Cheney Warns of Risk if Rivals Win

Vice President Dick Cheney suggested Tuesday that electing the Democratic presidential ticket would make the United States more vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

Cheney’s comments came on a day when President Bush escalated his efforts to paint Sen. John F. Kerry as wobbly on the war in Iraq and the Democratic challenger continued to more harshly criticize the incumbent for the way he orchestrated the attack.

After Cheney’s controversial remarks, aides to the vice president sought to clarify them, saying he was referring to the terrorist threat that would face any administration elected in November.

But his comments dominated the day’s exchanges on the campaign trail. As the number of deaths of U.S. troops in Iraq reached 1,000, Cheney sought to question how the Democrats would handle national security.

During a question-and-answer session with about 200 supporters at a Des Moines hotel, the vice president said that it was imperative that the nation made the “right choice” in November, adding that decisions made by the next administration would affect the next 30 or 40 years.

“If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that’ll be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and we’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set that these terrorist attacks are criminal attacks and we’re not really at war,” the vice president said.

“I think that would be a terrible mistake for us,” Cheney told the supporters.

Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards immediately fired back, accusing his opponent of trying to frighten voters.

“Dick Cheney’s scare tactics crossed the line today, showing once again that he and George Bush will do anything and say anything to save their jobs,” the North Carolina senator said in a campaign statement.

“Protecting America from vicious terrorists is not a Democratic or Republican issue, it’s an American issue and Dick Cheney and George Bush should know that,” he said. “John Kerry and I will keep America safe, and we will not divide the American people to do it.”

Hours after Cheney’s words caused a stir on news wires and cable news programs, his spokeswoman told reporters that he stood by his statements, but she sought to clarify them.

As the vice president flew aboard Air Force Two back to Washington on Tuesday evening after a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H., campaign press secretary Anne Womack said:

“What the vice president was saying is, ‘Whoever is elected, we face the prospect of a terrible attack.’ But the issue at hand is whether you have the right policies in place” to prevent an attack.

When asked whether Cheney meant to imply that a Kerry presidency would result in a terrorist attack, Womack replied: “The vice president is saying that we need to ensure that we have the right politics in place to protect Americans. The campaign stands by and the vice president stands by my explanation of his statement.”

Earlier in the day, Cheney had bemoaned the tenor of this year’s campaign when asked about Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) recently calling him “a coward” because the vice president did not serve in the military. Harkin made the comment as he decried GOP attacks on Kerry’s service record in Vietnam.

“It’s gotten pretty nasty, no question about it,” Cheney told conservative talk-show host Jan Mickelson on WHO radio in Des Moines. “It’s unfortunate. In all my years in politics, I can’t recall a time quite as harsh as this.”

The vice president’s latest assault on Kerry’s national security credentials came as the Democrats professed confidence in the state of the race, despite several polls that show Bush with a solid lead.

Stephanie Cutter, Kerry’s communications director, said that although the senator’s advisors agreed that the president was ahead by about 7 points, they maintained that the race would tighten.

“Within eight to 10 days, we’ll be back up to where we were, and back to neck-and-neck,” she said.

In recent days, Kerry has sought to regain traction by focusing on the economy, a subject his advisors believe is Bush’s weak point.

But for the second day in a row, the two candidates tussled over Iraq, and the Democrat was set to give a speech today in Cincinnati castigating the president for the rationales he used to go to war.

On Tuesday, Bush criticized his rival for calling the war in Iraq “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time” at a Labor Day campaign stop. He accused Kerry of mimicking the antiwar words of his onetime primary foe, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

The president also used the phrase “flip-flop” to describe his challenger’s views on Iraq, invoking language that had been the domain of his surrogates and supporters.

“He woke up yesterday morning with yet another new position,” he told about 10,000 supporters at a rally on a high school football field in Lee’s Summit, a suburb of Kansas City.

“And this one is not even his own. It is that of his onetime rival, Howard Dean,” Kerry’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination whose campaign was fueled by his fervent opposition to the Iraq war.

Bush said Kerry, in his recent criticisms of the war, “even used the same words Howard Dean did back when he supposedly disagreed with him.”

Cheney echoed the accusation in Manchester, N.H.

The Bush campaign circulated transcripts of exchanges between Kerry and Dean over Iraq during the Democratic primaries, including a May 2003 debate in South Carolina in which Dean called it “the wrong war at the wrong time” and Kerry said it was the “right decision” to disarm former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The Kerry campaign accused the president of making an “outrageous” attack to distract from his economic record.

“George Bush should be worrying more about the mess he’s created in Iraq and the $200-billion cost to American taxpayers rather than attacking Democrats for wanting to fix the problem,” Cutter said.

For his part, Kerry tried to turn the charge of inconsistency back onto the Republicans.

During a town hall meeting in Greensboro, N.C., the senator said that in a book by President George H.W. Bush, Cheney is quoted as saying that invading Iraq during Desert Storm would have been the wrong decision “because if you went to Baghdad, you owned it and you had to run the whole deal,” Kerry said.

“They continually shift their ground,” he said.

He called Bush’s handling of Iraq “catastrophic.” “He chose the date of the start of this war, he chose the moment, and he chose for America to go it alone and today, all of America is paying this price,” Kerry said.

Kerry also took several swings at Bush on the domestic front, accusing the president of supporting outsourcing.

“It’s bad enough that the jobs are being sent overseas, ladies and gentlemen,” the candidate said. “But Bush actually thinks it’s a good idea.”

A Bush spokesman said that Kerry had “shifting positions on outsourcing ... another reason that he faces a credibility problem with the American people.”

*

Times staff writer Nick Anderson contributed to this report. Gerstenzang reported from the trail with Cheney, Gold with Kerry and Wallsten with Bush.