America’s increasingly bitter election turned ugly on Saturdayamid a flurry of attacks and counter-attacks on issues ranging from the candidates’ Vietnam war records to Teresa Heinz Kerry’s tax returns.
As the race for the White House enters its final stretch, both campaigns are relentlessly on the offensive in a brutally negative campaign. The Democrats have now launched an attack against a conservative television network which is preparing to broadcast a 42-minute documentary on Kerry’s protests against the Vietnam war.
Kerry’s lawyers have written to Sinclair Broadcasting to demand that its 62 stations give the Democrats the same airtime as the controversial programme. The Democrats have also complained to the Federal Communications Commission, a government broadcasting watchdog.
The show — Stolen Honour – Wounds That Never Heal — features interviews with 17 former POWs who say Kerry’s 1971 Senate testimony on US war crimes in Vietnam led to them being kept prisoner for longer. The film echoes the attacks made on Kerry’s war record by a Republican-linked group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which came close to derailing his campaign.
A Sinclair spokesman said that the network has offered Kerry an interview slot after the broadcast. His campaign has turned down the offer, saying it was an attempt at a ‘political set-up’. Sinclair has asked its stations to pull their regular programming to make space for the documentary which will be shown this week. The move has many Democrats worried because Sinclair broadcasts in several key swing states.
However, new controversy has emerged over George W. Bush’s Vietnam service as a pilot in the National Guard after 31 new pages of documents surfaced yesterday, two weeks after National Guard officials had signed legal oaths swearing they had turned over all the President’s records. Bush has been criticised for poor attendance, losing his flight status and failing to show up at all for a long period of his service before leaving early to go to business school. A National Guard spokesman said the new discovery was simply a matter of the poor state of the records.
At the same time ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz Kerry released a series of documents detailing her tax returns. Republican campaigners have been demanding for months that she reveal her contributions, though candidates’ wives are under no obligation to do so. The records showed that she paid a federal tax rate of about 12,5% on income of about $5-million. Republican operatives are keen to make such huge wealth an issue in the campaign and frequently refer to her multiple houses and enormous fortune.
Meanwhile, the candidates campaigned in key swing states. Bush was in Florida, which decided the result in 2000, and Kerry in Ohio, seen as perhaps the most vital this year.
Polls show Bush with a narrow lead, blunting a recent Democrat surge in the wake of Bush’s poor performances in the presidential debates. A study from top polling firm Zogby International showed Bush leading Kerry 48% to 44%. However, the Rasmussen tracking poll has Bush with just a two-point lead, 48% to 46%, and a Washington Post study released on Friday had the candidates at 48% each. – Guardian Unlimited Â