US: In a set-back for Senator John Kerry, former president Bill Clinton has told friends that his recovery from heart surgery has been slower than expected and he will not be able to join the Democratic candidate campaigning across the country as planned.
New polls also show that Mr Kerry is struggling to close the gap with President George Bush in the presidential race, but the Massachusetts senator got a powerful endorsement yesterday from the New York Times, which scathingly dismissed Mr Bush's four years in office as "disastrous".
Mr Clinton had quadruple bypass surgery on September 6th and has been recuperating for the last seven weeks at his home in Chappaqua, New York. His wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, told friends in the last few days that he is not as well at this stage as she had hoped.
She felt the 58-year-old former president was trying too hard to push himself to get out on the road and help Senator Kerry, a friend of the Clintons told The Irish Times. He may now make only a couple of cameo appearances, possibly in New Hampshire and Ohio, and make recorded telephone messages for automatic calls to voters, the source said.
Mr Clinton has reluctantly had to abandon plans to travel with Kerry on the campaign plane during the last two weeks before polling day on November 2nd. He has been taking long walks in the forested countryside around his home but returns exhausted and continues to suffer considerable post-operative pain, according to family friends quoted in the Washington Post.
"He wants to do everything he can, but he may or may not" be able to, said Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, who consults Mr Clinton regularly by telephone.
Mr Clinton's slow recovery from the heart operation contrasts with the forecasts at the time that he would be fit to campaign by early October. Plans for Mr Clinton to continue his recovery in Little Rock, Arkansas, to prepare for the opening of his presidential library on November 16th are still going ahead.
The New York Times editorial endorses Mr Kerry as a clear thinker with a strong moral code, and blasted the Bush presidency as ideologically driven and incompetent.
Mr Bush turned the government over to the radical right, the editorial says, and he and Attorney General John Ashcroft were responsible for "a Nixonian obsession with secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and inept management".
Mr Bush's obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed "closer to zealotry than mere policy" and the war was sold to the American people on evidence which Bush officials knew to be dubious. The editorial looked back "with hearts near breaking" for lives unnecessarily lost and casually wasted opportunities.
Two new polls showed Mr Bush ahead in the wake of Wednesday's debate with Mr Kerry in Arizona - which is doubly encouraging news for the President as history shows that the candidate in the lead after the last debate wins the election.
Newsweek has Mr Bush leading Mr Kerry by 50-44 per cent, and Time magazine, by 48-47 per cent.
The Zogby daily tracking poll put Mr Bush ahead at 46-44 per cent and the Washington Post daily tracking poll gave Mr Bush a three point lead, 50-47 per cent.
However this latter poll shows Mr Kerry ahead in 13 key battleground states where the Democrat holds a 53-43 per cent lead among likely voters.
An overwhelming majority of voters said it was wrong of the Democratic candidate to mention in Wednesday's presidential debate in Arizona that Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter is a lesbian.
President Bush is campaigning in Florida today and tomorrow, as the race in the southern state tightens to a statistical dead heat. In West Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday he pushed his message that Mr Kerry's record makes him unfit to lead the country's armed forces.
Mr Bush also made the case that the senator was an extreme liberal on issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Noting that it was a year since Mr Kerry voted against an $87 billion appropriation bill to support the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, the President accused the Democrat of shoring up his political position at the expense of providing funds for armour needed by troops.
Mr Kerry voted against the bill as a protest against tax cuts for the wealthy and his campaign pointed out that the President himself had threatened to veto it over provisions he did not like.
Mr Kerry attended a Mass at Chillicothe in Ohio on Saturday where the priest conducting the service, Father Lawrence Hummer, said those who support abortion rights - like the Democratic candidate - should not be ostracised or treated like lepers.
Some moderate Catholics like Fr Hummer have begun speaking out against a small number of Catholic bishops who have implicitly asked believers not to vote for Kerry for his support for a woman's right to choose.