Washington, DC – October 21, 2004 – U.S. Representative Mike Doyle (PA-14) today criticized the Bush Administration for sending National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice out on a series of transparently political appearances in states that are in play in the upcoming presidential election.

“The Bush administration has taken the unprecedented step of exploiting the President’s national security advisor for political gain,” Congressman Doyle said yesterday. “This is a new and potentially dangerous political strategy. We can’t afford to have the President’s top national security advisor taking her eye off the ball at a time when our county faces such pressing national security threats.”

“Dr. Rice is an intelligent, committed, and hard-working government employee with tremendous responsibilities, and many groups understandably would like her to speak to them,” Congressman Doyle observed, “but that’s not really the point.”

“If you take even a casual glance at Dr. Rice’s speaking schedule, it’s obvious that her engagements are almost exclusively located in battleground states, and that she’s doing a lot more such events since Labor Day than she has done over the past 4 years,” Doyle observed. “She just spoke in Cleveland last week, she’s speaking in Pittsburgh today, and she’s off to Michigan and Florida in the coming week.”

“You’ve got to ask yourself, should our national security advisor be spending so much time stumping for the President’s re-election campaign, or should she be spending every minute of her working day trying to keep Americans safe from the terrorists and rogue nations that mean us harm?” Congressman Doyle observed. “We shouldn’t play politics with our national security, and we shouldn’t involve the president’s national security advisor in his political campaigns.”

Dr. Rice is scheduled to give a speech to the World Affairs Council in downtown Pittsburgh today, as well as an interview on the Jerry Bowyer show this afternoon. Pennsylvania is a battleground state that could determine the outcome of the upcoming Presidential election.

According to an article in yesterday’s Washington Post (also printed in yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Dr. Rice has recently given speeches in other key battleground states like Ohio, Oregon, Washington, and North Carolina – and she has speeches scheduled in the battleground states of Michigan and Florida in the next 4 days. The Washington Post article also noted that “[t]he frequency and location of her speeches differ sharply from those before this election year – and appear to break with the longstanding precedent that the national security advisor try to avoid overt involvement in the presidential campaign.”

The article also pointed out that of the 68 speeches Dr. Rice has given as National Security Advisor, two-thirds of them have been given in Washington, DC, and none of them was given in battleground states before last May.

And, as an Associated Press report printed in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on October 16 indicated, at least some of these appearances have been before partisan crowds – raising further questions about the nature and appropriateness of these appearances.

The Washington Post article reported that no other National Security Advisor has given nearly as many speeches at the height of a presidential campaign. Most of them gave no speeches at all in the weeks before presidential elections, in fact. The few speeches that past national security advisors did give were given almost exclusively in or around the nation’s capital.

“I urge President Bush to pull Dr. Rice off the campaign trail and put her back to work full-time protecting the American people,” Congressman Doyle said. “That’s what we pay her to do, after all.”

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