Democrat Barack Obama escalated his attack on President Bush‘s appeasement comments Friday, but the White House said Bush’s remarks were aimed at Jimmy Carter, not Obama.
Undaunted, Obama redoubled his criticism of Bush and even broadened it to encompass Republican John McCain, who seconded the president’s comments. The Bush-McCain linkage is a key component of Obama’s general election strategy.
“I’m a strong believer in a bipartisan foreign policy, but that cause is not served with dishonest, divisive attacks of the sort that we’ve seen out of George Bush and John McCain over the last couple days,” Obama told voters in South Dakota. “They’re trying to scare you and trying to keep you from seeing the truth.”
He was referring to Bush’s warning, echoed by McCain, against appeasing terrorists.
“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Bush told members of the Knesset in Israel on Thursday in a tribute to the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding. “We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”
Bush, who has used such language before, did not single out Obama or any other Democrat. But Obama seized on the comments as a direct attack on him. That’s because Obama has pledged, if elected, to meet without preconditions with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the destruction of Israel.
White House counselor Ed Gillespie expressed surprise at the volume and tone of the orchestrated criticism from numerous Democrats. Gillespie said Friday the White House had expected critics to interpret Bush’s remarks as a rebuke to former President Jimmy Carter, who met last month with Hamas, a terrorist group.
Meanwhile, McCain refused to back away from his support of Bush’s comments.
“Senator Obama would meet unconditionally with some of the world’s worst dictators and state sponsors of terrorists,” McCain said Friday. “I would not add to the prestige of those who support violent extremists or seek to destroy our allies.”
