John Kerry launched a stinging and personal counter-attack against US President George W. Bush's administration, singling out Dick Cheney, the vice-president, for having "refused to serve" in Vietnam.
The ferocity of the Democratic party's presidential challenger at the midnight rally of supporters in Ohio marked a sharp change in his campaign tactics. A few hours earlier, at the Republican party convention in New York, President Bush had joined in Cheney's derision of Senator Kerry as a vacillating liberal.
The president repeated those charges yesterday at a rally in Pennsylvania, lampooning Kerry for voting to go to war in Iraq and then opposing a funding request in the Senate for the occupation.
"He said he was proud of his vote, and then he just said the whole thing was a complicated matter. His words," Bush said. "Here are my words: There's nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat."
The charge that Kerry was "unfit for command" was a main theme of the Republican convention, provoking outrage from the senator. He said: "I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have, and by those who misled the nation into Iraq."
Kerry seemed to be using his speech to release months of pent-up anger.
In the face of a campaign by rightwing Vietnam war veterans to question whether he merited his five combat medals, the senator had until yesterday refrained from referring directly to the actions of Bush or Cheney during the Vietnam era.
Both men avoided combat, while the young Lieutenant Kerry was fighting in the Mekong Delta. Bush signed up with the Texas air national guard as a pilot; Cheney was granted five deferments from the draft for attending college, then graduate school and finally for having a child.
The new gloves-off strategy begins after a week of debate and unease within the Kerry camp over the wisdom of restraint. It coincided with the hiring of Joe Lockhart, a former spokesman for Bill Clinton with a combative reputation.
In Saturday's speech Kerry made it clear he was aiming his accusations principally at the vice-president, who had used his Wednesday night speech to portray the Democratic candidate as unfit to be commander in chief.
Kerry responded: "I'll leave it up to the voters to decide whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of duty.
`Unfit for duty'
"Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty: Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this nation. Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation ... That's the record of George Bush and Dick Cheney."
He also implied that the vice-president was guilty of a financial conflict of interests, accusing him of handing out contracts to his former employer, the oil services company Halliburton, "while you're still on their payroll."
Cheney continues to receive annual payments of "deferred compensation" from Halliburton for his past work as its chief executive, but the White House has denied that he had any role in awarding the company contracts in Iraq.
Kerry's tough approach satisfied his cheering supporters but it carries inherent risks for a candidate claiming to be more capable than the president of unifying the US.
Some pundits also wondered whether Kerry had left his counter-attack too late.
"We're at the point now where all's fair in love and war, and politics is war," said Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia. "The problem is Kerry is out of synch.
"The time for this was a month ago, but it came on a night when all the coverage went to Bush's speech. I find it incredibly odd."
Both sides argued over the significance of new employment figures published yesterday showing a net creation of 144,000 jobs in August.
The total was a little below most projections but still up from July. Speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania, Bush said the figures showed that the economy was growing, and he added the catchphrase he used when accepting the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday: "Nothing will hold us back."
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