Candidates trade blows as end nears

SIOUX CITY, IOWA -- Sen. John Kerry appealed to middle class voters in the election homestretch Wednesday, saying President George W. Bush had sold them out to help the wealthy and now wants "four more years so that he can keep up the bad work." Bush put together an end game that included persistent appeals for Democratic votes and a rarely used weapon in this bruising campaign -- a positive commercial.\nIn the mail, on the phone and in courtrooms across the nation, activists, lawyers and partisans of all kinds intensified their efforts to shape the outcome of next Tuesday's election.\nWith their agendas laid out, Bush and Kerry were trying to create an aura of excitement in get-out-the-vote rallies, hoping to snag the dwindling pool of voters who haven't taken sides.\nRockers Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi were rejoining the Kerry campaign, minstrels in his fast-moving gallery. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was bringing his star power to Bush's side later in the week.\nKerry said Wednesday, "After four years in office, this president has failed middle-class families with almost every choice he's made. He's given more to those with the most at the expense of middle-class working families who are struggling to get ahead."\n"Now he's asking you to give him four more years so that he can keep up the bad work," Kerry told a rally in Sioux City.\nBush turned to the iconoclastic Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia to accompany him Wednesday to Pennsylvania and Ohio events, in keeping with his late-breaking appeals to Democrats who aren't sold on their own party's nominee.\nThe president has been talking up the "great tradition of the Democratic Party," citing the steeliness in crises shown by the likes of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, to make the point Kerry doesn't measure up.\nKerry mentioned those presidents and more, saying great U.S. leaders built alliances that protected this country while Bush "has failed in his fundamental obligation as commander in chief to make America as safe and secure as we should be."\nThe Democratic challenger said the president's response to revelations that 350 tons of explosives disappeared in Iraq was to "dodge and bob and weave." He said Vice President Dick Cheney, who has defended the administration's actions, "is fast becoming the chief minister of disinformation" while the president remains silent on the matter.\nKerry was focusing on economic troubles in the Sioux City speech Wednesday before stumping in Minnesota and back in Iowa, at a C edar Rapids event. Aides saw that speech and one Friday that will blend his campaign's economic and foreign policy proposals as his "closing arguments" for change. The speeches were added to his schedule after aides had said earlier that a speech Tuesday on homeland security was to be his last of the campaign.\nAfter ripping Kerry for weeks as an equivocator, Bush planned to close the contest with a 60-second commercial meant to show him as steady, trustworthy and compassionate in dangerous times.\nThe ad shows an emotional president telling the Republican National Convention about meeting the children and parents of slain U.S. soldiers, as well as wounded servicemen and women.\n"These four years have brought moments I could not foresee and will not forget," Bush says. "I've learned firsthand that ordering Americans into battle is the hardest decision, even when it is right." The commercial will be seen by a limited audience, given that it will run only on a couple national cable news networks.\nNeither campaign was going upbeat, nor were their supporters.\nHard-hitting leaflets lined mailboxes in a dozen or so hotly contested states. A glossy mailing by the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee showed burning roadside wreckage in Iraq, with U.S. soldiers looking on, and the headline "Wrong Choices ... Less Secure."\nA Republican National Committee mailing showed pictures of Jane Fonda and Michael Moore, two anti-war liberals supporting Kerry, and the headline, "John Kerry's heart and soul of America?"\nKerry's latest ad accuses the Bush administration of failing to secure the explosives that disappeared from a military installation south of Baghdad around the time U.S. forces were toppling Saddam Hussein's government.\nCheney, campaigning in Florida, called Kerry an "armchair general." "If our troops had not gone into Iraq as John Kerry apparently thinks they should not have, that is 400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that would be in the hands of Saddam Hussein, who would still be sitting in his palace instead of jail," he said.\nNew state polls suggested the race was deadlocked in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the three most important battlegrounds in the race for 270 Electoral College votes.\nWith the possibility of another inconclusive election night looming, lawyers were already deep in courtroom entanglements in a variety of states over problems either anticipated or already experienced in states with heavy early voting.\nA federal judge in Miami ruled against Democrats in saying Florida election officials will not be required to process incomplete voter registration forms.