Appealing to late-deciding voters in explicitly religious terms, Senator John Kerry used the Bible on Sunday to accuse President George W. Bush of trying to scare America, and said his own Catholicism moved him to help those in need but not to "write every doctrine into law."
"The Scripture teaches us -- John says, `Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid,'" Kerry said, alluding to Bush's strategy of portraying Kerry as too weak to defend against a terrorist attack. "What these folks want you to do is be afraid. Everything that they're trying to do is scare America."
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Rebuking one of the most openly religious presidents in recent history, Kerry said that Christians believed in caring for the sick, housing the homeless, feeding the hungry and stopping violence, but that the administration was not heeding those teachings.
Kerry's South Florida swing came on a day when Bush did not campaign until late in the day, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, near the site of the nuclear tests that led to the end of World War II. Bush argued that the war of this generation could come to an end only under his leadership.
"He considers the war on terror primarily an intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement operation," Bush said of his rival, as several thousand booed the notion. "You cannot win a war if you are not convinced that you are even in one."
The two candidates continued a series of sharp exchanges about who would prove tougher on terror -- exchanges that have flared whenever either has acknowledged that eradicating terrorism altogether is highly unlikely.
In an interview on Saturday with the conservative commentator Sean Hannity of Fox News, Bush seemed to forget his lines briefly when he was asked whether the nation would always have to live with a terrorist threat. "Whether or not we can be ever fully safe is up -- you know, is up in the air," Bush said, according to a transcript.
Kerry pounced on the remark late in the day, telling thousands in Boca Raton: "You make me president of the United States, we're going to win the war on terror. It's not going to be up in the air whether or not we make America safe."
Kerry's Bible-based thrust, at first from the pulpit of a black church here and later in a lengthy speech on values, was the latest effort by the Democratic candidate, who is generally reticent about his religious beliefs, to demonstrate his core principles to religious voters.
In a particularly partisan talk from the pulpit of the Mount Hermon AME Church here, Kerry said that Bush had chosen profits for drug companies over lower prices for the elderly, and had spurned veterans and the unemployed while giving tax cuts to the rich.
"Oh, no, they didn't choose the least among us, they chose the most powerful among us," he said. "They keep on thinking it's the most powerful who deserve the most, some kind of entitlement."
Aides said Kerry would campaign in Ohio or Pennsylvania almost every day between now and the election, and claimed that they were dominating the airwaves with far more commercials than Bush in Florida and Ohio. They canceled plans for a trip today to Colorado. On Monday, Kerry is heading to Michigan, which was believed to be relatively safe for him, but where a new poll on Sunday showed Bush with a five-point lead.
In Alamogordo, meanwhile, as Bush spoke under a brilliant sun, castigating Kerry for everything from his defense policy to Social Security, the president's communications director, Dan Bartlett, told reporters that at the end of the week the Bush campaign would release its last commercial, a direct appeal from Bush for a second term.
"In a very emotional, heartfelt way," Bartlett said, voters "will see why they have rallied around the president in a post-9/11 world."
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