New ad attacksKerry about Iraq

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President Bush's re-election campaign today begins running an updated TV ad portraying Sen. John Kerry as a "craven political opportunist," said Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman.

"He is using Iraq in a purely political way to capitalize on events on the ground in Iraq for his own political gain," Mr. Mehlman said of the Massachusetts Democrat.

The Kerry campaign also plans to begin running a new series of TV spots detailing the candidate's policies and biography.

"A lot of people don't really know who I am," Mr. Kerry told Democrats at a New York fund-raiser yesterday.

Bush campaign officials pulled their ad criticizing Mr. Kerry's support for higher taxes now that the federal tax-filing deadline has elapsed, campaign pollster Matthew Dowd said.

Mr. Dowd denied that the tax ad and another spot were being pulled in 18 battleground states because they were ineffective.

"When we started the ad campaign on March the 3rd, we had always said there was going to be ebbs and flows to this effort," he said. "There would be windows of opportunity when the public was going to be paying a lot of attention and then smaller amounts of attention and then little attention."

Mr. Dowd said the campaign weighed the impact of the ads and the timing in which to air new ones.

"We have made a decision which we now think it's more appropriate to adjust those levels," he added. "So what you're going to be seeing now is one ad being aired at the moment, as opposed to two or three ads at the same time"

Mr. Kerry told donors that the president has failed to define the Democrat through advertising. He also vowed to fire back with his own ads.

"We're just going to be coming right back at them," he said.

But Bush campaign officials pointed out that the effectiveness of the earlier Bush ads has been acknowledged by various Democratic polling entities, including Democracy Corps, which is headed by pollster Stanley Greenberg and strategist James Carville.

"The messages in Bush's negative ads against Kerry had penetrated voters' thinking," wrote Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Carville in a recent report based on focus groups.

"Perceptions of Kerry are forming, and most participants had some opinion of him," they added. "A dominant attitude was that Kerry changes his position on issues and tells people what they want to hear; he will also raise their taxes"

The Bush ad that begins today is an updated version of a spot that criticizes Mr. Kerry for voting against a bill to spend $87 billion funding reconstruction and security in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ad quotes Mr. Kerry saying that he voted for the measure before voting against it.

Mr. Mehlman said the ad is pertinent now because Mr. Kerry has been criticizing the president's policy in Iraq. He accused the Democrat of "blaming America first, when in fact international terrorists are responsible for the actions, atrocities, the attacks in Iraq."