Bush calls foe ‘wrong man’ at ‘wrong time’

SAGINAW, Mich. — President Bush said yesterday that Sen. John Kerry’s political opportunism and shifting positions on Iraq make the Democrat “the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time.”

Barnstorming through the Midwest in a final search for swing voters, the president played off Mr. Kerry’s oft-repeated charge that Operation Iraqi Freedom was “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“The senator’s willingness to trade principle for political convenience makes it clear that John Kerry is the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time,” Mr. Bush said at the first of four energetic rallies across three states.

The president’s increasingly sharp attacks on Mr. Kerry were leavened by uncharacteristically introspective reflections on his own first term.

“My years as your president have confirmed some lessons and have taught me some new ones,” he said. “I’ve learned to expect the unexpected, because history can deliver sudden horror from a soft autumn sky.

“I found you better know what you believe or risk being tossed to and fro by the flattery of friends or the chorus of the critics,” he added. “I have been strengthened by my faith and humbled by its reminder that my life is part of a much bigger story.”

While Mr. Bush was summing up the past four years, his campaign’s chief strategist was sketching out the next four days.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Matthew Dowd ventured at a gathering sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington. “I like our position a lot better than their position.

“I think the president will be able to declare victory, and Kerry will concede by the time the polls close on the West Coast,” he said.

Mr. Bush has only “a slight advantage” over Mr. Kerry going into the campaign’s final weekend, Mr. Dowd said. But he emphasized that of the 10 states where polls show the contest within the margin of error, seven were won in 2000 by former Vice President Al Gore — which leaves the president with only three to defend this time around.

“We have to win a lot less in the battleground states than Senator Kerry does,” Mr. Dowd said.

He cited a Los Angeles Times poll that cast the race as a tie in Pennsylvania and a Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday that gave Mr. Bush a two percentage-point lead in the state.

Asked why the Bush campaign was spending so much time in Democrat-leaning Michigan, Mr. Dowd said it was part of a strategy to take the fight to Mr. Kerry and force him to defend his turf.

“Democrats thought [Michigan] was put away, not a state where they think it was worth his time,” Mr. Dowd said, pointing to a Zogby poll released yesterday showing the race tied in that state. “If we win Michigan, John Kerry can’t win the White House.”

He added that Mr. Kerry’s recent return to Michigan amounts to the Democrat “trying to protect his flank. And we’d rather be there than [campaigning to defend] states we won in 2000.”

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