Salon/ Memo to Kerry: Don't let Osama steal your thunder

[kskiska]

Keep going after Bush, the way the president should have pursued bin Laden at Tora Bora.

Sure, paranoid liberals have worried for months that Osama bin Laden would be the October surprise in this presidential election. But it was supposed to be a captive Osama, dragged in chains to Crawford, Texas, shorn and humbled like Saddam after being extracted from his spider hole. What to make of swaggering Osama in his golden robes, hectoring President Bush about his behavior the morning of 9/11, warning Americans of more terror to come just four days before the election?

I watched excerpts of the video with a sinking feeling, at first, that Video Osama could help Bush almost as much as an Osama in an orange jumpsuit. Like most Americans, I hate even looking at him. He brings out my patriotic fury. I can't stand the idea of the Saudi fascist trying to shame Bush with a garbled version of the president's "The Pet Goat" moment, when the president continued listening to a child read that apparently riveting story after learning that the first tower had been hit. (Osama clearly hasn't had time to rent "Fahrenheit 9/11" to get the accurate version of what happened.) Even though I still wonder why Bush stayed in that classroom, hearing bin Laden taunt him with the memory of the 50,000 people trapped in those towers, people whose murders he now admits to planning, is revolting.

(snip)

After stumbling in the Swift boat summer, Kerry has made this a thrilling race in the last month because he finally found his voice, settled into his skin, and faced up to the fact that he had to confront the president directly for his terrible failures over the last four years. Struggling to defend his own early, complicated stance on Iraq -- especially in the face of the Bush camp's droning taunt of "flip-flopper" -- Kerry lost the momentum he had coming out of the Democratic convention. His delay in hitting back after the Swift boat smears hurt more. But in the days before the presidential debates he stiffened his spine and the American people began to see a new John Kerry -- sober, resolute and determined to fight back.

Kerry soared in the first debate when, ironically, given Friday's developments, he attacked Bush hard for letting Osama slip away after he'd been isolated in Tora Bora. "We had him surrounded, but we didn't use American forces, the best-trained in the world, to go kill him," Kerry said then. "The president relied on Afghan warlords that he outsourced that job to." Bush was on the ropes immediately. Kerry kept the line a staple of his message in the weeks afterward.

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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/10/29/bin_laden/index.html