Kerry Urges Voters to Look Past Bush’s ’Last-Minute Promises’

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

NEWARK, Ohio, Sept. 3 - Senator John Kerry opened the final 60 days of the presidential campaign on Friday with a slashing indictment of President Bush’s record on jobs and health care, saying he had misled the United States into war in Iraq and left a trail of broken promises and worsened problems at home.

As his running mate and their wives swept across the electoral battlegrounds of Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin, Mr. Kerry asked voters in this economically battered state to look past Mr. Bush’s "last-minute promises" and focus on what he said were the facts: 1.7 million jobs lost since 2000, 1.4 million more people in 2003 without health insurance than the year before and 1.3 million more in poverty.

"Is that a reason to be re-elected?" Mr. Kerry said. "Folks, they’ve had four years. And what they’ve done is take America backwards."

Mr. Kerry also seized on economic data released Friday that showed only modest job growth in August.

Since accepting the nomination at the end of July, Mr. Kerry has for the most part avoided harsh political attacks on the president, instead emphasizing his expansive plans and offering gauzy-sounding talk of sunrises and grabbing onto dreams. But he returned to the offensive after his character, voting history and even his patriotism were questioned by Republicans in New York this week, and after Democrats faulted him for a hesitant, halting response last month to televised attacks on his military record.

Criticizing the Republican convention as bitter and insulting one moment, then calling Mr. Bush dishonest the next, Mr. Kerry attacked against what he called his rivals’ distortions and said the president’s address Thursday made clear he "will literally say anything and do anything in order to try to get re-elected" - a line stolen from Mr. Bush, who used it regularly against Al Gore.

"Yesterday, I read that speech," Mr. Kerry told a crowd of thousands here in a heavily Republican county outside Columbus that Mr. Bush won by 22 percentage points in 2000. "Every time they open their mouths, they can’t tell the truth about the things that we want to do. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. It’s time for us to have a president of the United States who can look you in the eye and when he does, you know you’re being told the truth about your lives and about this country."

But it was on the economy that Mr. Kerry focused on here in Newark, a rural town of 46,000 where 4,300 people are unemployed and another local factory is set to lay off 784 workers next Thursday.

"All these attacks on me, I’ve been through worse, believe me - that’s not what this is about," he said. "It’s their attacks on you, that’s what this is all about."

"Just today the secretary of labor stood up and said that 140,000 jobs being announced is something to celebrate in America," Mr. Kerry said. "My friends, at the rate that this administration is creating jobs, you’re not going to have a net plus one job in the state of Ohio till the year 2011. I don’t think this is something to celebrate, I think this is something to get to work on."

Mr. Kerry’s focus on jobs, health care and other domestic issues came as a strategic change in a campaign in which he has devoted more attention to foreign policy than any other single issue. His advisers say that for all the damage done by the unsubstantiated attacks on Mr. Kerry’s military record, they believe he has passed the threshold test of "does he have the strength, does he have the resoluteness to be commander in chief," as Joe Lockhart, a senior communications adviser, put it.

"We have established the credentials we need to," Mr. Lockhart said in a conference call with reporters Friday morning, "and the campaign will turn now in a different direction and go to the economy."

As one indication, the Kerry campaign began running six new advertisements in cities that President Bush planned to visit this weekend - Cleveland; Milwaukee; Scranton and Erie, Pa.; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Parkersburg, W.Va. - highlighting promises he made in 2000 on health insurance and the economy.

"Now, Bush is back," the spots say. "But around here, we remember Bush’s broken promises."

At his rally in Newark, Mr. Kerry drove home that message, recalling that Mr. Bush "promised Ohio he was going to create jobs by giving a great big tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, right?"

"That’s a fact - that doesn’t have a Democratic label, doesn’t have a Republican label," he said. "You know what happened? Ohio lost 230,000 jobs. Ohio lost 112,000 jobs from November of 2001, when the recession was declared over."

He acidly said that Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao this week described the outsourcing of jobs as "good for America."

"This president doesn’t understand what’s happening to communities all across this country," he said.

Ms. Chao said this week that the "anxiety belies the numbers" because the number of American jobs lost to other countries was far outweighed by the number of jobs in the United States at foreign-owned companies.

Mr. Kerry repeatedly cited Census data released last week showing that 1.4 million more people went without health insurance and that 1.3 million people had fallen below the poverty line. But he used outdated figures for the job losses since 2000; the Labor Department now says 1.6 million jobs have been lost, not 1.7 million.

A new hint of the pressure Mr. Kerry is under to fight back at Mr. Bush came in a Time magazine poll released Friday that showed the president with a 52 percent to 41 percent lead among likely voters. But some experts on surveys cast doubt on the poll’s findings because it was conducted as the Republican convention was under way.

Even Mr. Kerry’s comments about Iraq centered on the economics of the war and its potential impact on domestic priorities.

"He told America the war would cost you how much?" Mr. Kerry said. "One billion dollars. The war has cost $200 billion, and as you look around this country, think of what that money could have done for schools, for health care, for prescription drugs, for all the things we need to do."

Mr. Kerry was upbeat and feisty on the attack, even noting "this lonely voice over here" of a Bush supporter on the periphery of his rally. When his supporters yelled, "Two more months!" at the man, Mr. Kerry did their barb one better.

"A mind is a terrible thing to waste, ladies and gentlemen," he said, laughing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/04/politics/campaign/04kerry.html?ex=1252036800&en=ad02829137d8b85e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland