John Kerry sought to galvanise his campaign by delivering his most withering attack yet on George Bush's Iraq policy. Speaking in New York on Monday night, Mr Kerry said the administration's record was filled with "deceptive statements and errors of judgment of historic proportions".
The tough speech must have been a tonic for Democratic supporters exasperated by Mr Kerry's inability to turn the administration's inept handling of Iraq to his advantage. He has been taking the fight to Mr Bush in recent days on issues from gun control to links between Halliburton, the oil services giant, and the administration, and now Iraq.
But beating up on the president carries risks, notes Marc Sandalow of the San Franciso Chronicle.
If the attacks come across as too strident, they could alienate voters who are reluctant to change presidents during a war. Never at a loss on how to hit back, the Republicans are now calling Mr Kerry the new Howard Dean.
George Packer, of the New Yorker, provides a useful compare and contrast exercise between Mr Bush's rhetoric on Iraq and the worsening situation there. He chronicles the White House's ruthless determination to put a positive spin on - or simply disregard - bad news from Iraq. Packer makes the telling observation that public approval of Mr Bush's handling of the war rose between May and September - just when coverage of events in Iraq dropped off the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Packer thinks the press is unfair in pressuring Mr Kerry for a detailed strategy on how to deal with the mess in Iraq. He writes: "The president's actions have led the country into a blind alley; there's no new strategy for Kerry to propose, and the press should stop insisting that he come up with one when the candidate who started the war feels no such obligation."
On Iraq, an issue on which Mr Kerry has been accused of flip-flopping, it is worth reading his Senate speech in October 2002 before his vote to grant Bush authority to go to war. Although the vote has been the source of much grief, the speech was actually a cogent argument, with Mr Kerry saying he would not support "a unilateral war against Iraq unless the threat is imminent".
CK Rairden, of the Washington Dispatch, sees a problem for Mr Kerry beyond Iraq - the man himself. Rairden, exasperated by Mr Kerry's inability to connect with the voters, calls him "aloof and an absolute bore", and says he had better loosen up or he will go down as Michael Dukakis II.
Amid all the speeches and the campaigning, Kerry found time to appear on the David Letterman show where he came out with his "top ten Bush tax
proposals". My favourite: Cheney can claim Bush as a dependent.
