Kerry has meetings

"I am going to put real choices in front of the country. This isn't going to be any mealy-mouthed, half-assed, you know, namby-pamby campaign."

"Home base for George Bush in this race, as you saw to the nth degree in his press conference, is terror. Ask him a question and he's going to go to terror. And everything he did in Iraq, he's going to try to persuade people it has to do with terror, even though everybody here knows that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Al Qaeda and everything to do with an agenda that they had preset, determined," Kerry said. "I say again and again as I campaign, I can wage a more effective war on terror than this administration."

Later, during an appearance at Howard University in Washington, the senator also disputed comparisons between the Iraqi war and Vietnam -- tentatively.

"It's not Vietnam yet, and I underscore 'yet,' " he told a student. "But I think this administration is making mistakes of judgment and stubbornness that increasingly push it toward the potential of developing into a much more difficult situation than it has to be."