FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – President Bush and Sen. John Kerry stayed on the offensive in swing states Sunday as the presidential race entered its final full week. In a television interview, Bush said it is “up in the air” whether the nation can ever be fully safe from another terror attack and suggested terrorists may still be contemplating ways to disrupt the election.
Kerry ridiculed Bush’s statement, suggesting it echoed an earlier assertion, later withdrawn by the president, that the war on terror could not be won.
“You make me president of the United States, we’re going to win the war on terror,” Kerry said at an evening rally in Boca Raton, Fla. “It’s not going to be up in the air whether or not we make America safe.”
Earlier, Kerry spoke at a predominantly black church for the fourth consecutive Sunday, this one in Fort Lauderdale in heavily Democratic Broward County, and promised worshippers their votes would be counted this time. The county saw some of the worst of Florida’s 2000 vote-counting abuses. “I want you to turn out,” the Democrat said.
The Democrat took on church bishops who have criticized his support for abortion rights and expanded embryonic stem-cell research and who have said he should be denied Holy Communion for not advancing church teachings. “I love my church, I respect the bishops, but I respectfully disagree,” Kerry said.
Meanwhile, Al Gore, on a tour of mostly black churches in Florida, told blacks embittered by his narrow loss in the 2000 presidential election to turn anger into energy at the polls. “Don’t turn it into angry acts or angry words,” the former vice president said in Jacksonville.
Kerry was headed to New Hampshire after Florida. Bush won both states in 2000. The Republican incumbent campaigned in New Mexico, which Democrat Gore narrowly won. Speaking at a high school stadium in Alamogordo, Bush cited his differences with Kerry over Iraq.
On a day when Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group claimed responsibility for ambushing and killing U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers, Bush declared: “Our troops will defeat Zarqawi and his likes overseas in Iraq so we do not have to face them here at home.”
In a taped interview with Fox News Channel’s “Hannity and Colmes,” Bush was asked whether the nation would always be vulnerable to another terror attack and whether Americans would always have to live with that.
“Yes, because we have to be right 100 percent of the time in disrupting any plot and they have to be right once,” Bush said. He said the nation is safer from terrorism, but “whether or not we can be ever fully safe is up – you know, up in the air.”
Bush said he was sure terrorists still “think about” trying to disrupt the Nov. 2 elections.
White House communications director Dan Bartlett said Bush would spend the upcoming days focusing more closely on the two central issues: the war on terror and the economy. He will give a new speech today in Greeley, Colo., on fighting terrorism and a new one on the economy on Tuesday in Wisconsin, Bartlett said.
New ads will be aired to bolster these messages, along with a 60-second spot in the final days that will make an “emotional, heartfelt” appear for keeping Bush in the White House. “It’s our closing pitch to undecided voters,” Bartlett said.
Closing its own $150 million ad campaign, Kerry’s camp said it planned to run a series of previously released television commercials.
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