Democrats Claim Mantle of Fiscally Responsible Ticket

With the country facing a record $445-billion federal deficit, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and running mate John Edwards stepped up efforts Tuesday to cast themselves as more fiscally responsible than President Bush.

In separate campaign stops -- Kerry in Wisconsin, Edwards in Louisiana -- the senators embraced the traditionally Republican theme of fiscal discipline that President Clinton succeeded in co-opting for Democrats in the 1990s.

In central Louisiana, Edwards told supporters at a town hall forum that fiscal responsibility was “not some abstract Washington thing.”

“This affects people’s lives,” he said in Alexandria, a small town on the Red River. “And the deeper and deeper we go into deficit, the more and more Social Security is at risk. We are leaving our children with a debt and a responsibility that’s not theirs.”

Like Kerry has sought to do, Edwards framed the matter as one of “values.”

“Talk about values, and our moral responsibility to our children and grandchildren?” Edwards asked. “How would you feel ... if you were leaving your child with $20,000 in debt, instead of leaving them better off?”

At a similar forum Kerry headlined here, the Massachusetts senator touted his support for a line-item veto of federal spending bills -- newly designed to survive court challenges that have derailed it previously -- to curb excess expenditures by Congress.

Speaking to about 2,000 union workers and other supporters on bleachers and folding chairs at a hockey rink, Kerry said he could “get the pork and the waste, and the throwaway, and the special-interest deals out of the system, and put children and taxpayers back into the system.”

His goal in overseeing the federal budget, he said, would be “to be able to move in a direction where you get control of your finances, just like our families.”

Kerry renewed his call for rolling back Bush’s tax cuts for families earning more than $200,000 a year.

With that restored revenue, along with savings from proposed spending cuts, he said, he could cut taxes for everyone else, raise spending on health and education and still cut the deficit in half during his first term.

He held up his campaign’s new policy book, “Our Plan for America,” and said he would not “just throw the words at you.”

“Here it is,” he told the crowd. “I want you to go read it.”

The Bush campaign repeatedly has charged that Kerry’s agenda does not add up financially. In a statement released Tuesday, Bush aides said, “Kerry’s empty rhetoric on fiscal responsibility still doesn’t answer the fundamental question of how he intends to pay for his campaign proposals.

“His tax hikes don’t even begin to cover the drastic increases in spending he has proposed, and he owes it to the American people to explain himself,” the statement said.

By Bush campaign estimates, Kerry’s proposals would leave a $1.3-trillion budget hole over the next 10 years.

Sarah Bianchi, Kerry’s national policy director, said Kerry “doesn’t need a lesson on fiscal discipline from the most fiscally reckless administration in American history.”

Kerry and Edwards emphasized fiscal discipline on a day when both were campaigning in regions where that theme could resonate -- the South and the rural Midwest.

After the Beloit forum, Kerry’s two-week, coast-to-coast campaign swing that started Friday in Boston rolled onward by bus across the green hills of Wisconsin’s dairy country. Crowds lined the streets of small towns, waving to his passing motorcade.

In Cuba City, a town of about 2,200 people that Bush passed through earlier this year, Kerry stopped to climb aboard a red caboose.

As Sally Alexander, 51, shook Kerry’s hand, she told him: “I have a son in Iraq. When can I expect him back home?”

“As soon as possible,” he told her.

Finnegan reported from Wisconsin, Rainey from Louisiana.