Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday August 19, 2004
The Guardian

Before attending a rally to hear vice president ***** Cheney, citizens in New
Mexico were required to sign a political loyalty oath approved by the
Republican national committee. "I, [full name] ... do herby [sic] endorse
George W Bush for reelection of the United States." The form noted: "In signing
the above endorsement you are consenting to use and release of your name by
Bush-Cheney as an endorser of President Bush."

Bush is campaigning at events billed as Ask President Bush. Only supporters are
allowed in. Talking points are distributed to questioners. In Traverse City,
Michigan, a 55-year-old social studies teacher who wore a Kerry sticker had her
ticket torn up at the door. "How can anyone in the US deny someone entry?" she
asked. "Isn't this a democracy?"

At every rally, Bush repeats the same speech, touting a "vibrant economy" and
his leadership in a war where "you cannot show weakness". He introduces local
entrepreneurs who praise his tax cuts. (More than one million jobs have been
lost in his term.) Then Bush calls on questioners. More than one-fifth of them
profess their evangelical faith or denounce gay marriage. In Niceville,
Florida, one said: "This is the very first time that I have felt that God was
in the White House." "Thank you," replied Bush. Another: "Mr President, as a
child, how can I help you get votes?" In Albuquerque, he was told: "It's an
honour every day when I get to pray for you as president." And this one: "Thank
God we finally have a commander-in-chief." Others repeat attack lines on John
Kerry's military record to which Bush responds with an oblique but encouraging
"Thanks".

Bush's overriding strategy is to bolster his credentials as a decisive military
figure and to impugn his opponent's manhood. In his latest TV commercial, he
says: "We cannot hesitate, we cannot yield, we must do everything in our power
to bring an enemy to justice before they hurt us again." But, according to the
Washington Post, for the last two years he has uttered the elusive Osama bin
Laden's name only 10 times, and "on six of those occasions it was because he
was asked a direct question ... Not once during that period has he talked about
Bin Laden at any length, or said anything substantive". At Ask President Bush
events, he mentions 9/11 only to raise the threat of Saddam.

Vice president Cheney sneered at Kerry for even using the word "sensitive" with
respect to counter-terrorism. Not one war was "won by being sensitive", mocked
Cheney. Kerry, in fact, had called for fighting "a more effective, more
thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that
reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to
American values in history". Cheney's distortion is calculated to attempt to
portray Kerry as somehow effeminate.

At the same time, a Republican front group of Vietnam veterans financed by a
major Bush contributor is running an ad campaign claiming Kerry's account of
his military record is false. But not one of these veterans served with him on
his boat.

During the Vietnam war, Bush famously used his father's connections to get a
posting as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard because it was filled with
the sons of privilege. After refusing to submit to a routine drug test, he was
suspended and never flew again. He got himself transferred to the Alabama
National Guard, but didn't turn up for his tour of duty. Since then, he has
withheld his full military records. Now he encourages smears that a genuine war
hero has lied about his service and is a coward. But this is more than a case
of projection. The more profound issue is not who served in Vietnam and who
dodged. It is whether the president is a sovereign.

Since the birth of the US party system, presidential candidates have gone
directly to the sovereign people to make their case. After the Democratic
convention, Kerry travelled from New England to the northwest doing just that.
Not one of the hundreds of thousands who attended his open-air rallies had to
pledge allegiance to him, and he encountered organised Bush hecklers as part of
the price. At his rallies Bush is a pseudo-populist. But these controlled
environments reflect his deeper view of the presidency as sovereign, preempting
democracy.

Floundering in the polls, without a strategy for Iraq, unwilling to say the name
of Bin Laden, he is secure in the knowledge that the cheering multitudes have
been selected. Ask President Bush has crystallised the underlying issue, framed
succinctly by the greatest American poet of democracy, Walt Whitman, who wrote:
"The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here
for him."

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington
bureau chief of salon.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1285936,00.html