WASHINGTON — A defiant Barack Obama said Tuesday that he would take no lectures from Republicans on which candidate would keep the U.S. safer, a sharp rebuke to John McCain’s aides who said the Democrat had a naive, “Sept. 10 mind-set” toward terrorism.
“These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,” the presumed nominee told reporters aboard his campaign plane. “This is the same kind of fear-mongering that got us into Iraq . . . and it’s exactly that failed foreign policy I want to reverse.”
The rival camps engaged in a war of words Tuesday that echoed the 2004 presidential campaign, in which President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republicans argued that Democratic nominee John Kerry was soft on terrorism, a claim that resonated with voters and helped propel Bush to re-election.
“Sen. Obama is a perfect manifestation of a Sept. 10th mind-set. . . . He does not understand the nature of the enemies we face,” McCain national-security director Randy Scheunemann told reporters on a conference call.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, who is advising the McCain campaign, concurred, saying Obama has “an extremely dangerous and extremely naive approach toward terrorism . . . and toward dealing with prisoners captured overseas who have been engaged in terrorist attacks against the United States.”
Democrats complained that the GOP was using the politics of fear. The Obama campaign countered with its own conference call in which Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism official in Republican and Democratic administrations, argued the McCain campaign was emulating political strategist Karl Rove.
“I’m a little disgusted by the attempts of some of my friends on the McCain campaign to use the same old, tired tactics . . . to drive a wedge between Americans for partisan advantage and to frankly frighten Americans,” Clarke said.
Kerry accused McCain of “defending a policy that is indefensible” by siding with Bush’s policies, particularly with respect to the Iraq war.
On his campaign plane, Obama told reporters that Osama bin Laden is still at large in part because President Bush’s strategy toward fighting terrorism has not succeeded.
At issue were comments Obama made in an interview with ABC News on Monday in which he spoke approvingly of the successful prosecution and imprisonment of those responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Obama said the government can crack down on terrorists “within the constraints of our Constitution.”
