http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/politics/campaign/11letter.html?ex=1255233600&en=bd46c3588b76acf9&ei=5088&partner=rssnytPresident Bush inaugurated a new lean, mean stump speech last week that aimed the AK-47's directly at his Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry. On Wednesday in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Mr. Bush charged that Mr. Kerry's policies would make the world a more dangerous place, and that he had a "20-year history of weakness" in the United States Senate and a "strategy of defeat" in Iraq.
Gone was one of Mr. Bush's favorite phrases, used just four days earlier in Ohio, about the "transformational power of liberty." Gone was his familiar line that freedom is "the Almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world." Gone, too, was his sunny prediction that someday an American president would sit down with "a duly elected leader of Iraq" to talk about how to keep the peace in the "greater Middle East."
Campaign officials insisted that Mr. Bush was not ditching his well-worked lines - all of them in the hopeful language of his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson - to keep pace with reality on the ground in Iraq. Instead, the officials said that with all the new attack lines against Mr. Kerry, something had to go.
"We're certainly in a tougher part of the campaign," said Nicolle Devenish, the Bush campaign's communications director. "John Kerry called us a liar on the stump. We're going to go on the offensive every chance we get."