Kerry accuses Bush of hiding bad decisions

DEMOCRATIC candidate John Kerry accused president Bush yesterday of hiding bad decisions and said it raised the prospect of more bad news Bush was trying to hide.

Bush, for his part, invited Democrats to cross over to his campaign as it began its final week, arguing their party was no longer led by men of strength and resolve.

Kerry said a stream of bad news coming out of Iraq showed the Bush administration glossing over the reality of the situation there.

“Mr President, what else are you being silent about?

“What else are you keeping from the American people?” Kerry said in Green Bay.

The latest national polls continue to show Kerry in a very tight race with Bush.

A Los Angeles Times poll taken from October 21-24 shows 881 likely voters are evenly divided between the candidates, with Kerry-Edwards and Bush-Cheney both garnering 48%.

An ABC News poll, also taken October 21-24, shows Kerry with 49% and Bush 48%.

While Kerry campaigned on the east side of Wisconsin, a state Bush barely lost to Al Gore in 2000, the president sought votes from Democrats as well as Republicans on the west side of the state.

In Onalaska, Bush said Kerry had chosen a path of “weakness and inaction,” putting himself “in opposition not just to me, but to the great tradition of the Democratic Party.”

“The party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John Kennedy is rightly remembered for confidence and resolve in times of war and in hours of crisis.

“Senator Kerry has turned his back on ‘pay any price’ and ‘bear any burden’,” Bush said.

The president also renewed his contention Kerry would raise taxes in a way that would cripple small businesses “to pay for all the new spending he’s proposed.”

The Massachusetts senator pressed his case that Bush has bungled and misled on the Iraq war and national security crises generally.

“When the president is faced with the consequences of his own wrong decisions, he doesn’t confront them, he tries to hide them,” Kerry said.

“The truth is, President Bush has never levelled with the American people about why we went to war, how the war is going, or what he is doing in order to put Iraq on track.”

And Kerry broadened the attack to declare: “Just as he has been warned about his mistakes in Iraq, George Bush has been warned time and time again about the vulnerability of our homeland security.”

Kerry said he would spend an additional $60 billion over 10 years on homeland security, using the money to screen cargo for nuclear materials at ports and borders, add border patrol agents and more.

Bush, who lost Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes by only 5,708 ballots in 2000, was focusing his efforts in Democratic-leaning reaches of the state.

Warming up for that task in his last stop on Monday, in Davenport, Iowa, he ditched his single-focus, national security speech of earlier events in favour of a broader pitch praising the traditions of the Democratic Party, a theme he returned to yesterday.

Also, in a television interview aired yesterday, Bush said he didn’t oppose civil unions for same-sex couples even though the Republican Party platform opposes them. However, he supports banning gay marriage through a constitutional amendment.

“I don’t think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that’s what a state chooses to do so,” Bush said on ABC’s Good Morning America.

“I view the definition of marriage different from legal arrangements that enable people to have rights.”

The Republicans, meanwhile, said it was a sign of Kerry dullness the Democrats were calling on former president Bill Clinton, who rallied voters for Kerry on Monday after being sidelined for weeks by heart surgery.