Democrats have begun to portray Bush's sunny rhetoric as a clumsy effort to whistle past the graveyard. A revised stump speech Bush unveiled last week included the mantra "We are turning the corner, and we're not turning back." Democrats pointed out that Hoover said on March 7, 1930, "Prosperity is just around the corner."
Kerry has hammered Bush on the phraseology ever since. "Saying we've turned the corner doesn't make it so," he said yesterday. "America will not turn the corner to better days until we have a new president who can see our problems and take action to fix them."
The Democratic National Committee yesterday launched a $6 million ad campaign lamenting that "millions of good jobs" have been "lost to plant closures and outsourcing" while "President Bush protects tax breaks favoring corporations that move their headquarters overseas."
Any policy proposal now would have virtually no impact on job creation before Election Day, said R. Glenn Hubbard, Bush's first Council of Economic Advisers chairman. But politically, Bush needs a strong policy response, said Kevin A. Hassett, a GOP economist at the American Enterprise Institute with close ties to the administration. "Having a positive policy agenda in the fall may be key to President Bush's reelection hopes," he said.
"When you run for president, you have to talk about the future," said Rep. Ray LaHood (Ill.), a senior Republican in Congress.
Policy suggestions such as extending health care to the uninsured or brokering a deal to curb asbestos litigation are coming from all corners of the GOP. But those suggestions are running up against cautious advisers who believe Bush should not court controversy, said Steve Moore, who heads the conservative political action committee Club for Growth.
"They're really divided between two camps, the 'Morning in America' crowd for running on the record of the last four years, against others who say, 'Let's not run on Morning in America because if we want to actually do something in the next four years, we need a mandate, we need to talk about policy.' "
The first camp has thus far held sway, Moore said, and "paradoxically, the worse Bush stands in the polls, the more risk-averse they will be."
Allen reported from New Hampshire. Staff writer Howard Kurtz contributed to this report.
