Bush trashed McCain during the election of 2000. Try this one:
Commentary: Bush turns to men he trashed
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Washington, DC, Aug. 12 (UPI) -- Politics make strange bedfellows -- especially when you are finally forced to turn in desperation to two national heroes from your own party.
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Three years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, boosted him to stratospheric personal popularity, this has become President George W. Bush's ironic fate in the 2004 presidential election campaign.
With his own luster as a resolute, successful defender of America against Islamic terror unraveling following months of embarrassing revelations topped by the conclusions of the Sept. 11 Commission, the president is now trying to associate himself at every public appearance he can with former New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
It is impossible to imagine any two figures in public life Bush would instinctively more wish to avoid. His 2000 presidential campaign trashed McCain in one of the dirtiest campaigns of smears, slander and attempted personal destruction the Republican Party has ever unleashed against one of its own in the South Carolina, New York and Michigan primaries. McCain, whose cherished sister had died of breast cancer, was even accused of opposing increased spending on cancer research through the highly creative twisting of his actual Senate voting record.
Even now, the maverick Arizonan and famous Vietnam War hero continues to embarrass and no doubt infuriate the president at key moments. Only last week, he called the GOP's attempt to trash Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts' heroic Vietnam War record despicable and called on the White House to repudiate it. Bush has not done so.
But McCain still toed the party line enough -- with, no doubt, a desire to have an uncontested re-nomination race when his time comes up for re-election -- to embrace Bush as if he were a buddy from his long years of imprisonment in Vietnam in the notorious "Hanoi Hilton." And Bush, even more remarkably, was happy to return the hug.
The Bush-Cheney '04 campaign's decision to make Giuliani the new central figure in its latest attack strategy against Kerry is even more remarkable: It was not intended or planned as little as a month ago before the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
The Republican National Committee does not turn on a dime, and neither does this particular White House. Both are famous for meticulously planning their campaign strategies years -- in Karl Rove's case even entire election cycles -- ahead of time. Embracing Giuliani and the moderate Northeastern Republicanism that he embodied through the decade before Sept.11 was not among them.
Turning to Giuliani at all, but especially turning to him this late in the day, is an even greater mark of desperation than publicly hugging McCain. For Bush has coldly and calculatedly treated Giuliani as dirt ever since he stepped down on the completion of his second consecutive term as mayor of New York City.
Giuliani's performance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, killing 2,800 people, was magnificent. The emergency services of the City of New York that day acted not only with exemplary, heartbreaking bravery but also with outstanding efficiency, a quality that has not been evident in the Bush administration's national-security and anti-terror policies, to put it mildly.
Had the city administration of New York that Giuliani had run with an iron hand for nearly eight years not reacted as superbly as it did, the death toll in, around and under the towers could easily have been 30,000, as Giuliani has said.
Yet after Giuliani stepped down as mayor, he was not immediately conscripted to head the CIA, the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security, even though any of these positions would have fitted him perfectly. He was not even given any honorary federal commission to preside over as a figurehead.
For Giuliani had always been a genuinely moderate Northeastern Republican in the tradition of Thomas E. Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller and the president's own father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush. And the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has always treated such people as worse than lepers -- or even Democrats.
Giuliani's outstanding success in administering the largest city in the nation and his previous first-class record as a crime-busting district attorney gave him the ideal résumé to spearhead the war against al-Qaida and its efforts to penetrate the United States. Yet Bush refused to let him anywhere near those responsibilities.
To quote the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, "All is changed, changed utterly." Giuliani, as the New York Times reported Thursday, "is emerging as a central player in the Bush re-election effort, attacking John Kerry, racing around the country campaigning and directly leveraging the events of Sept. 11 in ways that President Bush and many of his closest allies have not dared."
Will it work? Almost certainly not: Historically, whenever an incumbent president has been forced to rely on the charisma or talents of another figure to boost his re-election efforts, that president has gone down in defeat.
Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Bill Clinton in 1996 had no need to resort to such undignified and even desperate expedients. Rather, the ploy recalls the antics of Gerald Ford during the 1976 campaign and Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Indeed, far from making Bush look bigger as intended, the campaign of relying on heroes the president had previously gone out of his way to ignore or even humiliate seems much more likely to make him look like a wimp. After all, real he-men never need other heroes to rescue them.
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