Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry on Thursday launched a two-week campaign to promote his economic proposals, as a new poll showed President George W. Bush vulnerable on the key campaign issue.
The Massachusetts senator said the United States could return to the prosperous years it enjoyed under former president Bill Clinton, a fellow Democrat, and pointed to disappointing new job figures to decry Bush's record.
"Let's not forget what we did in the 1990s," Kerry said as he wrapped up a 15-day tour of several states considered key to victory in the November 2 presidential election.
"We (Democrats) balanced the budget. We paid down the debt. We created 23 million new jobs. We lifted millions out of poverty and we lifted the standard of living for the middle class," he said in a speech here at California State University.
"We just need to believe in ourselves, and have the right leadership and the right policies - and we can do it again," Kerry said in prepared remarks.
Kerry, who will take a weekend break at one of his homes in the northwestern state of Idaho from Saturday to Monday, will return to the campaign trail Tuesday with a first stop in Cincinnati in the industrial state of Ohio.
His two-week campaign is to focus on the economy and job creation, around the slogan, "A stronger America begins at home: the path to prosperity," his campaign said.
A Pew Research Centre poll released Thursday showed Kerry with a 52-37 percent lead over Bush on voter confidence in their ability to steer the economy, up from a five-point edge Kerry had in March and a 10-point margin in May.
A Time magazine poll this week showed that 27 percent of Americans put the economy as the election's top issue, ahead of the war against terrorism.
In his speech, Kerry seized on recent government figures showing that employers hired a meagre 32,000 workers in July.
"Over the last four years, again and again, we were promised that tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals would create millions of new jobs," he added. "Instead, we've lost jobs, and these unaffordable tax cuts have led America into deficits as far as the eye can see."
He also criticised Bush for saying this week that the country should "explore seriously" a proposal to replace the income tax with a national sales tax, saying the notion added "insult to injury."
"(Americans) will go back to paying the same taxes they paid when Bill Clinton was president, a time when the rich got richer, and so did everyone else," Kerry said, vowing to cut taxes for the middle class.
While Kerry assailed Bush on the economy, Vice President Dick Cheney derided Kerry's pledge last week to wage "a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations."
"A 'sensitive war' will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans and who seek the chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more," Cheney, who was in Ohio, said in a reference to the September 11 attacks.
Asked about the vice president's remarks, Kerry told ABC that "it's sad that they can only be negative."
"They have nothing to say about the future vision of America. I think Americans want a positive vision for the future."
Bush was campaigning in Las Vegas, Nevada, Thursday and was heading to heavily Democratic California with its popular Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Comments
Comments are closed.