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Released five days before Election Day, the ad was called, "Whatever It
Takes"
and had been touted by Bush advisers as a personal message from the
president
talking about the war on terror.
It depicts Bush talking of his meetings with family members of fallen
soldiers and saying the "hardest decision"
he faced was the one to
send soldiers into battle.
It then shows clips of people apparently listening to the president,
including a crowd of soldiers. But some
of the faces appear more than once in
the image, which flashes across the screen as Bush vows to
"never relent in
defending America, whatever it takes."
Reed Dickens, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, acknowledged the image
had been adjusted
but said it was done during the editing process and had not
been ordered by the campaign.
"It was completely unintentional," he said. "The ad has already been replaced."
The ad still appeared on the front page of the campaign's Web site as of Thursday afternoon.
The Kerry campaign said it was an example of the Bush administration's dishonesty.
"Now we know why this ad is named 'Whatever It Takes,"' Kerry
campaign senior adviser Joe Lockhart
said in a statement. "This
administration has always had a problem telling the truth from Iraq to jobs to
healthcare."
Dickens said, "There was no attempt to mislead."
MIAMI, Oct. 28 - President
Bush's campaign said Thursday that it was replacing one of its
closing
advertisements after acknowledging that it included an image that had been
doctored to increase the
number of soldiers appearing to listen to Mr. Bush.
The abrupt move came after a liberal Web log,
DailyKos, featured a posting showing that the same faces
appear several times in several different places within the same crowd shot.
Democrats pounced on the
issue, saying that the advertisement underscored their contention that the
Bush administration had
repeatedly deceived the American people.
Bush campaign aides said they were unaware that
the editors who worked on the advertisement had
used a computer program to expand the size of the crowd after being asked to
crop the shot for artistic reasons.
"The important thing in this is there was
no intent to mislead people about the size of the audience,"
said Mark McKinnon, Mr. Bush's chief media adviser. "They were real
soldiers, they were really there,
there was no editorial intent here."
He said that the advertisement was being
retooled and that the new version, without the doctored portion,
would be sent immediately to the cable networks planning to run the spot.
Joe Lockhart, a spokesman for Senator
John Kerry, said in a statement, "If they won't tell the truth
in an ad,
they won't tell the truth about anything else."
Soldiers have become increasingly potent
symbols in the final days of an election in which the war in Iraq
has become a central issue.
On Wednesday, after Mr. Kerry had aggressively
criticized Mr. Bush for days over a report that 380 tons of
powerful explosives disappeared from an Iraqi military complex after the
American-led invasion, Mr. Bush
accused him of "denigrating the actions" of the troops.
Responding on Wednesday in Kendall, a suburb
here, Senator
John Edwards of North Carolina,
Mr. Kerry's running mate, said, "Aren't we sick and tired of George Bush
and Dick Cheney using our
troops as shields to protect their own jobs?"
In a new Kerry advertisement that was released
Wednesday, an announcer says, "As we see the deepening
crisis and chaos in Iraq, as we choose a new commander in chief and a fresh
start, we will always support
and honor those who serve."
Mr. Bush's campaign took the Kerry campaign's
finger-pointing over the doctored advertisement to reprise
one of its longtime attacks on Mr. Kerry for his vote against the $87 billion
appropriation for military and
rebuilding operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Noting that the soldiers who appear in the
advertisement had been assembled to hear Mr. Bush speak at
Fort Drum, N.Y., in July, Steve Schmidt, a Bush campaign spokesman, said,
"These are the soldiers
John Kerry voted against when he voted against their body armor, their combat
pay and their health care benefits."
The shot was included in a spot that Mr. Bush's
campaign had presented as a crucial part of its closing
argument to voters. Most of the spot shows a segment of Mr. Bush's nominating
acceptance speech in
which he praises the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.
"I've met with the parents and wives and
husbands who have received a folded flag," he says. "Because of
your service and sacrifice, we are defeating the terrorists where they live
and plan and you're making America safer."
The actual photograph used in the commercial
showed Mr. Bush speaking from a lectern with the soldiers
behind him. But Mr. McKinnon said the editors were asked to crop Mr. Bush to
focus on the soldiers.