Kerry & Bush: Offense On Defense

Four states hold presidential primaries Tuesday but those contests received scant attention as the general election battle continued to unfold.

Campaign action Monday reflected themes that may become familiar: Sen. John Kerry targeting Florida and stressing foreign affairs, and President Bush raising money and accusing his opponent of weakness on defense.

Kerry said he no longer considers Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to be a statesman, but rather "an outlaw to the peace process" in the Middle East who has been rightly shuffled aside.

In a 1997 book, Kerry described "Arafat's transformation from outlaw to statesman." But in an interview with The Associated Press on Monday he said he no longer views Arafat favorably.

"Obviously, Yasser Arafat has been an impediment to the peace process," said Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting. "He missed a historic opportunity and he's proved himself to be irrelevant."

Referring to the Palestinian leader as a statesman would be potentially damaging in Florida, which has a heavy Jewish population and a Democratic primary Tuesday. Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas also hold primaries Tuesday.

Kerry has all but clinched the nomination after his most formidable opponents dropped out of the race. A party convention will formally choose a presidential nominee this summer to run against Mr. Bush in the November election.

For his part, Mr. Bush accused Kerry of having proposed "deeply irresponsible" cuts in intelligence spending just two years after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

During a fund-raiser in Dallas, the president called attention to a 1995 bill Kerry sponsored to trim intelligence spending by $1.5 billion over five years.

The cut was part of what Kerry called a "budget-buster bill" to strip $90 billion from the budget and end 40 programs that he said were "pointless, wasteful, antiquated or just plain silly." The plan never came up for a vote.

"This bill was so deeply irresponsible that it didn't have a single co-sponsor in the United States Senate," Mr. Bush said, accusing Kerry of "trying to have it both ways."

Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton said the senator's bill was about opposing "business as usual in our intelligence community" and that he has supported $200 billion in intelligence funding over the past seven years — a 50 percent increase since 1996.

An idea similar in size and purpose to Kerry's won Senate approval on a bipartisan voice vote — a procedure reserved for non-controversial measures — as an amendment to a larger bill sponsored by one Republican and one Democrat, Clanton said.

The move came after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when there was wide recognition that intelligence spending needed to shift away from efforts to thwart the Cold War opponent and toward measures to combat terrorism, drug trafficking and weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Bush also criticized Kerry's shifts in position on the Patriot Act, trade legislation and an education reform bill.

"My opponent clearly has strong beliefs, they just don't last very long," Mr. Bush said.

Kerry's campaign said Mr. Bush's accusations are misleading.

Kerry, who has suggested that Mr. Bush is impeding a federal commission's investigation into the events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, played more than just defense on Monday.

"If the president of the United States can find time to go to a rodeo, he can spend more than one hour before he commission," Kerry said in Florida, referring to Mr. Bush's appearance at a rodeo in between Dallas and Houston fund-raisers. Both events added $3 million to his $160 million-plus campaign war chest.

The White House says Mr. Bush is cooperating with the investigation.

In discussing foreign policy, Kerry said he couldn't guarantee that Saddam Hussein would now be out of power in Iraq if he had been president over the past year.

Kerry faults Mr. Bush for not allowing continued U.N. inspections in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction Saddam was said to be hiding.

"You don't know how an appropriate global coalition with the proper amount of patience might have coerced him into a different set of behaviors," he said of Saddam.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush's re-election campaign says it will ask the Federal Election Commission to investigate a Democratic-leaning group that will air $4.5 million worth of TV ads against Mr. Bush, beginning Wednesday.

The Media Fund's initial two-week ad run in 17 competitive states will include commercials that criticize Mr. Bush's policies and priorities, and mention the president by name.

The campaign said it would file a complaint with the FEC accusing the Media Fund of violating a broad, new ban on the use of "soft money."

The head of a civil rights group has taken issue with Kerry saying he wouldn't mind being known as the "second black president."

"John Kerry is not a black man — he is a privileged white man who has no idea what it is in this country to be a poor white in this country, let alone a black man," said Paula Diane Harris, founder of the Andrew Young National Center for Social Change.

Last week, Kerry told the American Urban Radio Network: "President Clinton was often known as the first black president. I wouldn't be upset if I could earn the right to be the second."

Clanton, Kerry's spokesman, said: "This was intended as a light-natured remark about President Clinton's strong legacy with African Americans. It is a legacy that John Kerry would like to build upon if elected president."