At a Bush campaign news conference, former Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh made one of the worst arguments I’ve ever heard. Ever.
“I read somewhere that Sen. Kerry said that he supports 95 percent of the USA Patriot Act — that’s similar to saying you’re 95% not pregnant.”
This is breathtakingly stupid, even for the Bush campaign.
It seems to be the smear of the week for BC04. A few days after the campaign unveiled a patently false ad attacking Kerry’s alleged position on the controversial law, Dick Cheney was on a similar tear this week, calling the law “crucial to many of our successes” and blasting Kerry for “shar[ing] his second thoughts.”
I’m not even sure if I understand the point of the criticisms. After the attacks of 9/11, Kerry, like most lawmakers, supported the legislation. Since then, he’s seen how the law has been implemented and discovered provisions that could infringe on Americans’ civil liberties. Kerry wants to keep most of the law in place, but fix some structural flaws, a move that has garnered bi-partisan support in the Senate.
What, exactly, is the problem here?
To hear Bush and Cheney tell it, Kerry wants to gut the law and give al Queda state secrets. What makes the criticisms even more bizarre is the fact that Bush campaign’s chairman, Marc Racicot, endorsed Kerry’s proposed changes to the Patriot Act just last fall.
And as Kerry’s blog noted yesterday, Racicot is far from alone among Republicans.
Former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey said, “I told the President I thought his Justice Department was out of control… Are we going to save ourselves from international terrorism in order to deny the fundamental liberties we protect to ourselves?… It doesn’t make sense to me.”
And Chairman James Sensenbrenner voted for the Patriot Act, then criticized it. “House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, made it clear that the Republican House is not about to roll over for President Bush on the Patriot Act… Mr. Sensenbrenner, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said ‘over my dead body’ will the act be reauthorized without undergoing thorough re-examination in hearings held by the House.”
I’m sure Bush campaign staffers, any day now, will argue that all of these conservatives, including their own campaign chairman, are equally irresponsible for joining Kerry in wanting to remove these protections against terrorists.
BC04 must have some kind of polling data to suggest these nonsensical attacks are a good idea, but is the Patriot Act so popular nationally that Kerry’s mild criticisms of the law will hurt him? I’m not even sure most Americans know what the Patriot Act is.
A CBS News/NYT poll from late April asked respondents how much they had heard or read about the Patriot Act. A clear majority, 58%, said they either knew “not much” or “nothing” about it. The results were very similar among Dems, Republicans, and Independents.
Moreover, among those who said they did know about the law, the nation was closely divided over its benefits — 52% said the Patriot Act was a “necessary tool,” while 42% said the law “goes too far and poses a threat to civil liberties.”
So Kerry’s position is a sensible approach backed by many GOP leaders, while the public isn’t crazy about the law in the first place. So why is the Bush campaign making it a centerpiece of their partisan attacks?