US election: Final countdown
2004-10-31 14:39
Washington - John Kerry and George W Bush were set to begin delivering their closing arguments to American voters on Sunday, racing from state to state in the final 48 hours of the US presidential campaign.
Sunday marks Halloween, when children in costumes go door to door at dusk asking for candy. The innocent autumn rite was to be celebrated this year in the shadow of an unwelcome new message from Osama bin Laden.
Bush conferred with top security officials on Saturday after the mastermind of the September 11 2001 attacks shocked the United States with his warning that US voters will be held accountable for any leader who seeks to persecute Muslims.
Homeland security secretary Tom Ridge announced that the nationwide terrorist alert level would not be raised despite the video, aired by Al-Jazeera satellite television on Friday, and urged Americans to go to the polls as usual.
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 the all-important electoral votes awarded in separate state contests stayed clouded in a jumble of contradictory data and political spin by both sides.
Bush and Kerry each appeared Saturday night on the weekly Spanish-language variety show "Sabado Gigante," sharing air time with scantily clad showgirls and hot Latin music to court voters from the largest US minority group.
In separate interviews on the show, enormously popular with Latinos in the United State, the two candidates talked immigration, and the guitar-playing Kerry revealed his fondness for fiery flamenco music.
On Sunday, Bush began the day in Florida, the state that decided the 2000 election, and was to travel to Ohio in the evening. Kerry was on the exact opposite itinerary with a stop in tiny New Hampshire thrown in.
For his final sprint to polling day, Monday, aides said Kerry would hold a final rally in Florida, before heading to suddenly-in-play Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Rock icon Bruce Springsteen, who has already drawn nearly 150 000 people to three events for Kerry over the last four days, was due to headline a final election eve rally in Cleveland, Ohio.
Kerry argued Saturday that he would do a far better job of hunting terrorists than Bush, signalling that he would not back away from charges Bush called "shameful" after the release of the bin Laden tape.
"As I have said for two years now, when Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, it was wrong to outsource the job of capturing them to Afghan warlords who a week earlier were fighting against us," Kerry said at a rally in Wisconsin.
Bush, he said, should have deployed "the best-trained troops in the world, who wanted to avenge America for what happened in New York and Pennsylvania and in Washington," a reference to the September 11 attacks.
A day after accusing Kerry of politicizing the bin Laden tape, Bush did not mention the issue in his campaign speech in Florida.
But Bush stayed on the attack against his rival, reprising his well-worn charges that the senator from Massachusetts was fickle on national security issues and unfit to lead the war on terrorism.
"My opponents' positions are kind a like the weather here in Green Bay. If you don't like it, wait a little bit, and it'll change," he joked in Wisconsin, to roars of laughter from about 3 000 cheering supporters.