Kerry, Bush face off for face time in Iowa

DAVENPORT, Iowa -- Usually, the office talk at Happy Joe's catering company this time of year is about pizza or profits or vacations, not presidential campaign visits. But as President Bush and Senator John F. Kerry nearly collided in this small city at the edge of Iowa yesterday morning, sending an extraordinary buzz through the local community and the media about their dueling events, even the catering employees took sides.

"Just this morning in our office, we were having big debates and controversies," said Sharon Miller, 45, an accountant at Happy Joe's, who volunteered to help with a catering job for the Bush entourage so she could see her candidate.

Despite her Republican leanings, Miller said she was glad to see Kerry holding an event just blocks away. "I think it's great, for both parties," she said. "It's getting people talking and interested, no matter which side they're on."

Both the Republican and Democratic campaigns see Iowa as crucial. It is one of more than a dozen states in which opinion polls have been so close that a concerted effort by either candidate could tip the state into his column, adding seven electoral votes to the bottom line and determining who will win the White House

All across the Quad Cities yesterday the close encounter between Bush and Kerry touched off far more than the usual chatter surrounding presidential campaign trips. The visits dominated the front page of the local newspaper -- "President Bush, Mr. Kerry, We Want You to Know . . ." the Quad-City Times blared in a headline over a story about a focus group -- and prompted intense analysis of every aspect of the trips on television. ("Getting to this event late certainly did not help John Kerry in the amount of live news coverage he received today," Matt Hammill, senior anchor at WQAD-TV, said during live coverage of both events.)

Yet the intersection of the two campaigns was more than an odd coincidence: In crossing paths, Kerry and Bush offered a vivid glimpse of how important tactical maneuvers have become in this hard-fought race, and of how intense -- and personal -- the contest is likely to become in the remaining three months.

Indeed, by nearly bumping into each other here at the edge of the Mississippi River -- after almost never seeing each other on the banks of the Potomac River, in the nation's capital -- both sides had a chance to hobnob with reporters covering the other team, offer up their admittedly biased spin about the symbolism of the events, and fire off zingers at close range.

Most importantly, the Bush and Kerry visits gave both sides a chance to prevent the other from dominating the local news.

"It's a good thing they're both here because it only highlights the differences between them," Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said as she entered the Democratic event at the River Center in Davenport.

Five blocks away, Scott Stanzel, a Bush campaign spokesman, offered an identical take.

"It's actually provided a very good opportunity for President Bush to talk about the differences in the campaigns," Stanzel said as Bush shook hands with supporters.

Both campaigns described the stops as sheer coincidence -- a claim bolstered by the fact that Bush's security needs usually require several weeks' advance notice,and that Kerry's postconvention schedule has been in the works since mid-July. Furthermore, a Bush official said: "You can't possibly think either campaign would want to be in the same market on the same day," sharing headlines at great expense.

"There are only a few cities in five or six states that these guys are going to go to for the next three months," the official said, arguing that the same map of electoral swing states is pinned to the walls of strategists on both sides.

Whether the local media would portray the contrasts in the way the advisers hoped seemed uncertain in the immediate aftermath of both events. The local ABC affiliate, which covered the events live, sounded as concerned with Kerry's tardiness (he was 50 minutes late) and with the impressive size of Air Force One, parked at the Quad Cities International Airport, as with the substance of two campaign speeches that were aimed as much at a national audience as at the tens of thousands of voters in Davenport.

Bush delivered his standard stump speech but added a section about his demands that Congress create a national intelligence director. He also dismissed Kerry's claim this week that Bush's policies are fueling terrorist recruitment rather than diminishing it. In addition, Bush mentioned his support for ethanol subsidies, an important issue in Iowa.

Kerry, whose focus was on economic issues, conducted a two-hour round-table that at times sounded more like a graduate course than a political event: He contrasted Bush's economic record with Bill Clinton's and then with Kerry's own set of tax and health care proposals, while some of the executives invited to the round-table calculated details such as the impact of higher interest rates on construction costs for new facilities.

Some 200 business leaders endorsed Kerry yesterday, including executives from Oracle, Bank of America, and three other companies who flew here to attend the round-table. They decried rising US deficits and what several said was a chilly international business climate under Bush. Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, said that the Bush administration's "isolationist" and "occasionally bellicose" rhetoric was bad for US financial interests and trading abroad.

Globe staff writer Patrick Healy contributed to this report.