Cheney rips Kerry claims of conservative values

WHEELING, W.Va. — Embarking on his first serious campaigning of the 2004 election, Vice President Dick Cheney lit into Sen. John Kerry, the expected Democratic nominee, for trying to portray himself as the candidate of conservative values despite a voting record that Cheney said argued otherwise.

"Sometimes I think John Kerry develops amnesia when he gets out on the campaign trail," Cheney said mockingly in front of a booming and loyal crowd at a Republican Party rally here Saturday, before ticking off a list of Kerry's votes against bans on flag burning and late-term abortions, and in support of gun control.

"On these and a whole host of values," the vice president told the crowd, "John Kerry's votes and statements put him on the left and out of the mainstream and out of touch with the conservative values of the heartland."

Cheney played hard to patriotism and concerns about the economy on a Fourth of July weekend bus tour through the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Kerry embarked on a similar bus tour this weekend as the two campaigns vie for rural votes.

Resuming his position as the Bush campaign's attack dog, Cheney painted a Kerry presidency as one that would drag down the economy with higher taxes and tremble in the face of terrorism.

"These are not times for leaders who shift with the political winds, saying one thing one day and another the next," Cheney told the crowds here and at another rally in Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. "We need a commander-in-chief with clear vision and steady determination, and that's just what we have in George W. Bush."

A day after the government reported that recent months of job growth had slowed in June, Cheney argued that tax cuts had set the economy on pattern of increasing employment. And after weeks of criticism that the administration had led the nation into war based on unsubstantiated links between Iraq and the attacks of Sept. 11, he defended the American-led actions in Afghanistan and Iraq as fights against terrorism and tyranny.

"Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength, they are invited by the perception of weakness," he declared, replaying a line that has become standard in his speeches over the past several weeks.

The Kerry campaign responded to Cheney's attack by emphasizing Kerry's military service. "Considering Dick Cheney got five deferments to avoid seeing combat, he's the last person who should be questioning a decorated Vietnam veteran on his allegiance to the flag," said Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign. "These broken-record attacks serve no purpose other than to divide the country."