WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democrat John Kerry, seeking to refocus his White House battle against George W. Bush, zeroed in on the president`s economic record he called a litany of fiscal failure and favoritism for the rich.
After days of sparring largely on Iraq and security issues, Kerry launched a double-barreled attack on Bush`s "dismal" handling of the economy in an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal and a speech to the Detroit Economic Club.
He broke no new ground but took a noticeably sharper tone in assailing the net loss of a million jobs, spiraling health and education costs and mushrooming budget deficits since the Republican took office in January 2001.
"Of course, the president would have us believe that his record is the result of bad luck, not bad decisions," Kerry said Wednesday in remarks prepared for Detroit. "His is the Excuse Presidency: never wrong, never responsible, never to blame."
"George Bushs failures are the result of misplaced values and wrong choices that always give more and more to those with the most and tell the middle-class, `you are not the priority,`" the Massachusetts senator said.
The Democrat, trailing Bush in the polls less than seven weeks before the November 2 election, repeated pledges to provide business tax incentives to create more jobs and stem "outsourcing" of positions abroad.
He promised to establish school tuition credits, lower health costs, reverse tax cuts Bush accorded Americans earning more than 200,000 dollars a year and halve the 422 billion dollar federal deficit within four years.
"Cleaning up President Bush`s fiscal mess will not be easy but (...) we have to make the tough choices to move America`s growing deficits back in the right direction," Kerry wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
Some Democrats have criticized Kerry for failing to hit Bush hard enough on bread-and-butter issues and allowing the Republicans to center the debate on the challenger`s fitness for command in the war on terror.
Opinion polls show the Republican incumbent still vulnerable on economic questions. A majority of voters are unhappy with his management and more than 60 percent rate the economy as only fair or poor.
But Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman, in a conference call with reporters, brushed off the latest Democratic offensive as unduly pessimistic and based on "old, tired ideas" that would mean more red tape and hurt small businesses.
His policy director Tim Adams dismissed Kerry`s plan to cut the deficit, saying each dollar in raised taxes would be offset by two or three in spending. "Not a single dime of additional revenue goes to deficit reduction," he said.
With Kerry bogged down in attacks on his vaunted Vietnam war record and the Republicans accusing him of waffling on the Iraq war, Bush has surged to an overall lead of two to 12 points in most polls.
But a new survey published Wednesday by the Annenberg Public Policy Center showed the president`s approval rating among undecided voters dropping from 56 percent to 44 percent in the last month. Kerry`s popularity rose from 36 to 43 percent.
The study suggested Bush had been hurt by a CBS television report last week that questioned whether he had fulfilled his obligations in the Texas Air National Guard. Democrats have charged he used family connections to shirk duty.
CBS was meanwhile having its own headaches over the report, which other media challenged as being based on counterfeit documents, which could not be authenticated because their author, Bush`s former Texas National Guard commander, died 20 years ago.
But CBS Wednesday aired an interview with the commander`s former secretary, who said that while she did not type the memos in question and believed they were fake, the information was correct.
CBS Washington correspondent Wyatt Andrews said the memos came from a confidential source, and the network "remains certain the content of the story is true."
CBS News president Andrew Heyward added, "We would not have put the report on the air if we did not believe in every aspect of it."
Bush campaign manager Mehlman, in his conference call with reporters, was eager to keep the discussion on Iraq where the Republicans have scored political points on Kerry`s initial vote to authorize military action and later opposition to the war.
"On the most important issue facing our country today, the question of how we deal with global terrorism, John Kerry`s position has deteriorated into complete and total incoherence," he said.
For his part, Kerry again attacked what he called Bush`s failed diplomacy that left the United States unable to muster more troops from its European allies for the operation in Iraq.
Interviewed on a national radio talk show, Kerry reiterated his hope of withdrawing the 140,000 troops in Iraq by the end of his first four-year term if he wins the White House.
Asked how he would do it, the Democrat replied: "I would immediately call a summit meeting of the European community. They haven`t lived up to the obligations of their own resolution that they passed at the UN."