Sharper Barbs as Nov. 2 Nears

The final week of the campaign for the White House opened Monday with a fierce exchange over war and terrorism, as Sen. John F. Kerry accused President Bush of “incompetence” and Bush said his challenger would “cut and run” in Iraq.

Joining the fray was Kerry’s top surrogate, former President Clinton, making his first political appearance seven weeks after quadruple bypass surgery.

With Kerry at his side, Clinton told tens of thousands of supporters gathered on the streets and sidewalks outside Philadelphia’s City Hall that Bush was trying to scare undecided voters.

“If one candidate’s appealing to your fears, and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope,” Clinton said.

Kerry, who hopes that appearances by Clinton in at least three battleground states this week will mobilize supporters, seized on news reports that tons of explosives had disappeared from a military installation south of Baghdad after the United States invaded Iraq.

“The incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk, and put this country at greater risk than we ought to be,” Kerry said, calling the missing explosives “one of the great blunders” of Bush’s war effort.

Campaigning in Colorado and Iowa, Bush summoned images of the Sept. 11 attacks and assailed Kerry’s fortitude and character, saying his rival’s Senate record showed a penchant for “weakness and inaction” on security matters. The president accented his remarks with biting sarcasm and some of the harshest rhetoric of the intensely bitter campaign.

“If America were not fighting these killers west of Baghdad and in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere, what does Sen. Kerry think they would do?” Bush asked supporters at a rally in Greeley, on the northern edge of Colorado’s Front Range. “Would they be living productive lives of service and charity?”

The caustic back-and-forth came as the two men raced across the country to the handful of states that remain tossups in the Nov. 2 election. As the campaign days dwindle, both sides are playing a fast-paced chess game to get the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

After hitting Colorado and Iowa, Bush wrapped up his day in Wisconsin, which he lost in 2000 to Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, by fewer than 6,000 votes.

Meanwhile, Kerry traveled from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania and Michigan before also ending his day in Wisconsin.

With partisan passions rising, Kerry supporters at stop after stop bellowed “Eight more days!” while Bush was greeted with thunderous chants of “Four more years!” Adding a note of uncertainty to the race was the report that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has thyroid cancer.

Kerry occasionally mentions the prospect of Bush appointments to the court to energize Democratic loyalists, and he did so Monday in a conference call that he and Clinton held with black ministers.

“We learned today that Justice Rehnquist is ill,” Kerry told the ministers. “We know that two or three justices will be retiring in the next years. The Supreme Court is at stake. Affirmative action was decided by one vote. The presidency was decided by one vote.”

Campaigning for Kerry in Florida, Gore told Democrats in Riviera Beach that it was “awfully important that the Supreme Court does not pick the next president of the United States, and this president does not pick the Supreme Court.”

Bush’s main focus Monday was national security, recasting his campaign speech for the second time in four days.

In a twist on Kerry’s denunciation of the Iraqi conflict as “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Bush told thousands of supporters in a Greeley arena, “My opponent has the wrong strategy for the wrong country at the wrong time.” The crowd erupted in cheers.

“Protest is not a policy,” Bush said. “Retreat is not a strategy, and failure is not an option.”

Bush’s visit to Greeley, a small city amid rolling farmland, kept with his closing strategy of rallying the GOP base in hopes of a big turnout next week.

And his emphasis on the scars of Sept. 11 offered a message that his aides believed had the strongest resonance with his supporters.

Bush accused his rival of forsaking his party’s muscular foreign policy tradition under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, invoking Kennedy’s inaugural address.

“Sen. Kerry has turned his back on ‘pay any price, bear any burden’ to spread democracy, and has replaced those commitments with ‘wait and see’ and ‘cut and run,’ ” Bush said.

Though Kerry traveled with Clinton, Bush had his own politician-turned-celebrity. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who symbolized the city’s gritty resolve after Sept. 11 campaigned for Bush in the West.

“We can’t take a chance on going back to where we were before Sept. 11, 2001,” Giuliani told the crowd in Colorado.

In Dover, N.H., Kerry responded to Bush’s charge that he would abandon the U.S. mission in Iraq, saying the president was “debating phantoms.”

“He sort of sets up a straw man, then he knocks it down,” Kerry said. “He’s trying to tell America, ‘Well, we can’t cut and run.’ Nobody’s ever talked about that! We’re talking about how we’re going to be successful and not leave a failed Iraq.”

The key attraction of the senator’s day was Clinton, who also rallied Florida Democrats late Monday in Miami as Kerry headed for the Midwest.

“If this isn’t good for my heart, I don’t know what is,” Clinton said in Philadelphia.

Wearing a suit that hung loosely over his slim frame, Clinton did not mention Bush by name. But he contrasted job loses, “record bankruptcies,” declining wages and rising poverty under Bush with the economic expansion during his own two terms in the 1990s.

“Pennsylvania alone, you’ve lost 70,000 jobs, as compared with the 219,000 you gained by this time when that last fellow was president: Me,” he said.

Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political strategist, scoffed at Clinton’s reemergence. In Davenport, Iowa, he told reporters, “They had to roll Clinton out of the operating room and onto the campaign trail” to boost Kerry with core Democratic constituencies.