by Olivier Knox
PORTLAND, Oregon, Aug 13 (AFP) - Democratic White House contender John Kerry on Friday charged that President George W. Bush's signature tax cuts had overwhelmingly helped the wealthiest Americans while Bush tied his campaign to the Olympic Games.
Kerry, running neck and neck with Bush just 80 days from the November 2 election, pointed to newspaper accounts of a government report that the reductions had shifted tax burdens from the rich to the middle-class.
"He is turning his back on middle-class families," Kerry said in a statement. "His tax breaks have forced them to pay a bigger share of Americas tax burden forcing them to bear the brunt of his failed economic policies."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that while higher-income taxpayers received higher absolute reductions, middle-class taxpayers received a greater reduction in tax rates.
"This is just another misleading attack," he said.
Both candidates were in Oregon, so close that the charter jet carrying the White House press corps parked almost wing-to-wing with the Massachusetts senator's red-white-and blue campaign plane.
On the waterfront at Portland port, the president unveiled a proposal to deepen 104 miles (168 kilometers) of the Columbia river to boost exports and protect trade-dependent jobs in a region with sluggish employment growth.
"Today we're going to take an important new step to enhance the vitality of this river and thereby expand opportunities for the people of the Pacific Northwest," he said, surrounded by massive metal shipping containers.
The president's campaign, meanwhile, touted a new advertisement, set to run in health clubs during the Olympic Games, in which he touts the presence in Athens of athletes from Afghanistan and Iraq.
"There will be two more free nations, and two fewer terrorist regimes" in Athens, Bush says in the commercial, a reference to the two wars he launched to topple the Taliban Islamist regime and Saddam Hussein.
"It's another example of how we're trying to link what's going on obviously in Athens with the positive news and developments out of Iraq and Afghanistan," said the president's chief campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd.
The White House echoed his message by sending reporters a statement about Alla Hikmet Jasmin, whom it identified as "the only female athlete representing Iraq at the Olympics"
And White House aides happily told reporters on Thursday that televisions in the presidential mansion were tuned to the Iraq-Portugal football match, which the Iraqis won 4-2 to score an upset victory.
After campaigning in Oregon, where polls show Kerry enjoys a slim lead, Bush was to travel to Washington state, which he lost in 2000 by just 6,765 votes out of 1.5 million cast.
The president was to go to Iowa on Saturday before heading back to Washington, wrapping up an unusually aggressive campaign swing that began with a three-city bus tour in the crucial battleground state of Florida.