Lateline - 30/08/2004: Bush has damaged war on terrorism: Clarke

Lateline - 30/08/2004: Bush has damaged war on terrorism: Clarke: "TONY JONES: It's no coincidence that New York has been chosen for the Republican convention.

President Bush, however, got a much warmer reception than I suspect he may have wanted - 100,000 people demonstrating in the streets of New York overnight.

How is that going to play to the American electorate?

RICHARD CLARKE: I think there are very few people in the United States who haven't already decided who they are going to vote for.

About 45 per cent of the American people would vote for George Bush if he ran naked down Pennsylvania Avenue.

And about 45 per cent would vote against him if he came up with a cure for cancer.

So that small amount of people in the middle are trying to decide what to do.

Some of them seeing the radical protests in the New York, might be inclined to vote for Bush.

TONY JONES: Let me ask you this - are you worried at all to find yourself effectively in the same boat as someone like Michael Moore and I suppose, in a way, it is a perennial problem for whistleblowers, that they often get championed by people who are more radical than they are.

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, I'm certainly not in the same boat as Michael Moore.

I mean Michael Moore is a Democratic Party partisan.

I'm not, I'm not in either party.

When the Bush Administration does something right, I'm the first to say that it has done something right.

Unfortunately in the war on terrorism, they've done very little right."



Australian Broadcasting Corporation
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