DETROIT- Branding George W. Bush’s first term an “excuse presidency,” Sen. John Kerry on… DETROIT- Branding George W. Bush’s first term an “excuse presidency,” Sen. John Kerry on Wednesday chose the venerable Detroit Economic Club to deliver a detailed rebuke of Bush’s economic policies and laid out his own proposals for job growth, health care and taxes.

With new polls showing that Bush has lost some of his early September luster, Kerry hit the president hard on issues that his aides believe are Bush’s key vulnerabilities: unemployment, the medically uninsured, the rising costs of health care and a record deficit.

Kerry accused Bush of working for special interests instead of for middle-class Americans- a theme he’s been developing over the past few days on topics that include health care and assault weapons. And he painted a bleak picture of the economy, for which he said Bush hasn’t been accountable.

“His is the excuse presidency- never wrong, never responsible, never to blame,” Kerry said.

“President Bush’s desk isn’t where the buck stops, it’s where the blame begins. He’s blamed just about everyone but himself and his administration for America’s economic problems.”

The Bush campaign responded vigorously to the speech, linking Kerry to special interests, labeling him a tax-and-spend liberal and arguing that Bush would fight the better war on terrorism and help remove a yoke on the economy.

“There are national security implications to the war on terror; there are economic implications to the war on terror,” said Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman.

The crowd of 1,000 mostly business people responded politely but not wholly enthusiastically to Kerry’s 43-minute speech.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, acknowledging the corporate cast of the audience members, asked that they imagine the country as a major corporation and themselves as shareholders.

“You may have a fiduciary duty to seek change,” she said.

Kerry’s economic program has two key features- increasing taxes on wealthier Americans to levels before Bush took office and reducing the cost of health insurance.

Gene Sperling, one of Kerry’s economic advisers, called health care the “defining issue in the election,” saying rising medical costs are placing huge financial burdens on businesses and Americans.

“Spiraling health care costs have been enemy number one for job creation in the United States,” Kerry said.

Kerry would do away with the Bush-initiated tax cuts to taxpayers with incomes of $200,000 or more, generating about $860 billion over 10 years. That money would pay for the health plan, which Kerry advisers and some independent analysts believe would cost about $653 billion over 10 years. The remainder of the revenue generated by the tax increase would go to a $200 billion education trust fund.

Kerry also would give lower-income taxpayers a refundable tax credit to buy health insurance. He would let the government pick up the costs of “catastrophic” illnesses- those costing $50,000 or more to treat- to reduce premium costs. The plan is designed to cover the costs of 95 percent of the population, including about 27 million who are currently uninsured.

Though few dispute the reach of Kerry’s plan, the cost has been challenged by Bush and the American Enterprise Institute, a right-of-center think tank in Washington. The institute said the Kerry health plan would cost about $1.5 trillion.

In his speech, Kerry criticized Bush for adopting tax cutting and spending policies that have created a deficit that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts will reach a record $422 billion this year. As a percentage of the overall economy, however, the deficit is still smaller than the pool of red ink during the Reagan administration.

And while Kerry, like Bush, promised to cut the deficit in half in four years, independent analysts say that’s an ambitious goal, considering that he plans to spend the revenue from the tax increase on wealthy taxpayers.

Kerry and his advisers say they’ll reduce the deficit by cutting waste from the government, ending tax breaks for corporations and adopting a policy of paying for every spending increase with an equal spending reduction elsewhere in the budget. What’s more, they say, an improved economy will also generate more tax revenue that would be devoted to deficit reduction.

Kerry’s “excuse presidency” line dovetailed with another characterization he’s been using recently that plays off Bush’s middle initial: “W stands for wrong.” The newly aggressive tactics signal a change for a campaign that spent months defining Kerry as a credible commander in chief.

Speaking on the Don Imus show Wednesday morning, Kerry said he was ready to fight back: “I am absolutely taking the gloves off; I’m prepared to take them on and everything.”

Recent independent and internal campaign polls show that Kerry’s more forceful approach may be halting Bush’s rise in public approval. The University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg election survey shows that Bush’s support among so-called “persuadable” voters is worse now than in August. In particular, the poll found that while 52 percent of voters disapprove of Bush’s handling of the economy, 63 percent of the fence-sitting voters disapprove.

Bush advisers, responding to Kerry, portrayed the economy as rebounding and cited Kerry’s votes during his 20-year Senate career that supported tax increases. Several of those votes were related to President Clinton’s 1993 budget plan.

“John Kerry offered more pessimism about an economy that has created over 1.7 million jobs over the past year, and he rehashed old, tired ideas of higher taxes, of more regulation and of more government control of people’s lives that his own advisers say will not work,” Mehlman said.

The president’s economic policies also came under attack Wednesday by Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards, who spoke about job losses while in Parkersburg, W.Va.

Edwards, highlighting a plant closing and the shutdown of a call center in this Appalachian community, emphasized that many of presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have waged war, from World War II to the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. But they also left office with more jobs than when they were sworn in, he said.

“Every one of those presidents created jobs,” Edwards told a crowd at West Virginia University, “until George Bush.”

Since Bush took office, the economy has lost, on balance, about 900,000 jobs. Most of the losses occurred in his early years. Over the past year, the economy has added some 1.7 million jobs, though the pace of job creation picked up modestly in August after two disappointing months.

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(Mark Johnson reported from West Virginia with Edwards.)

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