The gloves come off
Bush-Cheney campaign sets it sights on Kerry
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President Bush's re-election campaign is getting more aggressive in promoting the incumbent's record.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush left the Democrats alone to slug it out for a while in the early Democratic primaries, but now that the field is narrowing the Bush-Cheney campaign has decided it's time to come out swinging.
Its target? Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic front-runner.
"Senator Kerry's had the stage to himself for a few weeks now. He's had a lot of very positive news coverage," Terry Holt, press secretary for the Bush-Cheney campaign, told me Thursday's during an appearance on "Inside Politics."
Until now, the president's re-election campaign has kept a low profile, putting out surrogates instead of campaign officials to tout the president's agenda and respond to Democratic attacks. But Holt admitted that the "incumbent has taken it on the chin a bit during the primary process."
Another sign that Bush is moving more publicly into campaign mode, was his trip to South Carolina on Thursday. This is the second time the president has visited a state right on the heels of a Democratic primary.
Both the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee seized on a report by the Associated Press that Kerry blocked a Senate committee's efforts in May 2000 to eliminate a loophole that allowed a large insurance company to reap profits from liability coverage it provided for a major highway construction project in Boston, known as "Big Dig."
Kerry received $30,000 in legal campaign contributions from the company for political action committees he founded in the two years subsequent to his efforts to keep the project's funding flowing to Massachusetts.
Holt said this contradicts Kerry's message that he's fighting special interests: "There's hypocrisy there between what he's saying on the campaign trail and what his record demonstrates."
Kerry insisted that his role was about fighting for his home state's interests, not the insurer's.
"The entire congressional delegation, every single member, fought to hold onto $150 million for the Big Dig, which is the most important single project in Massachusetts and New England, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the [insurance] industry," Kerry told reporters in Main on Thursday.
George Mitchell, former Senate majority leader, endorsed Kerry on Thursday and dismissed the GOP's attacks that the contributions and Kerry's actions were linked.
Mitchell said that the charges show "the rising concern in the White House and among supporters of the president of the strength of John Kerry's candidacy."
Earlier this week, Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, appeared to anticipate a race between Kerry and Bush.
McAuliffe said he looked forward to a debate between Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and the president. And McAuliffe revived questions that arose in the 2000 campaign about Bush's military service during the Vietnam war.
Holt told me these newly raised charges that the president didn't complete his duty in the National Guard are an "old story, dead story."
But in defending the president's service and honorable discharge from the National Guard, Holt trained his sights on Kerry.
"John Kerry the other day said that he wasn't going to judge people who dodged the draft or went to Canada or served in the National Guard, as if dodging the draft was equivalent to the National Guard," Holt said. "That's not fair. It's impugning the character of the commander-in-chief and impugning the character of people who serve in the National Guard."
Despite the fact that the president hasn't officially acknowledged the campaign and only 15 percent of the delegates needed to win the 2004 Democratic nomination have been awarded, the grenades launched by both sides this week demonstrate that the political battle for the White House is well under way.
Judy Woodruff is CNN's prime anchor and senior correspondent. She also anchors "Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics," weekdays at 3:30 pm ET.
