Wrong Way or Wrong War?

When Sen. John Kerry and President Clinton spoke by phone on Saturday, the former president advised Kerry to focus on drawing contrasts with President Bush on jobs and health care.

For the most part, Kerry took Clinton's advice on Monday, trying to frame the election as a referendum on President Bush's "wrong choices, wrong judgments, wrong priorities and wrong direction" in domestic policy.

But at a Monday morning "front porch" event in Cannonsburg, Pa., Kerry borrowed a formulation Howard Dean used at Drake University on Feb. 17, 2003, and said of the Iraq War: "It's the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time."

In the past, Kerry had said that what was wrong was "the way the President went to war," as he did July 11 when talking to CBS' Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes."

President Bush seized on Monday's comments as evidence Kerry has "yet another new position."

At an evening rally in Poplar Bluff, Mo., President Bush said: "After voting for the war but against funding it, after saying he would have voted for the war even knowing everything we know today, my opponent woke up this morning with new campaign advisors and yet another new position -- suddenly, he's against it again."

At this point, while moving their hands from side to side over their heads, the crowd chanted: "flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop."

Bush continued: "No matter how many times Sen. Kerry changes his mind - it was right for America then and it's right for America now that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power."

Bush said this even though the war was sold to the public on the basis of weapons of mass destruction and not simply for the purposes of regime change.

Later, at a rally in Cleveland, Ohio, Kerry did not directly repudiate Bush's Poplar Bluff assertion that he was "against" the war "again" and, instead, highlighted his differences with Bush on Iraq, saying, the President "wishes I had the same position as he does but as we've learned from the administration, just wishing something doesn't make it so."