President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry intensified their attacks on each other Tuesday, trading sharp criticism over the Iraq war and the state of the US economy, even as new polling showed Bush opening a significant lead.
Bush, speaking at a rally in Lee's Summit, Missouri, accused Kerry of reversing himself on the war multiple times, citing two congressional votes and Kerry's shifting public statements. Kerry had described the invasion as launched at the wrong time and in the wrong place, a line Bush said Kerry had lifted from onetime rival Howard Dean.
Kerry hit back on fiscal policy in Greensboro, North Carolina, citing a Congressional Budget Office projection of a 442-billion-dollar federal budget deficit as proof of Bush's economic mismanagement. He also charged that administration policies had pushed American jobs overseas, gutting communities nationwide.
A Gallup poll released Tuesday put Bush ahead 52 to 45 percent among likely voters, a gap the Kerry campaign attributed to a post-convention bounce it expected to shrink within a week to 10 days. The candidates were competing across 17 contested states ahead of the 2 November vote, with total US military deaths in Iraq nearing 1,000.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in September 2004, in its own words.