Bush moves to shore up war-on-terror credentials

Two months before high-stakes congressional elections, President Bush has dramatically reframed the debate over the war on terror and laid down a stiff political challenge to the Democrats.

This week's series of national-security speeches, pegged to Monday's 9/11 anniversary, differ in a key way from similar rounds of speeches in the last year: Mr. Bush made major news, foremost his proposal for new rules governing trials of terror suspects. The accompanying announcement that 14 "high value" terrorism detainees – including top Al Qaeda planners of 9/11 – are being moved from secret CIA prisons to the US military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, puts a face on his plan for trials.

Bush's speeches demonstrate the power of the presidential bully pulpit, even for a chief executive struggling in the polls. And in the first week of the fall campaign, marked by the traditional Labor Day kickoff, they confirm a political strategy long telegraphed by Bush adviser Karl Rove: to make heavy use of the terrorism issue for the third election in a row.

The question now is whether the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq – long framed as a central front in the war on terror – will undo the White House's goal of portraying Republicans as more capable than Democrats of defending the nation. For the Democrats, who control neither the White House nor Congress, the task is to convince enough voters in key congressional races to make the leap for change.

In 2004, "what the White House did was to use the war on terror like a helium balloon to pull up the sagging ratings in the war in Iraq," says Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. "Now, Iraq is like a lead weight pulling down on the war on terror. So they believe they need a more aggressive public approach to explain what the president is doing and put his critics back on their heels."

The Democrats are saying, in effect, "no more Mr. Nice Guy."

"They feel as if they've been battered for two elections in a row on the security issue and reacted either passively or defensively, and there will be no more of that," says Mr. Ornstein.

The Democrats had planned to make headlines Wednesday with a Senate debate over their resolution recommending that Bush fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom they blame for strategic failures in the Iraq war, but Bush's speech overshadowed the action on Capitol Hill. Republican senators killed the measure in a point of order declaring it irrelevant to the Pentagon spending bill under consideration.

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