MIAMI, Oct 10 (AFP) - Democratic hopeful John Kerry joined singing worshippers at a largely black Baptist church here seeking their support Sunday, while his rival, President George W. Bush, prepared at his Texas ranch for their upcoming debate on domestic issues.
With both candidates planning to spend the next few days studying up for their third and last televised face-off in Arizona on Wednesday, their campaigns sparred over Iraq, fueled by an official report last week that found Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US-led 2003 invasion.
A new poll for ABC television conducted in part before the last presidential debate Friday showed Bush still leading Kerry by about four percentage points.
The poll of 2,030 adults, conducted October 6-9, gave Bush 50 percent and Kerry 46 percent. The margin of error was 2.5 percentage points.
Kerry appeared Sunday at Miami's Friendship Missionary Baptist Church with two African-American politicians, Reverend Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton.
"Never again will a million African-Americans be denied the right to exercise their vote in the United States of America, that is not going to happen," Kerry said, drawing exclamations of agreement from the worshippers.
Voting in Florida in the 2000 presidential election was plunged into chaos amid charges that many blacks were wrongly removed from the electoral rolls, and that many of their votes were improperly counted.
Kerry's appearance allowed him to flesh out his religious faith -- an important requirement for any US candidate -- and to connect with the African-American community, which votes largely Democratic.
There has been some concern that Kerry has yet to energise African-American voters, and a big turnout from the community is crucial for his victory.
Sharpton, a former rival for the Democratic nomination warned Bush: "On November 2 we are going to the polls for the big payback," he said, to loud cheers from the congregation.
Jackson focused on what he said are new efforts to deprive African-Americans of the right to vote.
"In 2000 our franchise was taken from us," Jackson claimed. "We were targeted, today it is getting worse. It is not just Florida, it's Minnesota, it's Colorado, it's Illinois. It's an ideology, it's a plan.
"While they brag upon elections on Afghanistan, we cannot have one meeting to discuss open, free and fair elections at home."
Urging African-Americans to come out en masse against Bush, Jackson said: "The power is in your hands, hands that once picked cotton, on November 2 can pick a president."
Meanwhile Kerry's running mate, John Edwards, said in an interview with ABC television that one of his mistakes as senator was "believing that there were weapons of mass destruction."
Giving Bush "the authority to confront Saddam Hussein ... was the right thing to do," he said.
"But we didn't authorize this president and vice president to make the mess that they've made," he told CBS television in a later interview, saying the adminstration did not put a proper coalition in place before the war, and did not let United Nations weapons inspectors do their job.
"If they had, we would know what we know now, that (Iraq) in fact didn't have weapons of mass destruction, didn't even have an active program to develop weapons of mass destruction," Edwards said.
Debate over the war has intensified since the top US weapons inspector in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, released a report stating that Saddam had destroyed most of his chemical and biological weapons after his 1991 Gulf War defeat, and that his nuclear program had "progressively decayed."
However, US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the administration would still have attacked Iraq even if they had known that Saddam had none of the banned weapons.
Saddam "was someone who had an insatiable appetite for weapons of mass destruction. He had the means, he had the intent, he had the money to do it," Rice said on Fox television.
In an interview published in The New York Times magazine Sunday, Kerry slammed the administration's Middle East policy, accusing Bush of fighting a "myopic kind of war."
Under Bush "the approach is that democracy is the automatic, easily embraced alternative to every ill in the region," Kerry said.
"You can't impose it on people," Kerry said. "You have to bring them to it. You have to invite them to it. You have to nurture the process."
Washington needs "to engage more directly and more respectfully with Islam, with the state of Islam, with religious leaders, mullahs, imams, clerics, in a way that proves this is not a clash with the British and the Americans and the old forces they remember from the colonial days," he said.
As president, Kerry said he would approach the leaders of Egypt and Jordan to change negative views about the United States, and get US businesses involved in the region.