Candidates Press Through the Midwest

President Bush promoted an economy on the mend Tuesday while Sen. John F. Kerry condemned his rival’s silence on the missing explosives in Iraq, as the two candidates staked their claims to this Upper Midwest battleground.

Both men started the day in Wisconsin and finished campaigning in Iowa, a sign of the narrowed competitive field in the waning days of the White House race. Kerry also darted to Las Vegas and Albuquerque to harvest votes, while Bush reached out to Democrats with one of his most explicit appeals to potential crossover voters.

Traveling by bus through heavy showers, Bush said a vote for Kerry was a vote for higher taxes.

Kerry, in Green Bay, chastised Bush for a report Monday that 380 tons of explosives vanished from an Iraqi military installation after the U.S. invasion last year.

“Despite devastating evidence that his administration’s failure here has put our troops and our citizens in greater danger, George Bush has not offered a single word of explanation,” Kerry said.

Vice President Dick Cheney responded later at a campaign stop in Pensacola, Fla. “It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad,” where the munitions had been stored, he said.

“Sen. Kerry is playing armchair general, and not doing a very good job of it,” Cheney said.

Former President Clinton also campaigned in Florida, telling a Jewish audience at a Boca Raton temple that Kerry could best repair relations with the United States’ alienated allies.

“It’s a lot easier to kick down a barn than to build it,” said Clinton, on the second day of his post-heart-surgery campaign tour. “John Kerry’s a barn builder, and you’ll be proud of him.”

The rapid-fire back-and-forth between Kerry and Bush underscored the pace of the campaign with the candidates -- running close to even in polls -- fighting intently for more support.

Bush, rolling past wooded hillsides dappled in red and gold, even briefly stopped his motorcade to visit cows and pose for pictures with a dairy farm family.

Beneath a gloomy sky, Bush said his policies helped pull the economy out of a recession and post-Sept. 11 tailspin, citing the increase in home ownership, the creation of nearly 2 million jobs in roughly the last year and the rise in farm incomes.

“We’re headed in the right direction in America,” Bush said to a roar of approval at a rally in rural Onalaska, Wis.

The net job loss under Bush, counting private sector and government jobs, is about 821,000.

Bush said a Kerry presidency would mean higher taxes for all Americans, despite the Democrat’s pledge in the second debate that he would raise taxes only on the wealthy to pay for expanded healthcare and other programs.

“I’m running against a fellow who’s proposed $2.2 trillion of new federal spending. That’s with a ‘T,’ ” Bush told several thousand supporters. “That’s a lot, even for a senator from Massachusetts.”

The Kerry campaign disputed that figure, saying Bush was exaggerating.

Bush said the only way to pay for Kerry’s programs would be to raise taxes across the board, not just on those who make at least $200,000 a year, as Kerry has said.

Four years ago, Bush narrowly lost Wisconsin and Iowa, which sit across from each other on the upper Mississippi River. They are two of the hardest-fought states this year, with polls showing the contest essentially deadlocked in both places.

Combined, Wisconsin and Iowa offer 17 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win -- a threshold that has grown particularly important for Bush as Kerry threatens his hold on Ohio’s 20 electoral votes. No Republican has won the White House without carrying Ohio.

The day’s focus on western Wisconsin was an effort to “bump up” Bush’s support from four years ago when he “underperformed” in the heavily rural region, said Karl Rove, the president’s chief political strategist. In Richland County, Bush’s second stop of the day, he won four years ago by 157 votes.

The president repeatedly challenged Kerry’s adequacy to serve as commander in chief. Bush’s strong antiabortion language and tough talk on taxes seemed intended to spur Republican loyalists to the polls. But he also appealed to Democrats.

“Many Democrats in this country do not recognize their party anymore,” Bush said in Dubuque, Iowa. “If you believe America should lead with strength and purpose and confidence in our ideals, I’d be honored to have your support and I’m asking for your vote.”

In a further appeal to moderates, Bush said in an ABC interview that he did not oppose state-sanctioned civil unions between gay people -- even though his position puts him at odds with the GOP platform, which opposes them.

“I don’t think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that’s what a state chooses to do so,” Bush said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

The president also undertook a bit of fence-mending on his way through Wisconsin. Earlier this year, he sped through the small farm community of Cuba City, which calls itself “the City of Presidents.” Locals -- along with the Kerry campaign -- said that the presidential motorcade didn’t even brake.

“Kind of makes sense that a president stops in to say hello, doesn’t it?” Bush said to cheers that rang through the Cuba City High School gymnasium. As for Kerry, the senator followed his pattern of seizing on grim Iraq war headlines to undercut Bush and boost voter trust in his own ability to keep the country safer.

The latest was a Washington Post story Tuesday saying Bush would soon ask Congress to spend an additional $70 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, raising total costs to close to $225 billion.

“This is the incredible price of rushing and going it almost alone in Iraq,” Kerry told supporters at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay.

Kerry also resumed criticizing Bush over the previous day’s news of the vast explosives cache that vanished in Iraq. He said the president, who learned of the development about a week ago, “tried to hide the information until after the election.”

“He stood in front of the American people day after day, telling us how much progress we’re making in Iraq, and how much safer we are under his leadership, without ever mentioning the loss of these explosives,” Kerry said.

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

Away from the campaign trail, both candidates were refining their last-minute ad strategies. Kerry’s latest ad is pegged on the missing explosives in Iraq. “His Iraq misjudgments put our soldiers at risk, and make our country less secure,” Kerry says of Bush in the ad.

Kerry also ran an ad in Las Vegas that showed a ticking clock and attacked Bush for approving a nuclear waste dump outside the city at Yucca Mountain, according to TNSMI/Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Associated Press reported that Democrats had poured $121,000 into Hawaii after a weekend newspaper poll suggested Bush might be gaining momentum.

Bush’s campaign put most of its money early this week in a TV commercial that likens terrorists to wolves and criticizes Kerry for a 1994 proposal to cut intelligence funding.

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Times staff writers James Gerstenzang, Johanna Neuman and Nick Anderson contributed to this report.