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Trailing in national polls seven weeks before the Nov. 2 election and heeding advisers who have urged him to be more forceful, Kerry rejected Bush's perfect storm defense -- recession, war and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- of the tepid economic performance in the United States.

"The president would have us believe that his record is the result of bad luck, not bad decisions, that he's faced the wrong circumstances, not made the wrong choices," Kerry said in excerpts of remarks prepared for delivery at the Detroit Economic Club, a traditional forum for presidential candidates.

"In fact, this president has created more excuses than jobs. His is the Excuse Presidency -- never wrong, never responsible, never to blame. President Bush's desk isn't where the buck stops -- it's where the blame begins."

During his first campaign trip to Oregon on Tuesday, running mate John Edwards jumped in, too, accusing the Bush administration of causing "the most fiscally irresponsible turnaround in our country's history."

Discussing Bush at a stop at Clackamas Community College near Portland, Edwards said: "I think he believes he's Ken Lay and America is his Enron. The truth of the matter is that what happens when CEOs run a company the way George Bush has run America, is they get fired."

Bush and Cheney "will say just about anything," Edwards said. "But there's one important thing they won't say, which is how they're going to pay for these ideas that they're proposing. What they don't want people to know is they're proposing another $3 trillion of spending and they have no way to pay for it."

In Milwaukee, at a center for the elderly, Mr. Kerry used blowups from the annual trustees' report on Medicare and Social Security to show how a table that projected the percentage of Social Security income that the average person would spend on Medicare had been replaced this year with a line graph with a different bottom line.

"They're playing games with the American people again," he declared. "They hid it from you. They didn't want you to know what the costs were. Once again, this administration hides the truth from the American people."