and accused him of wasting the chance for progress on key domestic problems from the economy to health care.

“George Bush squandered our trust, he ignored the mandate, and he wasted the opportunity,” McAuliffe insisted in a speech at a DNC meeting in Las Vegas.

The sharply worded address, following recent criticisms nearly as pointed from 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore and other party leaders, leaves no doubt that the hesitation Democrats felt about challenging Bush after Sept. 11 is rapidly eroding.

The White House condemned McAuliffe’s speech as a return to “negative attacks.”

“What has become clear is that the Democratic Party cannot come together and agree on a positive agenda for the country,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “It appears all they can agree to do is to attack and tear down, and that’s a really sad commentary.”

The broadside from McAuliffe--who consulted with the party’s congressional leadership and former President Clinton before delivering the address--suggests that less than a year after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon discouraged partisan conflict, this fall’s midterm elections are likely to be as polarized and vituperative as usual.

In particular, with voter anxiety about the stock market and the overall economy rising, Democrats are sharpening their attacks on Bush’s economic management. “Every time this economic team opens its mouth, markets shudder, currencies collapse, and Americans watch their 401(k)s dwindle,” McAuliffe said Saturday.

In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush indirectly responded to those charges.

Highlighting an economic summit he will convene Tuesday in Waco, Texas, Bush argued that a “recession ... was beginning as I took office” and the economy was further weakened by “the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the corporate scandals that have recently come to light.”

But Bush argued that his agenda offered the best response to those challenges. The $1.35-trillion tax cut he pushed through Congress last year “boosted our economy at just the right time,” he said. Likewise, he argued that the expedited “fast-track” trade authority Congress recently provided him will allow him to reach agreements that “open foreign markets to American goods, creating high-paying jobs at home.”

While criticizing Bush’s economic record, McAuliffe, like other Democrats, offered no alternative agenda for invigorating the economy or the sagging stock markets. Divided over whether to seek a rollback in Bush’s tax cut, Democrats haven’t presented a broad plan for accelerating growth. Instead, they have centered their election message on individual programs, such as providing prescription drugs for senior citizens or opposing Bush’s proposal to partially privatize Social Security.

McAuliffe followed that pattern, accusing Bush of breaking a series of promises from the 2000 campaign and of failing to apply the sense of national unity that emerged after the terrorist attacks to domestic problems such as pension security and access to health care.

Noting that candidate Bush promised to “change the tone” in Washington, McAuliffe accused the president of orchestrating Republican attacks on Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), the target of withering ads from conservative political groups. McAuliffe also accused Bush of violating his pledges to protect Social Security and Medicare by “drawing down the Medicare and Social Security trust funds to pay for his misguided tax cut.”

The White House has argued that the recession and the cost of responding to the Sept. 11 attacks are the principal reasons Washington has needed to divert Social Security funds to operating the rest of government this year. The Congressional Budget Office projected Friday that, after four years of budget surpluses, the government this year will spend all of its general tax revenue and all the taxes collected for Social Security, and still increase the national debt by $157 billion.

McAuliffe targeted Bush’s ethics more directly than most other Democrats. He charged that questions surrounding the president’s sale of stock while he served as a board member of Harken Energy Corp. more than a decade ago--and the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into accounting practices at Halliburton Co. while Vice President Dick Cheney served as its chief executive--have left the president “unable to lead” on corporate ethics.

But McClellan said Bush demonstrated his ability to lead on the issue by recently signing into law the most sweeping accounting and corporate governance reforms since the Depression-era New Deal.

Finally, expressing publicly the private grumblings of many Democrats, McAuliffe accused Bush of breaking his pledge to “never exploit the national crisis that united us.” He said the White House was using the terrorist attacks to deflect criticism over the return of the federal budget deficit and to boost Republican chances in the midterm elections.