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Bush warns of Kerry's new taxes

US President George W. Bush shakes hands with the crowd at a rally at the Jerome-Duncan Theater at Freedom Hill in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on Monday. PHOTO: AFP

US President George W. Bush, kicking off a two-day bus tour of the battleground states of Michigan and Ohio, said on Monday his leadership had made the US safer and put the country on the road to economic recovery.

On his first campaign swing of the year, Bush launched a series of attacks on Democratic challenger John Kerry without using his name, calling him "a big spender," criticizing his votes against weapons systems and warning that everyday Americans would pay the price for his promises.

"He's going to raise taxes on the American people," Bush said of Kerry, who has promised to repeal tax cuts for Americans who earn more than US$200,000 a year but institute some additional targeted tax cuts for the middle class.

Bush, who listed a series of tax increases Kerry had supported, also chided the Massachusetts senator for saying in a recent interview that he did not own a sport utility vehicle but his "family" did.

"My opponent has been there long enough to develop the Washington language -- Washingtonitis," Bush told a rally in Kalamazoo on the first day of the bus tour, which was dubbed "Yes, America Can."

He said Kerry had claimed in an earlier interview in Michigan, a major car-producing state, that he owned an SUV.

"The president must speak clearly and mean what he says," Bush, whose campaign ads have tried to paint Kerry as a liberal waffler, told a roaring crowd at an outdoor amphitheater in Sterling Heights outside Detroit.

Bush, who had confined his campaigning to TV ads, fundraisers and one campaign rally in Florida, rolled across southern Michigan on Monday in an eight-bus caravan.

Bush's three-room bus, outfitted with a kitchen, four TV screens and captain's chairs, was trailed by a spare bus, a Secret Service bus, a staff bus and four press buses. Local residents lined the highways to wave, but several hundred protesters greeted him outside the arena in Kalamazoo.

With intensified fighting in Iraq moving the issue to the forefront, Bush renewed his defense of his decision to invade and remove former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from power, telling the Michigan crowd, "I looked at the intelligence on Iraq and I saw a threat."
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