Cheney's Praise of Bush Takes a Dig at Clinton (and Reagan)

[kskiska]

ST. PAUL, Sept. 6 - Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator John Edwards campaigned on starkly different themes in the same city on Monday, with Mr. Cheney suggesting that President Bill Clinton and even President Ronald Reagan were soft on terrorists, while Mr. Edwards called President Bush a failure on pocketbook concerns like jobs and health care.

With the race entering its final phase, the Republican and Democratic vice-presidential candidates ramped up their arguments on the issues they consider their own.

Speaking at the Minnesota State Fair with about 200 supporters, Mr. Cheney sought to portray President Bush as triumphing over economic and national security burdens inherited from previous administrations.

He blamed the Clinton and Reagan administrations for teaching terrorists that "they could strike us with relative impunity" and that "if they hit us hard enough, they could change our policy." Mr. Cheney cited the attack on United States Marines barracks in Beirut in 1983, in the first Reagan term, along with the 1993 killings of American soldiers in Somalia, a 1996 truck bombing at a housing complex in Saudi Arabia where many Americans lived, the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa and the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/politics/campaign/07mates.html