Group Of GIs Mocks Kerry Remarks

Holding Sign Saying: 'Halp us Jon Carry – We R stuck hear n Irak'

(CBS/AP)  CBS News chief White House correspondent Jim Axelrod reports that a Republican campaign official told CBS that "John Kerry has given us what Democrats have had for months: an evil boogeyman. We spent $200 million last election getting people to hate John Kerry. Now we just tap right back into that."

"Whatever the intent, Senator Kerry was wrong to say what he said," said Democratic Congressman Harold Ford Jr., locked in a close Senate race in Tennessee.

"It was a real dumb thing to say," said Claire McCaskill, a Democrat in an equally tight Senate campaign in Missouri.

The White House accepted Kerry's statement as a legitimate apology.

"Senator Kerry's apology to the troops for his insulting comments came late but it was the right thing to do," White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday.

She said it was too soon to say whether the White House will stop talking about the incident. "We'll see," Perino said. "Once he has apologized, I don't know that there is anything more to say."

Moments after Kerry issued his statement, House Majority Leader John Boehner, the No. 2 Republican in the House, said on CNN: "I think he has apologized. It sounds good enough."

For Republicans, it's a chance to change the subject, reports CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante.

"The president always sets up a straw man because he won't debate a real man," Kerry snapped in an interview with columnist Joel Connelly of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

With President Bush showing the way, Republicans had worked energetically to turn Kerry into an all-purpose target in a campaign that has long loomed as a loser for Republicans — much as they ridiculed him two years ago on their way to electoral gains.

"Anybody who is in a position to serve this country ought to understand the consequences of words. ... We've got incredible people in our military, and they deserve full praise and full support of this government," said Mr. Bush, in an interview with conservative talk radio personality Rush Limbaugh.

"Of course, now Senator Kerry says he was just making a joke, and he botched it up," Vice President Dick Cheney said in remarks prepared for a campaign appearance in Montana. "I guess we didn't get the nuance. He was for the joke before he was against it."

The jab was designed to recall Kerry's situation in the last election, when he had to defend his earlier vote for $87 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - before he voted against it.