by Olivier Knox
WASHINGTON, Sept 9 (AFP) - US President George W. Bush and Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry sparred on the economy and the Iraq war and waged a war of words over the incumbent's national guard stint to avoid the Vietnam War.
Two days before the third anniversary of the September 11 strikes by Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, Kerry accused Bush of focusing on Iraq at the expense of other priorities like hunting down the elusive terrorist mastermind.
Campaigning in Iowa, Kerry warned that North Korea is "more dangerous than it was before," Iran is being "ignored," and that Iraq has "diverted" resources from "the real war on terror in Afghanistan and getting Osama bin Laden."
In Pennsylvania, Bush defended the 1.7 trillion-dollar tax cuts at the heart of his economic program and told supporters that Kerry's pledge to roll back reductions for just the top two percent of earners could not be trusted.
The president cited his campaign's calculation that Kerry had proposed two trillion dollars in new spending but would raise only 650 billion, and drew cheers when he asked rhetorically: "Guess who would wind up paying the bill?"
With less than two months before the November 2 election, Bush got good news from a new poll showing him ahead of Kerry among likely voters in Missouri and Ohio, rich prizes among the battleground states.
The USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey found Bush up 55-41 in Missouri and 52-44 in Ohio, while Kerry was ahead 52-44 in Washington and locked in a statistical dead heat with the incumbent in Pennsylvania.
Kerry aides said the poll, which had an error margin of four percentage points, came too soon after the Republican National Convention in New York to be reliable and insisted that the race would soon revert to a dead heat.
A new survey by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics found that the convention had bolstered Bush's national poll standings by just three percentage points, giving him a 47-45 edge with an error margin of three percentage points.
On another front, the two campaigns exchanged verbal broadsides over new fuel for charges Bush's family connections got him into the Texas National Guard and that he shirked his duties while in the guard.
CBS television's "60 Minutes" program broadcast an interview with a former Texas politician, Ben Barnes, who said had pulled strings at the request of a Bush family friend to secure Bush a coveted post in the guard.
CBS also uncovered memos it said were written by late lieutenant colonel Jerry Killian, who headed Bush's squadron, saying he had grounded Bush for failing to attend an annual physical despite a direct order to do so and for "failure to perform" to US Air Force and Air National Guard standards.
Killian, who died in 1984, also wrote of coming under political pressure to sugarcoat Bush's annual review.
"You absolutely are seeing a coordinated attack by John Kerry and his surrogates on the president. The polls show Senator Kerry falling behind, and it's the same old recycled attacks that we've seen every time the president has been up for election," Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.
McClellan "seems to have lost his cool. Rather than deal with real issues with real candor, Mr McClellan is resorting to hurling nonsensical, inaccurate and baseless charges at the Kerry campaign," countered Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart.
The fresh flap over the Vietnam War came after Kerry faced a Republican-funded group's allegations that he embellished his exploits in Vietnam, where he won five medals and was wounded three times.
The Democrat has aggressively used his record, and the support of all but one of those who served on his patrol boat, to highlight his fitness to be US commander in chief at a time when voters worry about the war on terrorism.
The Boston Globe said a re-examination of records released in February showed Bush's attendance at required training drills was so irregular that his superiors could have disciplined him or ordered him to active duty in 1972, 1973 or 1974.
Instead, the newspaper said, they did neither.