Bush says he’ll join McCain to fight ads

LAS CRUCES, N.M. – President Bush’s campaign said Thursday that it would join with Arizona Sen. John McCain to ask the federal courts to intervene in the dispute over outside political organizations.

Campaign chairman Marc Racicot said they would seek to force the Federal Election Commission to implement rules, delayed until 2006, to regulate groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has been running television ads attacking Democrat John Kerry’s Vietnam War record.

Bush, who has declined to specifically denounce the veterans’ ads, has called for an end to all such groups. But Racicot said the Bush campaign and McCain, principal sponsor of the legislation to overhaul campaign financing, wanted to regulate the outside groups, not abolish them.

The purpose is to “level the playing field,” Racicot said.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan announced the planned legal action after the president and Republican senator had conferred by telephone and agreed to proceed.

“If the court action doesn’t work,” McClellan said, the president would be willing to join Mr. McCain in seeking a legislative remedy in Congress.

“The president thought we got rid of all this kind of shadowy activity when he signed the campaign finance reforms into law,” McClellan said.

Both the Bush campaign and McCain have filed complaints with the FEC, which will form the basis for the court action, Racicot said. But he offered no timetable for filing the case, nor any prediction on how quickly the court might act.

Kerry’s campaign, which has also complained to the FEC about the “527 organizations,” chided the Bush campaign’s rush to court as a red herring.

“This isn’t an issue about 527 ads or campaign finance,” campaign spokesman Phil Singer said. “It’s a question of whether the commander in chief will denounce a group whose claims have been discredited by eyewitness accounts, official naval records and, in some cases, their own words.”

He was referring to the bitter dispute over the Swift boat ads that question the circumstances of the medals awarded Kerry when he served on one of the Navy boats 35 years ago.

Military records supporting the citation and eyewitness accounts of those closest to the action back Kerry’s account. But the Swift boat veterans group has been relentless in challenging his story. And the Kerry camp has charged that Bush is behind it all.

In a three-city campaign blitz Thursday through the swing state of New Mexico, the president did not mention the Swift boat controversy publicly. But McClellan briefed reporters on the campaign’s new strategy just after Bush had telephoned McCain from Air Force One on the way to New Mexico.

Bush had just spent a week at his central Texas ranch preparing for next week’s Republican National Convention and his weeklong march through key battleground states before his acceptance speech Thursday.

Traveling with him was former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who introduced him at rallies in Las Cruces, Farmington and Albuquerque.

“It’s great to be here in Brooklyn,” Giuliani joked in Las Cruces. “Isn’t that where I am?”