Kerry heckled on his own front porch

COLUMBUS, United States (AFP) - Democrat John Kerry's presidential campaign took the pulse of the ordinary American homeowner, and came face to face with the polarized nature of the country's electorate.

Four days before he makes a crucial speech at the national Democratic convention in Boston, the Kerry bandwagon rolled into a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, for a "front porch" rally at the home of Jessie and Janet Aitkins.

The carefully choreographed event was gatecrashed by a vocal group of local Republican residents brandishing placards in support of President George W. Bush and chanting "flip-flop" Kerry -- echoing Republican criticisms of Kerry's Senate voting record.

"Kerry doesn't have anything like Bush's integrity," said David Timms, 32. "Actually, because of his liberal policies, I'm happy he doesn't even vote that often in the Senate."

Some Bush supporters handed out flyers advertising a "Kerry Waffle Raffle."

Earlier in the day, when Kerry visited a local church for a service, one man had to be removed from the congregation when he called the senator from Massachusetts "a big phoney."

Addressing supporters in front of the Aitkins' home, Kerry said he welcomed the voices of opposition.

"Sometimes, they're a little loud," he said over audible Republican voters' chants of "four more years" for Bush. "But that's the nature of democracy."

"Four more years of what?" he added. "Four more years of jobs being lost? Four more years of the deficit growing bigger and bigger?"

Unemployment is a key issue in Columbus and Ohio as a whole, where the slump in US manfacturing industry has seen major layoffs in recent years.

"These lost jobs are not abstract numbers," Kerry said. "They are our neighbours. They are our families."

The Columbus stop was the latest on a symbol-laden pre-convention tour for Kerry, aimed at building some momentum ahead of the Boston gathering, where he will formally accept the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday.

Later Sunday he was due to fly to Florida's Cape Canaveral to argue that the same commitment and imagination that took man to the moon should be used to provide affordable health care.

He will also travel to Norfolk, Virginia, home of a naval base and one of the country's largest concentrations of military veterans, while the final stop on the run-in to Boston will be Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution were written.

All states included in the tour are expected to be closely fought in the November 2 presidential election, with Florida carrying particular resonance as the scene of Bush's contested victory in 2000 that helped decide the election.

Latest polls give Kerry and his running mate John Edwards the slimmest of leads over Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. But a Time Magazine survey released Sunday found that only 29 percent of voters said they knew a "great deal" about Kerry while 67 percent said they knew "a great deal" about Bush.