Bush, Kerry in final blitz

2004-10-31 19:22

Miami - President George W Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry scrambled for votes in the key states of Florida and Ohio on Sunday, keeping a bruising pace on the campaign trail in a race still too close to call with less than 48 hours until election day.

Two tracking polls by The Washington Post and Fox TV showed the candidates have evenly split the electorate, with little apparent change since the emergence Friday of a video by America's top enemy, Osama bin Laden.

In an interview with ABC, Kerry rejected suggestions that bin Laden's video address to the American people on Friday would favour Bush, who has consistently polled better than his challenger on the issue of fighting terrorism.

"America knows that I bring 35 years of experience, more experience than George Bush has in foreign affairs and national security affairs," Kerry said in the interview to be broadcast in full on Monday evening.

"I'm going to hunt down, capture and kill the terrorists, and I believe I will wage a far more effective war on terror than George Bush has," Kerry said, before shifting the focus onto the war in Iraq and reiterating the list of presidential failings that have formed a major part of his campaign platform.

Crisscrossing

Kerry attended services at an African-American church in Dayton, Ohio before heading to New Hampshire and then on to Florida, crisscrossing paths with Bush who began the day stumping around Florida and then went north to Ohio.

Votes in either state could prove crucial in the all-important scrap for electors, the super-votes awarded state-by-state that actually determine who wins the US presidency.

The latest surveys ahead of Tuesday's election pointed to a photo finish to rival the 2000 contest, with the possibility a candidate could lose the popular vote and win the presidency for the second straight time.

Polls gave Bush a slight lead nationwide but the battle for electoral votes stayed clouded in a jumble of contradictory data and political spin by both sides.

The bin Laden tape returned the focus of the campaign to national security, as surrogates for both candidates staged back-to-back to television interviews on Sunday morning political talk shows.

Accusations

Kerry adviser Bob Shrum again accused Bush of diverting attention from the hunt for bin Laden by launching the invasion of Iraq.

"The issue is that we diverted our forces and our focus from Afghanistan. We went to Iraq. We created a mess in Iraq. It's a terrorist haven that it wasn't before," he told the "Fox News Sunday" program.

Bush adviser Karen Hughes accused the Democratic camp of "engaging in shameful politics, claiming that we missed a chance to get him."

"We had our most elite, most highly trained force, Delta Force, in the hills of Tora Bora looking for them. And I have every confidence that, had he been there, had they been able to find him, had they known exactly where he was, Delta Force, the most highly skilled force in the world, would have captured him," she said.

A report on Sunday said American voters have not been swayed by the video message broadcast on Friday, in which the mastermind of the September 11 attacks warned US voters they will be held accountable for any leader who seeks to persecute Muslims.

The New York Times, which said it interviewed dozens of voters in five key states after the broadcast, found that most people had already made up their minds, and their convictions remained unshaken.

- AFP