SCRANTON, Pa. — President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry, sparred over performance and campaign promises Friday as the two candidates blazed a path across some of the election's most hotly contested states.
Kerry, seeking to build on momentum coming out of the Democratic National Convention, vowed to expand health coverage as the first order of his administration. That pledge was part of a renewed effort by the Massachusetts senator and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, to cast their domestic agenda as more attentive than Bush's to the everyday needs of the middle class.
"People are struggling, but the people at the top keep getting taken care of," Kerry told more than 10,000 supporters who filled several blocks of downtown Scranton to cheer the Democratic ticket.
Kerry castigated Bush for the 4 million Americans he said had lost health coverage over the last four years, and pledged to start reversing that trend with legislation he would propose on his first day in office.
"We're sending to Congress a bill that will end America's shame of being the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn't understand healthcare is not a privilege for the wealthy and the connected and the elected," he said, reprising part of his speech to the convention.
Bush, ending a week of self-imposed exile at his Texas ranch, unveiled a retooled campaign speech Friday, citing his accomplishments in the White House while saying Kerry had done little during his 19 years in the Senate.
"Results matter," Bush said. On issue after issue -- including the economy and efforts to fight terrorism -- the president vowed: "We are turning the corner, and we're not turning back."
Kerry's "prescription for America is the wrong medicine," Bush told a crowd of 8,000 supporters in a college baseball stadium in Springfield, Mo. "Give me four more years and America will continue to march toward peace and better prosperity."
He described his vision of "a new era of ownership and opportunity" and offered a variation on his justification for the war with Iraq, citing the recent suggestion by the Sept. 11 commission that the attacks occurred, in part, due to "a failure of imagination."
"After Sept. 11, we could not fail to imagine that a brutal tyrant who hated America, who had ties to terror, had used weapons of mass destruction and might use those weapons or share his deadly capability with terrorists was not a threat," Bush said.
