"Those were Democratic presidents who led with a combination of strength and courage," Edwards said. "George Bush's combination is fear and failure."
Bush "has the kind of record, in fact, that a man like Herbert Hoover would be proud of," Edwards said, invoking the Republican president who presided over job losses at the start of the Great Depression.
The stop at a Clearwater community center was the first of three Florida appearances Edwards has scheduled today that are billed as efforts to encourage early voting in the key battleground of Florida. Following a rally, Edwards greeted a couple of dozen of voters who boarded school buses en route to early-voting polling sites.
The issue of the missing Iraqi explosives continued to dominate morning news shows today. Interviewed on the Fox News Channel, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) said that "we don't know really if the weapons were ever there" and that Kerry's continued stumping on the issue is "inappropriate" and "desperate."
She said, "I think we should remember that when our troops were marching toward Baghdad, they were looking for weapons of mass destruction, they were looking for chemical weapons that might be used on our troops, on the Iraqi people. They were not focused on conventional weapons at that time."
On NBC's "Today" show, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) asserted that when troops of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division arrived at the vast al Qaqaa storage site 30 miles south of Baghdad on April 10 -- a day after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government -- the high explosives "weren't there."
Reporters who were embedded with the troops have said they do not know whether the munitions in question -- including HMX and RDX explosives -- were there or not at that time. They have described seeing evidence of U.S. bomb damage, but no sign of looting on that day and bunkers that were still sealed. The troops were not focused on guarding sites because they were in a hurry to move north, the reporters said.
On the same program, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) disputed Chambliss, saying that the International Atomic Energy Agency had warned the United States about the explosives before the war and reported in May this year that looters may be helping themselves to "the greatest explosives bonanza in history."
Biden said, "This is not our military's fault. We do not have enough forces. . . . We didn't have enough troops to guard the ammo dumps, we didn't have enough troops to guard the borders, we didn't have enough troops to stop the looting. It was a fundamental flaw in policy of going in."
Branigin reported from Washington.
