WASHINGTON, July 29 (AFP) - Facing stinging attacks from Democrats united behind John Kerry, their candidate for the White House, President George W. Bush is to fight back by taking his campaign on the road across the United States.
Bush normally has a long holiday at his Texas ranch in August.
But the Republican president will spend most of this August visiting as many distant corners of the United States as he can before his party's convention in New York at the end of the month.
On Friday and Saturday, Bush will visit the battleground states of Missouri, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In the 2000 election, Bush narrowly won Missouri and Ohio while his Democratic opponent Al Gore took Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Less than 100 days from the November 2 election, most polls show Bush and Kerry neck-and-neck and many polls show the president's approval rating below 50 percent. For many weeks now, Bush will only spend short periods at the White House
He will also have to go to Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, Washington state and Iowa before the Republican convention starts on August 30.
His campaign has said visits to other Democratic strongholds such as California are also possible.
Because of the growing urgency of the campaign, Bush will only spend a few days at his ranch at Crawford, Texas, between two trips. Since his election Bush has spent nearly all of August at his beloved ranch.
But Republicans have been anxiously seeking ways to respond to the Democratic party convention in Boston this week where Kerry's Vietnam war record has been used to emphasise his security credentials against Bush.
Security, particularly after the September 11 attacks in 2001 which left about 3,000 dead, is set to become a key issue in the November election.
Opinion polls say voters have more trust in Bush as a war leader, but the Democrats are trying to exploit Bush's controversial record during the Vietnam war, when he served in the National Air Guard in the United States, as well as the president's problems over Iraq.
Iraq, however, is a topic that Kerry must broach with caution. The Massachusetts senator voted to give Bush permission to invade Iraq though he now says the president deceived the nation over the campaign.
"When he accepts the Democratic presidential nomination tonight, John Kerry needs to give the nation a clearer idea of how his choices would have differed from President Bush's -- particularly when it comes to the war in Iraq," The New York Times said in an editorial Thursday.
The economy is another key area where voters could swing one way or another.
Bush says he has relaunched growth with his huge tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. Unemployment is also starting to fall again.
But Democrats highlight that more than one million jobs have been lost in the United States since 2001 and that the tax cuts, particularly for the very rich, have stoked up the US budget deficit.
Both sides will now seize upon every economic indicator -- starting with the release Friday of the first official estimate of growth in the second quarter. Next week will come the unemployment and job creation figures for July.