Hunt for votes marked by ever-harsher attacks

RICHLAND CENTER, Wis. – With a week to go until the election, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry accused President Bush on Tuesday of hiding embarrassments in Iraq, and Bush chastised Kerry for grasping at passing headlines instead of building a coherent proposal.

Bush, appealing to what he called “discerning Democrats” as he rumbled through rural Wisconsin on the last of 20 campaign bus tours, said Kerry projects “weakness and inaction,” forsaking his party’s tradition of national strength. “My opponent has no plan, no vision – just a long list of complaints,” Bush said in the Mississippi River town of Dubuque, Iowa. “But a Monday-morning quarterback has never won any game.”

Kerry, also in Wisconsin, accused Bush for a second day of failing to secure stockpiles of explosives in postwar Iraq and painted a grim and ominous portrait of the Bush presidency. “These explosives … could produce bombs powerful enough to demolish entire buildings, blow up airplanes, destroy tanks and kill our troops,” Kerry said at an early-morning rally at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay.

Kerry said Tuesday that the explosives were evidence of broader problems with Bush’s presidency, accusing him of plotting to cover up the missing explosives until after the election, a charge the White House denied. In recent weeks, Kerry also has charged Bush with concealing plans for draft and a secret call-up of reservists and members of the National Guard. He pointed Tuesday to a report in the Washington Post detailing the administration’s plans to request $70 billion more to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to suggest a systematic plan to deceive.

“Mr. President, what else are you being silent about?” Kerry asked. “What else are keeping from the American people? How much more will the American people have to pay?”

With Tuesday’s clash in Wisconsin – one of nearly a dozen states where the electoral outcome is unclear – the candidates approached the last seven days of the campaign with ever-harsher attacks even as their aides planned to close on a positive note. Polls show no clear advantage or momentum for either side, magnifying the importance of each campaign stop and each news cycle.

In a new Kerry commercial airing in five states and in his speeches, the Democrat continued to make a case that the disappearance of nearly 400 tons of conventional explosives in Iraq is fresh evidence that Bush had botched the war and now was covering up his miscalculations. And Bush remained determined not to respond to the Democratic charge. Asked by a reporter about who was responsible for the missing munitions, Bush, on a visit to a dairy barn in Viola, Wis., did not say anything but simply glared, journalists with him said.

The White House says that the explosives’ disappearance, first reported by the New York Times and CBS News and confirmed Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been exaggerated by what they describe as the liberal media. Bush’s campaign worked aggressively to discredit the report, reflecting the nervousness of aides about a race over which they now have little control and worry momentum could tip on any given story.

Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking at a rally in Pensacola, Fla., said it is “not at all clear those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived.” He said Kerry does not “mention the 400,000 tons of explosives our troops have captured or destroyed” in Iraq. “Senator Kerry is playing armchair general and is not doing a very good job at it,” Cheney said.

On Monday night, the Bush campaign urged reporters to look into an NBC News report that soldiers searching the site three weeks into the war found nothing, suggesting that they were moved before Saddam Hussein’s government fell. But NBC followed up Tuesday night by reporting that the soldiers were “not actively involved in searching for Iraqi weapons.”

White House senior adviser Karl Rove had said the NBC account, heavily covered on Fox News and talk radio, “feeds the belief of a lot of people out in America that the media has a bias.”

“Kerry, by so rapidly embracing the story, is going to end up being tarnished by it,” Rove said. “What would he do as president? Get up every morning and say, I’m going to govern based on what I find in the newspapers?”