Democrat John Kerry, promising a "great debate," declared victory in the US Democratic presidential race on Tuesday and formally opened the general election campaign with an assault on President George W. Bush's credibility.
With a win in Illinois, Kerry acknowledged he had enough delegates to July's nominating convention to claim the right to challenge Bush in November -- a formality given that most delegate counters put him over the top last week.
"This night marks the opening of the general election and a great debate about the direction of our country," Kerry said at a victory rally in Charleston, West Virginia, a key battleground state in November.
"I believe we can do better," said Kerry, whose campaign was conservative in its delegate estimates and waited to claim victory until Illinois, another key state in November, could give him the win.
Kerry, accused by the White House in a new television ad airing in West Virginia of voting against funds for troops in Iraq, struck back by questioning Bush's credibility and saying he was blaming others for his own administration's failures.
At an earlier campaign event in Huntington, West Virginia, Kerry said Bush had squandered a budget surplus, misrepresented the cost of a Medicare bill and misled Americans about the threat from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq while pointing blame at former president Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein or the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The president is busy trying to blame everybody except his own administration," he said at a town hall meeting filled with veterans and many of his former navy crewmates and colleagues. "He's pushing it off on everybody else."
The Bush ad attacked the Massachusetts senator for voting against an US$87 billion package to pay for the conflict in Iraq. The ad's narrator lists body armor for troops, higher combat pay and better health care for reservists and their families as items the decorated Vietnam War veteran opposed.
Kerry said his vote had nothing to do with US troops not having the proper equipment and body armor in Iraq.
"They didn't have the state-of-the-art body armor at the moment they went in," Kerry said, adding he supported an amendment that would have paid for the US$87 billion by repealing tax cuts for the most wealthy Americans.
Kerry also commented on a vow by Spain's incoming prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to pull his troops out of Iraq.
"In my judgment, the new prime minister should not have decided he was going to pull out of Iraq; he should have said this, `this increases our determination to get the job done,'" Kerry said in a satellite interview with a Phoenix, Arizona television station.
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