Bush, Kerry in campaign frenzy with 10 days to go

Democrat John Kerry was to campaign in the western states of Colorado and New Mexico Saturday, then cross two time zones for more appearances in the crucial state of Florida the following day.

President George W. Bush also faced a jammed schedule: four election rallies in Florida Saturday, then a 1,000-mile (1610-kilometer) trip west to spend the night at his ranch in Texas before stumping in New Mexico Sunday.

The rival candidates are locked in a desperate battle to win support in the 10 battleground states expected to decide the November 2 election. Key among those is Florida, which has 27 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency and a too-close-to-call race.

Kerry was focusing on bread and butter issues as he galloped through a series of special pitches to specific groups of voters -- women on Friday, Hispanics on Saturday, blacks on Sunday.

He accused Bush of trying to make the election about "just one issue", national security, then said he would welcome the narrowed debate.

"Let's talk about what happened when you let Osama bin Laden escape in Afghanistan, let's talk about what happened when we had the world's number one terrorist cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora," he told a rally at the University of Nevada in Reno late Friday.

He said Bush outsourced the job of capturing bin Laden out to Afghan warlords "who just one week earlier were fighting us.

"I would have used our military and we would have gone after and captured or killed Osama bin Laden," Kerry said.

Bush set the wolves on Kerry in a new television advertisement Friday that Kerry's running mate John Edwards called "despicable."

A female narrator accuses Kerry of being dangerously weak on national security, while a pack of wolves -- standing in for terrorists -- prowl menacingly onscreen.