WASHINGTON, Sept 5 (AFP) - George W. Bush took a double-digit lead in what had been a neck-and-neck presidential election contest, prompting Democratic challenger John Kerry to refocus his campaign on bread-and-butter economic issues, where the Republican incumbent president is considered vulnerable.
Bush, fresh from last week's Republican Party's convention, would trounce Democrat John Kerry by a 54-43 percent margin in a theoretical head-to-head matchup, according to a poll to be published in Monday's editions of Newsweek magazine.
That result marks a 13-point margin bounce for the president since an August 5 - 10 poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International for the Pew Research Center, Newsweek said.
Fifty-three percent of registered voters would like to see Bush reelected, the survey found.
A Time magazine poll released Friday also reported Bush opening up a double-digit lead over Kerry.
Until last week's Republican National Convention, at which GOP delegates formally nominated him to be their standard bearer in the November 2 presidential election, polling showed Bush and Kerry to be virtually tied, with the Massachusetts senator enjoying perhaps the slightest of leads over the president.
But Kerry began to slip in the polls after Republicans succeeded in tarnishing his Vietnam war hero status, calling into question whether he actually deserved the medals and other honors he received.
The Bush campaign also began to recast Kerry as a "flip-flopper" who has been unable to take a firm stand on even the most clear-cut policy questions, such as support for the US-led war in Iraq.
On the campaign trail in Ohio early Friday, Kerry expressed outrage that Bush and his Vice President Richard Cheney would impugn his suitability to be the US commander-in-chief.
"I will not have my commitment to defend this questioned by those who refused to serve when they had a chance," Kerry said at a campaign stop in Newark, Ohio, shortly after the conclusion of the Republican convention.
"And I will not have it questioned by those who misled this nation into war in Iraq," the Massachusetts senator said.
Although insisting that the president is still highly vulnerable on the questions of Iraq and the US-led "war on terror," Kerry has retreated from those issues on the campaign trail, placing greater emphasis on the sputtering economic recovery.
"Over the past three years, we've lost 1.6 million jobs in the United States. And to make matters worse, the new jobs were creating pay an average of 9,000 dollars less than the ones we've lost," he said Saturday in the Democrats' weekly radio address.
"All across America, people who are working are working hard. They are working two jobs, three jobs, they're working weekends, just to get by. If President Bush thinks this is good enough, then he just doesn't get it," Kerry said.
Democrats say 230,000 jobs have been lost since Bush took office in 2001; Kerry says he will create 417,000 jobs if he is elected.
Bush's campaign team seemed unruffled by the latest salvos from the Kerry camp.
"One campaign, the Bush campaign, is talking about the next four years," chief campaign strategist Ken Mehlman told ABC news Sunday.
"We're focused on the future. We're focused on making America a more hopeful place. We're focused on making the world a safer place," Mehlman said.