PHILADELPHIA – George W. Bush’s running mate, Dick Cheney, told a crowd of enthusiastic supporters last night he’s “especially proud” of his voting record in Congress, which has come under Democratic attack.
Cheney got here three days ahead of Bush, who’s set to arrive Wednesday and give his acceptance speech Thursday night.
Cheney made just a few scripted remarks to a crowd at his downtown hotel, but earlier he went on all five network talk shows to defend his voting record.
Cheney, a former secretary of defense, compiled a very conservative record while he represented Wyoming in Congress, and he’s come under fire for it by Al Gore’s campaign and in new Democratic attack ads.
He said he wouldn’t have opposed a resolution that called for the freeing of then-jailed South African leader Nelson Mandela, except that it also called for recognizing Mandela’s African National Congress at a time when the Reagan administration considered the group terrorist.
“The ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization … Nobody was for keeping Nelson Mandela is prison. Nobody was for supporting apartheid,” Cheney told ABC’s “This Week” in his second different explanation of that vote in a few days.
Cheney called Mandela a “great man” who has “mellowed.”
Cheney also said he’s now for federal spending for Head Start and would consider a ban on “cop killer” bullets that can pierce body armor.
“It would depend … I think we’ve come a long way with respect to our efforts to find ways to deal with the problems of gun crime,” Cheney said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” though he added that he remains committed to gun rights.
Cheney has also been slammed for votes against the school lunch program, funding the Defense Department, the Clean Air Act, and a ban on small plastic guns that elude metal detectors.
“I might find a couple [of votes] I would do differently,” Cheney said. But he complained that some of the votes came up under “suspended rules,” which meant he couldn’t introduce amendments.
Cheney said he no longer wants to eliminate the Defense Department and said he’d support the Equal Rights Amendment if it prohibited women from being drafted into the military.
“Dick Cheney will say anything to hide his extreme record and obscure the truth behind George W. Bush’s rhetoric,” said Gore spokesman Doug Hattaway.
Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer fired back that the “attack-oriented” Gore campaign was “distorting a good man’s record.”