Terror In Their Vitamins!?

This from David Sanger’s article, Bush to Seek More Money To Fight Terrorism at Home, in yesterdays NYT’s:

President Bush said today that he would ask Congress for another major increase in financing for domestic security, and, in a clear indication of the strategy his aides say he plans to pursue in his re-election campaign, he urged Americans against taking false comfort in the absence of terrorist attacks on American soil for more than two years.

And later we have:

One senior political adviser to Mr. Bush described the president’s strategy in the coming months as “a healthy mix of optimism and the fear factor,” tapping into what White House officials believe is a wariness among swing voters about putting the nation’s security into the hands of any of the Democratic aspirants.

And with the Pew Research Center finding that 65 percent of Americans believe that the war on Iraq was the “right decision,” you bet your bottom dollar that 9/11 will continue to be Bush’s mantra (followed closely by some utterance of Iraq and terror and tax cuts and terror and the sanctity of marriage and terror) until the November elections. The above senior political adviser says as much. The soccer moms and Nascar dads will be innodated with terror and the pressing need to make tax cuts permanent. And I fear that most will lap it right up.

This daunting 65 percent might be one of the reasons Dean’s support has eroded. Democrats are feeling far more pragmatic this year…there seems to be a lot of folks who are willing to get behind anybody who can “beat the president.” Dean’s spent the past year positioning himself up as the anti-war candidate, which works for about 35 percent of the population, while that other 65 percent, however, seems to be blissfully malleable to the Republican’s ultimate weapon: the Democrats are weak on defense