By Gregory Korte
Enquirer staff writer

Dick Cheney sits with his wife Lynne during their Cincinnati Town Hall Meeting. (Ernest Coleman/The Enquirer) • WCPO video of Cheney • Jobless figures skewed, VP says

Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that President Bush is better qualified than Sen. John Kerry to deal with a terrorist attack if it happens - but said America would have to face the threat of attacks no matter who is elected.

In an interview with the Enquirer after a campaign event in Cincinnati, Cheney said he wanted to "clean up" the controversy surrounding his remarks at a similar event Tuesday in Des Moines, Iowa .

There, he told a town-hall audience that if, on Election Day, "we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again...."

But Thursday, he emphasized the half-sentence that came after: "... that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war."

"I did not say if Kerry is elected, we will be hit by a terrorist attack," Cheney said.

"Whoever is elected president has to anticipate more attacks. My point was the question before us is: Will we have the most effective policy in place to deal with that threat? George Bush will pursue a more effective policy than John Kerry.

"Look at what we have done and what Kerry has said and the way he voted for 20 years in the Senate."

Cheney's comments followed an hour-long, town-hall-style campaign event in which he talked at length about terrorism and the war in Iraq. The invitation-only crowd in an upstairs convention-center ballroom numbered about 450; about 40 protesters kept vigil outside.

Cheney said the recent terrorist attacks in Russia, Indonesia and elsewhere have demonstrated that fighting terrorism is a global problem - and not a problem with U.S. policy in the Middle East.

"That kind of violence, that kind of unbelievable savagery, is something the civilized world simply cannot accept," he said of the siege on a school in southern Russia.

"I think this brings home to anyone who comes to analyze it, that any nation in the world is vulnerable to this kind of attack. It's not just an anti-U.S. kind of thing."

Though the Bush campaign said the timing was coincidental, Cheney's visit came the day after Kerry gave a speech in Cincinnati critical of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraqi war. Kerry said the $200 billion spent to "go it alone" in Iraq would have been better spent on domestic priorities.

Cheney, in turn, criticized what he called a "pre-9/11 mind-set" and touted the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emption - going after terrorist groups and those who support them. And he maintained - despite the findings of the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks - that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein gave "safe haven" to al-Qaida operatives.

"A perfect defense isn't good enough. You can be right 99 percent of the time on defense, and that 1 percent that gets through will kill you. So we made the decision to go on offense, and I think it was absolutely the right decision.

"There are obviously some costs associated with it. I don't want anybody to think it's easy street we're on," he said, pointing to the parents of Spc. Keith "Matt" Maupin, a Batavia soldier who's been missing in Iraq since April, in the front row.

Cheney, as he did Tuesday in Des Moines, argued that post-World War II decisions made about international security provided a framework for success in the Cold War. But in Cincinnati, he did not follow it to the same conclusion as he did in Des Moines.

Here's what he said Tuesday, according to a White House transcript: "We're now at that point where we're making that kind of decision for the next 30 or 40 years, and it's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war."

In Nashua, N.H., Thursday, Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards devoted several paragraphs of a speech blasting the man he wants to replace in Washington.

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com