Republican President Bush and Democratic Sen. John Kerry took their campaigns to Oregon on Friday, with Bush promoting his free trade agenda and Kerry telling Oregonians that the president’s policies had helped drive oil prices to record highs.
It was the second time in 10 days that the two candidates had pushed their messages in the same state. Bush lost Oregon to Democrat Al Gore in 2000, and Kerry is leading in the opinion polls. The last time they were in the same state was on Aug. 4, when their campaigns skirted close to each other in Iowa.
At a port on the Columbia River, Bush announced a $15 million budget amendment to pay for deepening the river from Portland to Vancouver, Wash., to allow greater shipping traffic and boost exports.
Later, at a political event in nearby Beaverton, Bush was to talk about small business and was expected to renew charges that Kerry advocated protectionist trade policies that would ultimately hurt the economy.
Before going to Portland for a rally, Kerry said in Springfield that Bush’s handling of Iraq and the war on terrorism had contributed to instability in the Middle East and had helped drive up oil prices for the U.S. consumer.
“The world is unstable right now. The marketplace is unstable, and because of the way we’ve behaved in Iraq and because we’ve pushed our allies to our side and because we’re not doing the kinds of things necessary to build the global effort with respect to terror, the instability adds about $10 to the barrel for the price of oil,” he said.
Kerry jumps on tax report
Kerry, on the last day of a two-week coast-to-coast trek through the most politically divided states, also pounced on a new report showing that more of the tax burden had been shifted onto the middle class since Bush took office in 2001.
“Government is supposed to make choices on your behalf,” Kerry said at a neighborhood meeting on a leafy cul-de-sac. “Government is not supposed to make choices that favor just the powerful special interests, the people with the money who can go to Washington and have access average people can’t have.”
The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that Bush’s tax cuts had transferred the tax burden from the richest Americans to middle-class families, with one-third of the cuts going to people with incomes in the top 1 percent.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan responded that the largest percentage reductions in taxes was going to those in the middle- and lower-income tax brackets and that wealthier Americans got more benefits from the tax cuts because they paid more of the overall tax burden.
The two sides have battled for months over tax cuts, with Bush insisting that they have provided the foundation for a strong economic recovery and Kerry saying they benefited the wealthiest Americans, took resources from essential government programs and hurt the middle class.
In the weeks leading up to the third anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush campaign has been emphasizing the president’s performance in the war on terrorism, a subject on which he continues to receive high marks.
A new Bush television advertisement, to run on national cable and in more than 250 health clubs in the last two weeks of August, is timed to coincide with the Summer Olympic Games in Greece.
It points out that with the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are “two fewer terrorist regimes” and two more free nations at the Olympics.
Bush’s chief campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd, told reporters that the ad was “another example of how we’re trying to link what’s going on obviously in Athens with the positive news and developments out of Iraq and Afghanistan.”