Bush Attack Ad Is Questioned

With a new advertisement that accuses Sen. John F. Kerry of viewing terrorism as a “nuisance,” President Bush is continuing his push to depict his Democratic opponent in a harshly negative light.

But some analysts warned Monday that his campaign was playing loose with the facts -- and that the attack could backfire.

The new ad, which began appearing late Sunday on national cable stations, has drawn protests from the Kerry campaign and other critics, who say the Bush camp took a line out of context from a recent newspaper interview with the Massachusetts senator.

Some critics said the ad followed a pattern of the president distorting his rival’s record on taxes, healthcare and other matters in an attempt to portray him as too liberal and unfit to lead the fight against terrorism.

They said the pattern began after polls showed the race tightening and after Bush stumbled during his first debate with Kerry.

Kerry has also been accused of distortions in his attacks on Bush. But Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, who is not working for the Bush campaign, said Bush’s attacks could wind up hurting the president by undermining his credibility.

“The Bush campaign did an effective job creating questions about Sen. Kerry’s credibility that led them to a double-digit lead” in several national polls in early September, Fabrizio said. “But it would be a shame if that knife were turned on them because they pushed the envelope too far with ads like they released” Sunday.

Marshall Wittman, a former aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) who is a registered independent and recently joined the Democratic Leadership Council, said of the new ad: “They want to demonize the opposition by any means necessary, and if that means distorting one sentence in an 11,000-word article, then so be it.”

The Bush campaign staunchly defended the ad Monday as accurate. Titled “World View,” it draws on Kerry’s comments, published in the New York Times Sunday magazine, that his goal as president in waging war on terrorism would be to “get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.”

In the interview, Kerry drew parallels between his vision for the war and the way law enforcement battles intractable problems.

“As a former law enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution,” Kerry was quoted as saying. “We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day.”

In the Bush ad, a narrator says: “Now Kerry says we have to get back to the place where terrorists are a nuisance like gambling and prostitution. We’re never going to end them.”

“Terrorism a nuisance?” the narrator asks. “How can Kerry protect us when he doesn’t understand the threat?”

The Kerry camp complained that the ad inaccurately indicated that he viewed terrorism in the present as a mere nuisance and unfairly suggested that he didn’t take the threat seriously.

Kerry aides also noted that Bush himself had suggested that the fight against terrorism might have no fixed end. In a television interview in August, he said, “I don’t think you can win it, but I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.”

On the campaign trail Monday, Bush appeared to backtrack a bit from the new ad. He continued to criticize Kerry’s choice of the word “nuisance,” but noted that the Democrat had used it in the context of trying to diminish terrorism.

“Now just this weekend, Sen. Kerry talked of reducing terrorism to -- quote -- ‘nuisance’ -- end quote -- and compared it to prostitution and illegal gambling,” Bush told a rally in Hobbs, N.M.

“See, I couldn’t disagree more,” the president said. “Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying terrorists and spreading freedom and liberty around the world.”

Defending the ad in a conference call arranged by the Bush campaign, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said Kerry’s quote reflected a sharp difference between Bush and his challenger.

“The idea that you can have an acceptable level of terrorism is frightening,” Giuliani said. “How do you explain that to the people who are beheaded or the innocent people that are killed, that we’re going to tolerate a certain acceptable [level] of terrorism, and that acceptable level will exist and then we’ll stop thinking about it?”

Strategists in both parties say Bush began intensifying his attacks on Kerry after the first presidential debate Sept. 30, in Coral Gables, Fla., in which the president was widely perceived as off-stride.

Drawing on a comment Kerry made during the debate, for instance, Bush said later that Kerry “wants our national security decisions subject to the approval of a foreign government.”

Bush’s criticism was based on Kerry’s statement that preemptive strikes must pass a “global test where your countrymen, your people, understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing. And you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.”

Democrats argued then that Bush was taking the quote out of context, noting that Kerry had said for months that he would not require another country’s permission to act preemptively, only that the United States should be able to prove the legitimacy of using military force.

At their second debate, on Friday in St. Louis, Bush accused Kerry of voting 98 times for tax increases. The figure was challenged by Democrats and by factcheck.org, an independent website published by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. According to factcheck.org, 43 of the 98 votes were on budget measures that established revenue targets but did not legislate tax increases. The Bush total included several votes on one bill.

Kerry has also stretched the facts in criticizing the president. He frequently chides Bush for presiding over the loss of 1.6 million jobs, but that number refers only to the private sector. Overall, the nation’s job base had shrunk by about 585,000 since Bush took office.

Also, Kerry often accuses Bush of allowing Al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden to escape even after the U.S. had him “surrounded” in Tora Bora and “outsourced” the hunt to Afghan warlords.

But it has not been confirmed that Bin Laden was in that location at the time. And Gen. Tommy Franks has said that the use of local Afghan forces was “essential” to navigate the rugged terrain.

Wallsten reported from Washington and Reynolds from Denver. Times staff writer Michael Finnegan in New Mexico also contributed to this report.