Last chance for Bush and Kerry

2004-10-12 11:09

New Mexico - President George W Bush and his challenger John Kerry have one last chance on Wednesday to land a decisive blow in their knife-edge White House race, with a final televised debate.

The rivals face a third head-to-head clash in Tempe in the southwestern state of Arizona, in a session dedicated to domestic issues, after spending the previous two encounters slugging it out on Iraq and terrorism.

Bush rebounded in the second debate in St Louis, Missouri last week after a disappointing showing in the first encounter, where Kerry rescued his previously lagging campaign to pull level in opinion polls.

Both men spent time between the debates stumping for votes in critical battleground states like Colorado, New Mexico, Florida and Ohio, amid signs a win could be eked out by wafer-thin margins on November 2.

As Kerry pulled back into a tie with Bush in most polls, the tone of the campaign took a decided negative turn, a trend which continued on Monday with both candidates in New Mexico, a state Bush lost by less than 400 votes in 2000.

The president seized on a comment by Kerry in an interview with the New York Times magazine in which he said he hoped to reduce terrorism to the level of a "nuisance."

Destroying terrorist networks

"Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying terrorist networks and spreading freedom and liberty around the world," Bush said.

Kerry's camp hit right back, accusing Bush of desperation and of adopting a tried and tested tactic of twisting the veteran Massachusetts senator's words.

Aides also dug up a quote by Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security advisor in the White House with Bush's father in which he spoke of the need to reduce terrorism to the level of a "horrible nuisance."

"The President is flailing, he is contorting himself, now he finds himself rejecting today the very words of his daddy's national security advisor," said a Kerry aide on condition of anonymity.

Bush will try and hammer home a similar line of attack in the debate, exposing what his aides believe is a pattern of inconsistency and extreme liberal policies in Kerry's two decades-old Senate record with his new mantra "he can run, but he can't hide."

Kerry will skewer Bush as too stubborn to change course not just faced with a deepening insurgency in Iraq but with an economy that is shedding jobs at home.

"It's not just that Bush has failed in the last four years, he can only bring you more of that," the Kerry aide said.

Kerry will enter the debate buoyed by polls that show that he has eased into statistical level pegging with Bush.

- AFP