WASHINGTON – John Kerry accused President Bush on Monday of sending U.S. troops to the “wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time” and said he’d try to bring them all home in four years.
In response, Bush rebuked Kerry for taking “yet another new position” on the war, which he termed as “right for America.”
In Labor Day speeches, Kerry delivered some of his harshest rhetoric against Bush’s handling of the war and highlighted its economic costs. Kerry set, for the first time, a tentative timetable for completing a withdrawal that Republican opponents say is too soon even to begin.
“We want those troops home, and my goal would be to try to get them home in my first term,” Kerry said, speaking to a fellow Vietnam War veteran at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania who had asked about a timetable for withdrawal. Bush has not provided a specific timetable for withdrawal.
Bush, campaigning in southeast Missouri, described Kerry’s attack as the product of chronic equivocation combined with a shake up of his advisers.
“After voting for the war, but against funding it, after saying he would have voted for the war even knowing everything we know today, my opponent woke up this morning with new campaign advisers and yet another new position,” Bush told Missouri voters.
“When it comes to diplomacy, let John Kerry stick to windsurfing,” said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in Clear Lake, Iowa.
Kerry spoke with former President Clinton in a lengthy phone call during the weekend, hearing advice that he go hard after Bush’s record. Clinton White House aides are taking a larger role in the campaign, and Kerry moved longtime adviser John Sasso into a top spot.
On Iraq, “suddenly he’s against it again,” Bush said. “No matter how many times Senator Kerry changes his mind, it was right for America and it’s right for America now that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.”
Polls indicate Bush and Kerry are running evenly in four of the states the candidates were visiting Monday – Minnesota, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Nationally, Bush led Kerry by 7 points – 52 percent to 45 percent – while independent Ralph Nader had 1 percent in a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll taken over the weekend and released Monday.
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