WASHINGTON (AFP) - Already scrambling to make up ground lost after last week's debate, US President George W. Bush's campaign was forced further on the defensive by a report that the White House knew before invading Iraq that key intelligence on the country's alleged nuclear weapons program was questionable.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday she knew of a debate within the US government about the purpose of aluminum tubes found in Iraq, which she and other officials had brandished before the war as proof of Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions.
In a series of television interviews Sunday, Rice insisted, however, that she only later learned that the Energy Department believed the aluminum tubes were actually meant for conventional weapons, denying a New York Times report that she knew of those concerns before wielding the tubes as evidence in her argument for war.
"At that time we understood there were some debates within the intelligence community. I later learned that the Energy Department believed that these tubes might be for something else," she told NBC television's "Today" show.
Speaking on the campaign trail in the town of Austintown, Ohio, Sunday, Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry called the Times report a stinging indictment of the Bush administration's prewar intelligence and foreign policy judgment.
"There are very serious questions about whether the administration was open and honest in making the case for war in Iraq," Kerry said on a campaign sweep taking him through several rust-belt communities.
"These are questions that the president must face. These are question that the president has to answer fully to the American people and the troops," he said.
Kerry tried to wrench the focus of the US election campaign from Iraq to the economy Sunday, as he consoled job hunters and roasted Republican fiscal policy.
Bush's policies have culled tens of thousands of jobs from the US industrial heartland, Democrats claim. They said the president's tax policies have rewarded the rich at the expense of the poor, exploded the deficit and ripped the heart out of public services.
"There is nothing conservative about these people, they are radical, extreme, they have no regard for fiscal responsibility," Kerry told a town hall-style meeting in Austintown.
"Stop and think about 270,000 lost jobs in Ohio ... stop and think about schools that have after-school programs are being cut so that the most powerful people have been taken care of," Kerry said.
Kerry's strong performance in Thursday's debate with Bush on international affairs, combined with weekend polls showing Kerry with a slim advantage over Bush after trailing him for weeks, have reinvigorated the Democrat's bid for office.
On Tuesday, Kerry's running mate, North Carolina Senator John Edwards, faces Vice President Dick Cheney in a 90-minute debate on the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

The charismatic Edwards, a former trial lawyer, will sit across a table from Cheney, a serious, often dour conservative with a quick wit and sharp tongue. A television journalist will moderate the event.

Kerry and Bush in the meantime are preparing for two more debates. The rivals meet Friday in the midwestern city of St. Louis, Missouri in a town hall format to discuss all topics, and on October 13 at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona to discuss domestic and economic issues.

Speaking on CBS television on Sunday, White House communications director Dan Bartlett emphasized that Kerry "has been somebody who has debated all his life and is a good debater. But there's a difference between having style and having rhetorical points."

He then dismissed the Democrat as "a walking contradiction when it comes to the issue of Iraq." Kerry voted in favor of authorizing Bush to go to war, then opposing the way the war is being waged.

Lockhart, a former spokesman for president Bill Clinton and now a senior Kerry adviser, said on CBS that Bush's mistake was expecting to debate a caricature that "100 million dollars in negative advertising had created."

But Bush "didn't know how to handle" the real John Kerry. "It was a guy who was clear, who was consistent, and the president didn't have an answer."