Kerry Wields New Data on Economy Against Bush

With a new government report showing a slowdown in U.S. economic growth, Sen. John F. Kerry stepped up efforts Friday to paint President Bush as out of touch with the struggles of working-class Americans.

Campaigning in this suburb of terraced hillside houses on the San Francisco peninsula, Kerry highlighted the Commerce Department’s downward revision of the last quarter’s economic growth to 2.8%.

“It’s slowed down again,” the Democratic presidential nominee told 300 guests in a high school gymnasium.

And Kerry lamented “dramatic and startling” new figures on declining wages, along with higher costs for gasoline, college tuition, healthcare and prescription drugs.

“Now, either the president does not have a plan, or the president is out of touch with what’s happening to real Americans,” Kerry said.

Kerry’s offensive on the economy came on a day when he also assailed Bush on the environment, healthcare, education and the Iraq war at stops in the Bay Area, one of the most solid Democratic strongholds.

Kerry’s trip to California yielded $6 million for the party’s effort to capture the White House -- half at a lunch Friday in San Francisco and half at a dinner Thursday in Santa Monica.

Bush campaign spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said Kerry was “bringing his pessimism to California and trying to talk down the economy.” She also lauded Bush’s tax cuts and “pro-growth policies.”

In a state where voters long have favored strong environmental protection measures, Kerry stressed the issue at each stop in a nearly 24-hour visit. Today, he will fly to his family’s Massachusetts vacation home on Nantucket Island, where he will spend several days, while the Republicans hold their convention in New York.

In the Daly City gymnasium, he responded to a woman’s question on the mounting smog problem in the Central Valley by promoting tax breaks to encourage the purchase of clean-fuel vehicles, along with more spending on energy alternatives to oil.

Kerry said Bush had slid “backward on clean air” and accused him of neglecting the global warming threat.

“Four years have gone by, folks,” Kerry said. “You ought to be furious. You ought to be outraged.”

“We are furious,” many in the crowd responded.

Kerry also pledged stronger environmental policies at a campaign stop Friday evening in Everett, Wash. But, returning to a formulation he avoided in California, he mixed his remarks with tacit reassurance to hunters that he would not threaten their right to own guns.

“If you want something to hunt or fish, you’ve got to protect that habitat,” Kerry told 500 supporters at an Everett civic hall near a Boeing airplane plant.

At a lunch Friday in San Francisco, Kerry was introduced by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, who said he had “never been as worried as I am now that a nuclear bomb might be detonated in an American city.”

Perry said he trusted Kerry, but not Bush, to lead efforts to protect the country from nuclear attack.