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http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/06/09/campaigns_seize_on_reagans_legacy?mode=PF
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/06/09/campaigns_seize_on_reagans_legacy?mode=PF
WASHINGTON -- After three days of suspended political activity, the Bush campaign began openly incorporating Ronald Reagan's death into its reelection message yesterday, revamping its website to give Reagan a dominant role and distributing official campaign letters that invoke the former president.
Since Reagan's death Saturday, Bush has repeatedly offered glowing praise of the 40th president in ways that echo his own reelection efforts, but were not overtly political.
Yesterday, his campaign took the refrain into the political realm. Bush officials sent an e-mail inviting supporters to add to a "living memorial" on the campaign website -- one click away from the page that solicits campaign donations and recruits volunteers. Visitors to the official campaign site were automatically redirected to the Reagan tribute, paid for by the Bush/Cheney committee. It replaced the spot usually occupied by the campaign home page.
Meanwhile, lawmakers prepared to honor Reagan with the first state funeral in decades, an event that is almost certain to require both sides to abandon their partisan animosity and overt campaigning. But after a 72 hour stretch of glowing remembrances of Reagan, Republicans and Democrats began crafting statements that suited their political goals. Republicans continued to underscore similarities between the popular 40th president and Bush. And Democrats noted differences, such as increasing partisan bitterness and an alienation of America's allies.
Bush has long sought to portray himself as Reagan's ideological heir, and with Reagan's death, he has augmented those efforts.
When Bush was asked about Reagan yesterday, he responded in terms largely reflecting his own reelection theme. "Ronald Reagan will go down in history as a great American president because he had a core set of principles from which he would not deviate," Bush said from the G-8 summit in Georgia, during a joint appearance with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan. "He understood that a leader is a person who sets clear goals and makes decisions based upon principles that are etched in his soul."
Republicans say it would be impossible to separate Reagan's death from the current presidential race, or to take politics out of his death and burial this week. "It's unavoidable," said Grover Norquist, conservative activist and Reagan champion.
At the same time, Democrats have filtered their mostly complimentary remarks about Reagan through their own political lens.
One after another, key Democrats are praising Reagan for qualities they often say Bush lacks, including compromise for bipartisan gain, cordiality, and the ability to gain worldwide respect. The Senate minority leader, Thomas A. Daschle of South Dakota, used the occasion to lament that in the decade since Reagan announced his affliction with Alzheimer's disease, the spirit of bipartisan cooperation has turned sour. He implicitly blamed Bush and the Republicans in control of the House and Senate.
"The civility and personal decency that we associate with him seems, at times, to have all but disappeared from much of our public discourse," Daschle said yesterday, according to a transcript of his remarks in the Senate chamber.
"The elbows in politics have become sharper, the words have become meaner, and the accomplishments have become scarcer," Daschle continued. "Sadly, there is a tendency today to assume ill will and bad motives of those who belong to the other party, or even another wing of one's own party. This decline of civility in politics and public discourse is not good for America. It does not make us safer or stronger."
In the statement he issued immediately after Reagan's death, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, homed in on exactly the same traits.
Recalling Reagan's personal friendship with a political opponent, House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, Kerry said: "The differences were real, but because of the way President Reagan led, he taught us that there is a big difference between strong beliefs and bitter partisanship."
Kerry also included an implicit criticism of Bush's stem-cell research policy, which places limits on the use of stem cells, by praising Nancy Reagan for having "helped all of us better understand the cruel disease that took him away before it took his life, and what we must do to prevent and cure it." The former first lady has urged broader stem-cell research, a position Kerry shares, in opposition to Bush.
Republicans have been much more explicit in tying Bush to Reagan and, they argue, have far more to gain from the comparison than Democrats do from the contrast.
Reagan, elected twice by sizable margins and popular even as he left office, is often celebrated for his firm stance against Communism and credited for, at a minimum, helping to bring down the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. Bush casts his own stark message against terrorism in terms of the Cold War. The e-mail from his campaign yesterday, however, did not make any direct comparisons between the two. It mourned Reagan's loss, and stated that "many of us are . . . reminded of the impact that President Reagan's optimistic stewardship of our nation had on our lives and the lives of our families."
Arrangements have been made for Bush to eulogize Reagan at the memorial service here on Friday.
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