Bush may duck out of Kerry debate

President George Bush might try to dodge one of three live TV debates with election challenger John Kerry, it emerged today.

Republican officials said the president may back out of the second of the debates, due to be held on October 8 in Missouri.

It comes as the election campaign grew increasingly vitriolic, with vice president Dick Cheney suggesting that by voting for Senator Kerry, Americans increased their risk of facing another terrorist attack.

But Mr Bush is also starting to feel the heat, with fresh questions about his national guard service and the impending publication of a potentially damaging book.

The second campaign debate is due to be held at the Washington University, at St Louis in Missouri. The first debate will be on domestic policy and the third on foreign policy.

Republican officials insisted that the president was not afraid of going head to head with Mr Kerry.

“It’s not a fear of the format,” a presidential adviser told the Washington Post.

“They want two debates that are focused on clear differences on foreign and domestic policy. We benefit from the differences.”

Meanwhile, the issue of Mr Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam war came back to haunt him.

The Boston Globe reported that the president “fell well short of meeting his military obligation”.

Mr Kerry, on the other hand, was serving as a medal-winning Swift Boat captain on the Mekong Delta a fact he has made much of in the election campaign.

According to the Globe, Mr Bush twice failed to meet his national guard obligations.

His attendance at required training drills was so irregular that his superiors could have disciplined him or ordered him to active duty in 1972, 1973, or 1974, the newspaper reported. But they did not.

Mr Bush’s unit certified in late 1973 that his service had been “satisfactory” but months earlier his commanding officer wrote that Mr Bush had not been seen at his unit for the previous 12 months.

Despite the re-ignition of the controversy, questions have been raised about Mr Bush’s military service in the past, and still he has a lead in the polls.

A second threat hanging over the Bush campaign comes in the form of a book by celebrity author Kitty Kelley.

The book The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty makes a number of lurid claims about the Bush family and alleges Mr Bush used drugs.

The White House dismissed the book as “garbage” and a Republican National Committee spokeswoman said journalists should treat it as “fiction”.

But Peter Gethers, vice president of publisher Random House and Kelley’s editor, said lawyers went over the book “with a fine-toothed comb”.

“It was as extensive a legal read as a publisher could give.

“Some things didn’t make it, and we’re 100% confident of the things that made it in.

“We erred on the side of caution because we knew how hard she was going to be hit,” Mr Gethers said.

Mr Gethers confirmed the accuracy of a report in the Mail on Sunday, which said the book alleged past drug use by President Bush.

In the last campaign, Mr Bush repeatedly declined to comment on suggestions that he had taken drugs.

As the book was being dismissed by the White House, the vice president went on the offensive against Mr Kerry.

Speaking in Iowa he said if Mr Kerry is elected on November 2 “the danger is that we’ll get hit again” by terrorists.

He added: “We’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we are not really at war.”

Mr Kerry’s running mate John Edwards accused the Republicans of using scare tactics that “crossed the line”.