Returning this favor, bin Laden gave Bush a big assist in the tense final days of Campaign 2004.
With no WMD found in Iraq and the war going badly, Bush was struggling and Democrat John Kerry was within reach of victory. It was then that bin Laden ended nearly a year of silence by taking the risky step of releasing a new video on Oct. 29, 2004.
Bin Laden's rant attacking Bush was immediately spun by Bush's supporters as bin Laden's "endorsement" of Kerry.
According to two polls taken during and after the videotape's release, Bush experienced a bump of several percentage points, from a virtual tie with Kerry to a five or six percentage point lead. Tracking polls by TIPP and Newsweek detected a surge in Bush support from a statistically insignificant two-point lead to five and six points, respectively.
On Election Day, Nov. 2, the official results showed Bush winning by a margin of less than three percentage points. So, arguably the intervention by bin Laden -- urging Americans to reject Bush and thus having the predictable effect of boosting Bush -- may have tipped the election and given Bush a second term.
A CIA Assessment
Immediately after bin Laden's videotape appeared, senior CIA analysts reached just that conclusion about bin Laden's intent.
"Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President," said deputy CIA director John McLaughlin in opening a meeting to review secret "strategic analysis" of the videotape, according to Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which drew heavily from CIA insiders.
Suskind wrote that CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons." Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection."
Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, expressed the consensus view that bin Laden recognized how Bush's heavy-handed policies -- such as the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and the war in Iraq -- were serving al-Qaeda's strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.
"Certainly," Miscik said, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years," according to Suskind's account.
As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts were troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. "An ocean of hard truths before them -- such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected -- remained untouched," Suskind wrote.
Bush enthusiasts, however, took bin Laden's videotape at face value, calling it proof the terrorist leader feared Bush and favored Kerry. In a pro-Bush book, Strategery, right-wing journalist Bill Sammon portrayed bin Laden's videotape as an attempt by the terrorist leader to persuade Americans to vote for Kerry.
But Bush himself recognized the real impact of bin Laden's rant. "I thought it was going to help," Bush told Sammon after the election. "I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn't want Bush to be the President, something must be right with Bush."
In Strategery, Sammon also quoted Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman as agreeing that bin Laden's videotape helped Bush. "It reminded people of the stakes," Mehlman said. "It reinforced an issue on which Bush had a big lead over Kerry."
So how hard is it to figure out that bin Laden -- a longtime student of American politics -- would have understood exactly the same point?
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