Bush, Kerry hit the campaign trail after debate ends in draw

WASHINGTON, Oct 9 (AFP) - The US presidential rivals hit the campaign trail running Saturday, fervently courting voters in battleground states after their hard-fought second debate left the race for the White House tighter than ever.
President George W. Bush was set to stump in three midwestern states -- Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota -- while his Democratic challenger John Kerry was scheduled to campaign in the key states of Ohio and Florida.
Immediately afterwards, the two were to cloister themselves once again to prepare for their third and final debate on October 13, focusing on domestic affairs.
Neither man emerged as the clear winner of Friday's face-off, according to early reactions. But analysts said Bush rebounded from a poor performance in the first presidential debate on September 30, leaving the race deadlocked with just 24 days before voters go to the polls November 2.
In an often tense 90-minute rhetorical battle at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Bush accused Kerry of "naive and dangerous" views on North Korea and Iran, defended the March 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, and said his rival was as steady as a weathervane.
"I can see why people think that he changes position quite often, because he does," said Bush. "He said he thought Saddam Hussein was a grave threat, and now he said it was a mistake to remove Saddam Hussein from power."
Kerry hammered away at anemic job creation on Bush's watch and a report saying Saddam did not have the banned weapons that the president made the core of the case for war in Iraq.
Asked by an audience member to answer Bush's charges he is "wishy-washy," Kerry said: "The president didn't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so he's really turned his campaign into a weapon of mass deception."
"Let me tell you straight up: I've never changed my mind about Iraq. I do believe Saddam Hussein was a threat. I always believed he was a threat," Kerry said in response to increasingly fierce attacks from Bush's campaign.
The two candidates paced the floor of a university hall here as they took questions from an audience of 140 voters who said they were still up for grabs with less than a month before the election.
The president stayed on the offensive on national security and the economy as he worked to overcome a lackluster performance in their first debate last week.
After Kerry accused him of a "go alone" approach to Iraq, Bush angrily interrupted the moderator's efforts to ask a follow-up question, pointing to Britain, Italy, and Poland and saying "they're sacrificing with us" in Iraq.
Bush charged the Democrat would be too worried about global opinion of the United States to make hard decisions like going to war, saying: "Sometimes in this world you make unpopular decisions because you think they're right."
Bush and Kerry each put their own spin on a new government report showing just 96,000 new jobs in September, far fewer than expected and below the pace many economists say is needed to keep up with population growth.
Kerry noted that Bush would be the first US president since the Great Depression in the 1930s to oversee a net job loss. Bush said he had inherited a slowing economy made worse by the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
Two snap polls on who won the match showed a statistical tie. An ABC News poll and a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken just after the match each gave Kerry a narrow win, but in both cases the difference between the two candidates was smaller than the margin of error.
Top Kerry aide Joe Lockhart said that the size of the trend was not the only consideration. "We think the trend is going in the right direction," he said in a telephone press conference.
The final presidential debate will be held Wednesday in the western state of Arizona. But analysts said there were unlikely to be any major surprises as the campaign clock ticks down.
"I think it's basically a question of which (candidate) does the organizing and gets out his vote, because there are virtually no undecided voters any more," said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution.
"I think this thing is just as tight as a tick," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "It's ending up just where we thought it would all along."