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Tuesday, July 13, 2004

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  Bush refers to Kerry as "the senator from Massachusetts," a dig meant to reinforce Bush's assertion that Kerry is out of touch with Middle America. Bush carries that message on Tuesday to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a sparsely populated region no sitting president has visited in more than 90 years.

Bush won the Upper Peninsula, according to his campaign, but lost Michigan by about 5 percentage points, and he wants its 17 electoral votes in his column this year. He was trumpeting what he views as an improving economy, aides said.

Bush then heads west to Minnesota, the state where Kerry declared earlier this month that he represented conservative values that rural Americans hold dear.

Jennifer Millerwise, a Bush campaign spokeswoman, said that claim didn't square with Kerry's positions on taxes, medical malpractice reform and other issues.

'Stark Contrast'

"When you look at all these critical issues to this part of America, John Kerry's positions stand in stark contrast to those of President Bush," Millerwise said.

The campaign spokeswoman pointed to Kerry's attendance last week at a celebrity fund-raiser in New York City in which celebrities bashed Bush.

'Hollywood Hate-fest'

"John Kerry one week was in America's heartland saying 'I share your conservative values' and then in New York City at a Hollywood hate-fest where there was vulgar language and actors on stage attacking the president," Millerwise said.

On Monday, Bush used a stop at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to defend his decision to go to war in Iraq in the face of a Senate report debunking White House justifications for attacking Saddam Hussein's government. The Senate Intelligence Committee said last week the administration's belief that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons was wrong, based on false or overstated CIA analyses.

"Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq," Bush told lab employees assembled in an auditorium. "We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take."

Before leaving Washington on Tuesday morning, Bush is signing into law a bill to extend a trade pact that offers duty-free treatment on some goods and other trade benefits to the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

On Wednesday, he is making a second bus trip through Wisconsin, a state he lost in 2000 by fewer than 6,000 votes.

In May, Bush's bus tour hugged the western flank of the state, along the Mississippi River. This time he trolls eastern Wisconsin, between Milwaukee and Green Bay.

© 2004 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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