Bush, Kerry vie for votes in Iowa
Campaigns clash on economy, Iraq
 |  Event staffers for President Bush's campaign stop in Davenport, Iowa, escort a heckler from the field Wednesday. |
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 VIDEO |
 CNN's Candy Crowley on Bush and Kerry in Davenport.
 CNN's Keith Oppenheim on the Illinois GOP's offer to Alan Keyes.
 CNN's Bruce Morton on how to handle a heckler.
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DAVENPORT, Iowa (CNN) -- President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry appealed to Iowa voters Wednesday in rival events just blocks away in this battleground state.
While both candidates talked about a myriad of issues, Kerry focused on the economy during a "summit" with business leaders, while Bush concentrated on matters abroad.
Bush told supporters that "the world will drift toward tragedy" without strong U.S. leadership, while Kerry said Bush had failed to provide adequate leadership at home.
"President Bush is a few blocks from here," Kerry told the crowd. "It occurred to me that he could come here for a great discussion about America's future if he were really willing to just turn the corner."
Bush lost Iowa's seven electoral votes by less than a third of 1 percentage point in 2000, and published polls suggest the state will be closely contested again this year.
The nearly simultaneous events by the two campaigns underscored the nature of the battle in Iowa, and the two sides squabbled over who had plans to visit the state first.
In his speech to several thousand supporters at a Davenport park, Bush defended the invasion of Iraq and said American leadership is needed in the battle against terrorism.
"If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This is not going to happen on my watch," Bush said.
The president noted that the independent commission investigating the attacks of September 11, 2001, found a "failure of imagination" contributed to the inability to stop that plot.
"After September 11, we could not fail to imagine that a brutal tyrant who hated America, had ties to terror, had weapons of mass destruction, might use those weapons or share his deadly capabilities with our enemies. We saw a threat," he said, referring to deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
No stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since Saddam's regime was toppled in a U.S.-led invasion last year. A Senate Intelligence Committee report released last month was sharply critical of the prewar intelligence on Iraq.
More than 900 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.
Returning to a frequent criticism of the Democratic ticket, Bush faulted Kerry and running mate John Edwards for joining an "out of the mainstream minority" of senators to vote against an $87 billion spending bill to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two senators had previously voted to authorize military action against Iraq.
Kerry supported an alternative version of the bill, which failed to pass and involved financing the outlay by repealing tax cuts for people in the top income brackets.
Kerry has said Republicans have oversimplified his stance, but Bush mocked that assertion.
"There's nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat," Bush said.
At his economic summit three blocks away, Kerry touted his endorsement by 200 corporation chiefs, including the CEOs of brewery Anheuser-Busch, retail chain Costco, high-tech powerhouse Sun Microsystems, and financial giants Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
"These CEOs who are with us here today around this table, and business leaders from the state and labor leaders from the state all understand how you make business move -- how you create jobs, what you need, what are the ingredients," the four-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts told the forum. "John Edwards and I are committed to restoring those ingredients to America."
Kerry said he would ease a major burden on businesses from rising health care costs by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the top income brackets to expand federal support for health care. Kerry said that could lower the cost of health insurance by almost $1,000 per employee.
"They've had four years," he said. "They have no plan -- not only to provide coverage to the people who don't have it, which is important to America, but to lower the cost for everybody else."
Both Bush and Kerry are on campaign swings through the Midwest, with Bush stumping in Iowa and Minnesota on Wednesday and Kerry planning to continue a coast-to-coast tour into Missouri.
Published polls show the two running neck-and-neck among voters nationwide.
|  Would-be rally attendees who were caught in traffic trying to reach a campaign event in Mankato, Minnesota, walk back to their cars from buses on Wednesday. |
Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said the president's trip to Davenport was planned "weeks ago" and the scheduling was not related to the travel plans of the Kerry campaign. Stanzel said the Bush camp first heard about Kerry's planned appearance in local media reporters last week.
"It's not surprising when you have an election that could be as close as it was in 2000 and you have a state that was a close as 4,000 votes," he said. "This gives us a good opportunity to talk about the clear differences we have."
Davenport is in Scott County, the state's third-largest county, which went Democratic in 2000.
