Edwards: Bush bad, hopefuls worse

Democratic presidential contender John Edwards argued Thursday that President Bush had made the nation less safe and that the Republican candidates were trying to become “a bigger, badder George Bush.”

The remarks by the former senator from North Carolina came one day after he challenged the idea of a global war on terrorism, calling it an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush administration that had strained the U.S. military and emboldened terrorists.

Bush told reporters Thursday that Edwards’ view was naive.

A short time later, during an appearance in Montgomery, Ala., Edwards answered: “George Bush has made America less safe and less respected in the world. What we are seeing now in this campaign is John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and the other Republicans running for president of the United States are trying to be a bigger, badder George Bush. Is that really what America wants over the next four years?”

Edwards, who supports a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, said he would keep the country safe by going “after terrorists where they are.”

“There is an entire new generation of young people in the Islamic world sitting on the fence,” he told reporters, saying that those youths’ future action “depends on whether America can change this dynamic that George Bush has created that America is a bully, that we are selfish and that we don’t care anything about what is happening in other parts of the world.”

At least one Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, scoffed at Edwards’ comments on the war on terrorism.

“Remember that old Edmund Burke quote -- it’s a famous quote: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ And that, I am afraid, is the boiled-down version of what John Edwards said, is that good men should do nothing. Put their head in the sand and hope it all goes away,” Romney told an audience in Jacksonville, Fla.

Edwards was making his first campaign trip to Alabama since he entered the race. He met privately at the Alabama Education Assn. headquarters with several prominent Democrats, including Lt. Gov. Jim Folsom and veteran civil rights lawyer Fred Gray. He also attended a $1,000-a-person fundraising reception hosted by former Lt. Gov. Jere Beasley’s plaintiff law firm.

Alabama has moved its presidential primary to Feb. 5, when about a dozen states plan to vote.