Political Memo: In New Attacks, Bush Pushes Limit on the Facts By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

From the beginning of the year, the White House has charted new ground with the sweep of its negative campaigning, starting with an $80 million wave of attack advertisements directed at Senator John Kerry that began the moment he effectively won his party’s nomination last spring.

But the scathing indictment that Mr. Bush offered of Mr. Kerry over the past two days – on the eve of the second presidential debate and with polls showing the race tightening – took these attacks to a blistering new level. In the process, several analysts say, Mr. Bush pushed the limits of subjective interpretation and offered exaggerated or what some Democrats said were distorted accounts of Mr. Kerry’s positions on health care, tax cuts, the Iraq war and foreign policy. …

[A]nalysts, including some Republicans, said Mr. Bush was repeatedly taking phrases and sentences out of context, or cherry-picking votes, to provide an unfavorable case against Mr. Kerry.

“So much of what they are indicting is taken out of context,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of a book on negative campaigning. “It’s a matter of taking sentences out of context or parts of sentences out of context. And it’s hard for journalists to write the context back in because it takes time.” …

The latest line of attacks by Mr. Bush comes during what has been a tumultuous week for him, amid signs that a once swaggering White House was getting worried. …

“[Karl] Rove and [Ralph] Reed were schooled by Lee [Atwater] and he told them that what you do is you rip the bark off liberals.” said Marshall Wittman, a former senior aide to Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and is registered as an independent. “Even if they’re not liberals you rip the bark off them. That’s what they are doing.“