Al-Qaeda In America: Hijacking The Campaign

To all appearances, it was just another made-for-TV moment, brought to you by the John Kerry for President campaign: a balmy summer Sunday evening that found the newly official Democratic nominee playing a few carefree innings of softball with fire fighters and autoworkers on a small-town diamond in the heartland. But unknown even to some of Kerry's top aides, something that hadn't been written into the script was quietly taking place inside the luxury campaign bus parked just beyond right field in Taylor, Mich. Secret Service agents were laying secure phone lines, hanging privacy curtains and installing high-tech gear so Kerry could get a top-secret, 40-min. briefing on the intelligence that had prompted the Department of Homeland Security hours earlier to raise the terrorism alert level in New York City and Washington.

Kerry's was not the only campaign whose plans had been jolted that weekend. When the information reached President Bush two days earlier, he had been in almost the same position, launching what was supposed to have been a feel-good Midwestern bus tour focused on domestic politics. Even as Bush went from rally to rally, claiming achievements in education, health care and the economy, his thoughts were on the scary information that was pouring into the White House situation room. "It's hair raising," the President privately told an adviser aboard his campaign bus as it rolled between stops in Ohio and Pennsylvania. "This stuff is really hair raising."

That's what it's like, both men are learning, to be in a tight presidential contest in the post-9/11 world, where message and stagecraft keep tripping over reality. Last week's terrorism alert, coming on the heels of the 9/11 commission's devastating account of the missed signals that might have saved thousands of American lives, put the two candidates at odds over terrorism in a way that was more confrontational--and personal--than ever. In a Rose Garden ceremony that reminded everyone of the advantages that come with being an incumbent Commander in Chief, Bush, surrounded by his war Cabinet, declared it "my most solemn duty" to protect the nation and embraced part of the commission's recommendations--only to have Kerry dismiss the move as insufficient and late. Kerry then added the charge that the President's policies are "actually encouraging the recruitment of terrorists," which prompted Bush's stern reply that Kerry suffered from "a fundamental and dangerous misunderstanding of the enemy we face." Kerry even faulted Bush's reaction in 2001 upon learning of the 9/11 attacks--the scene that everyone who has seen Fahrenheit 9/11 will remember as seven excruciating minutes of reading The Pet Goat with a classroom of Florida schoolchildren. At that point the Bush campaign hauled out that icon of 9/11, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to brand Kerry "an indecisive candidate who has demonstrated an inconsistent position on the war on terror" and one who has been reduced, moreover, to "armchair quarterbacking based on cues from Michael Moore." So much for terrorism being the one issue that was supposed to be too grave to be sullied or manipulated by politics.