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Washington Post - August 30, 2004

Republican convention opens with 9/11 focus

By Dana Milbank

NEW YORK, Aug. 29 -- Vice President Cheney launched the Republican convention Sunday in a speech hailing President Bush's war leadership, as more than 200,000 demonstrators took to the streets here in protest of the Bush administration's policies.

With the terrorist-marred New York skyline as his backdrop, Cheney stood on Ellis Island to give the informal kickoff to Bush's nominating convention. "All of us are gathering this week for one reason and one reason only, and that is to make certain that George W. Bush is president for the next four years," Cheney said in a speech largely devoted to Bush's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Across New York harbor in Manhattan, demonstrators marched past Madison Square Garden, this week's convention site, carrying mock flag-draped coffins and signs condemning the Iraq war. Delegates arriving for the GOP's quadrennial celebration found a city under tense security, with thousands of heavily armed police guarding river crossings, closing streets and snarling traffic on a usually quiet summer Sunday.

Republican praise of Bush as war leader -- emphasized by symbolic reminders of Bush's actions after the attacks -- will be a dominant theme this week, as Bush accepts his party's nomination for a second term in the city where the twin towers once stood. Republican officials said Sunday that they plan to make Sept. 11 a focus of the week in a convention that is also intended to soften some of the party's ideological edges and broaden Bush's appeal to the political middle.

"How you approach the world after September 11th is a factor in this election," Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said at a lunch with reporters Sunday. Noting that Democrats at their convention last month also spoke about the attacks, Gillespie said ignoring them would be like "a convention in 1864 that didn't take into account the Civil War."….

The GOP convention begins just 64 days before the election, and presents Bush with his best chance to dispel doubts about the war in Iraq and slow job growth at home, which have combined to put the president in unexpected difficulty. He acknowledged his electoral focus in an interview with Time published Sunday. Asked whether the war on terrorism would be decades-long, Bush quipped, "I'm a two-month man right now."

Bush also acknowledged in the interview that the administration did not anticipate the nature of the resistance in Iraq, and he said that was his greatest mistake in office. "Had we had to do it over again," he said, "we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day."

Democrats tried Sunday to exploit that acknowledgment. "The president is now describing his Iraq policy as a catastrophic success," Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards said in Washington. "I, like most Americans, have no idea what that means, but it is long past time for this president to accept personal responsibility for his failures and for his performance." Edwards said the Iraq war "has clearly been a failure."…….

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45145-2004Aug29?language=printer