Who's tougher on terror?

Conservatives blame 9/11 on Clinton. But it was Bush Republicans who made deals with terrorists -- while Clinton's team took concrete steps to protect Americans. Part 5 of "Big Lies."

By Joe Conason

Aug 22, 2003 | "Conservatives are tough on terrorism, while liberal Democrats are soft."

After terrorists attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, liberal Democrats on Capitol Hill eagerly lined up with conservative Republicans to pledge their support for the President's war against al-Qaida and the Taliban. No one mentioned the hesitancy of George W. Bush's initial response to the terror strikes. No one said or did anything that might hint at dissension in a time of national crisis. When Bush showed up at a joint session of Congress nine days after the fall of the World Trade Center to deliver a rousing speech, he won standing applause across the bitter partisan divide left by the 2000 election.

That evening, the Democratic leaders in Congress for the first time declined the television networks' standard offer of free airtime to answer a Republican presidential address. "We want America to speak with one voice tonight and we want enemies and the whole world and all of our citizens to know that America speaks tonight with one voice," explained Richard Gephardt, the House Democratic leader. Without knowing any specifics of Bush's plan for military action, Gephardt pledged, "We have faith in him and his colleagues in the executive branch to do this in the right way."

At a press conference after the President's address, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle stood with his Republican counterpart, Trent Lott, to demonstrate joint support for the President. "Tonight there is no opposition party," said Lott. "We stand here united, not as Republicans and Democrats, not as Southerners or Westerners or Midwesterners or Easterners, but as Americans." Agreed Daschle, "We want President Bush to know -- we want the world to know -- that he can depend on us."

Even many of Bush's harshest critics on the left praised his eloquence that evening and expressed their support for him. "He hit a home run," said Representative Maxine Waters, the firebrand Los Angeles Democrat. "We may disagree later, but now is not the time."

Left politely unmentioned by Waters was the indelible fact that in the hours following the attack, Bush had failed to reassure and rally the nation. Under the extraordinary circumstances, he was rightly afforded an opportunity to recoup his credibility with very little negative comment. (That this was more than most Republicans had ever done for Bill Clinton didn't matter. The Democrats were not inclined to trim their patriotism to match the opportunism of their adversaries.)

In Bush's sudden surge of popularity, his political adviser Karl Rove saw an immediate opportunity. Midterm elections would be coming up in the fall of 2002, which meant the Republicans could exploit wartime patriotism and the President's newfound power to gain seats in Congress and retake the Senate. The need for bipartisan cooperation didn't matter. Neither did the fact that the Democrats had been just as supportive of the war effort and security measures as the Republicans.

The inspiring presidential rhetoric that unified the nation would soon be discarded. The memory of politicians of both parties gathering on the steps of the Capitol to sing "God Bless America" meant nothing. The slogan of a nation at war that blossomed on billboards, bumper stickers and storefronts -- "United We Stand" -- was no longer convenient. Less than four months after Bush's September 20 address to the joint session of Congress, Rove spoke behind closed doors at the Republican National Committee's winter conference in Austin, Texas. There he revealed his plan to regain control of the Senate and retain control of the House by turning the war on terror into a partisan weapon.

"We can go to the country on this issue, because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America," Rove explained. Those remarks, although provocative in departing from the bipartisan unity of September 11's aftermath, were considerably blander than the vicious line put out by Republicans and conservatives ever since.

For Rove, terrorism served as the universal solvent of national politics. The response to terror raised President Bush's sagging poll numbers and, for a while, gave him the kind of political Teflon armor once worn by Ronald Reagan. The war on terror excused Bush's enormous deficit spending, his attacks on public employees, his curtailment of traditional freedoms, his unilateralist foreign policy, and his drive to wage "pre-emptive" war on Iraq. The threat of terror gave him a sword against any and all opponents, foreign or domestic, which he used to cut down Democrats in the midterm elections.

Rove's electoral strategy could only function effectively, however, if the press and the public, as well as Congress, were discouraged from examining what the Republicans in power had done to combat terrorism in the months before the catastrophe. Any such inquiry would inevitably clash with the themes of Republican strength and Democratic weakness that Rove intended to promote.

Only one problem on the political horizon might complicate Rove's strategic use of terrorism: an independent investigation of the circumstances leading to the September 11 catastrophe. Americans wanted answers to important questions about how the Bush administration confronted the terrorist threat before the fall of the World Trade Center. Were the seasoned Republican officials who took office nine months before the attack as tough as their talk? Were they alerted to the impending threat? Did they heed the warnings? Why did U.S. intelligence and security agencies fail to thwart the al-Qaida plot?

The nation remains far from reaching any conclusions about those issues -- and others of equal importance -- because the White House obstructed the investigation for more than a year. Bush and Cheney didn't want Congress to investigate the causes of the disaster, and they certainly didn't want any snooping by an independent commission. So determined was the White House to conceal any embarrassing facts that when the Democrats took control of the Senate in spring 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney tried to intimidate Majority Leader Tom Daschle from undertaking a serious investigation of the September 11 catastrophe. Both Newsweek and the Washington Post reported that Cheney had called Daschle to warn against the investigation.

The prospect of public hearings particularly disturbed Cheney. He told Daschle that any such inquiry would be stigmatized as partisan interference with the war on terrorism. The President later echoed Cheney's bluster, in milder terms, at a breakfast with congressional leaders. In the months since those pleas and threats were issued, the White House and its political surrogates have repeatedly sought to exploit the campaign against terrorism for cheap advantage. (The Republicans sold pictures of the commander in chief on Air Force One, for example, while demanding immunity from public scrutiny.) But conservative Republicans such as Alabama Senator Richard Shelby were as bemused and troubled as the Democrats by the administration's attempt to cover up lethal incompetence.

What seems clear, even now, is that the President and his associates are not eager to see those troubling issues examined by any independent authority -- out of reasonable fear that the findings will not flatter them.

Next Page: Why was the Bush administration so desperate to block an independent investigation?

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