Watch John Kerry's "botched joke"
Watch President Bush's response last night

A "botched joke" by the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee yesterday allowed President Bush to go on the offensive over Iraq for the first time in a midterm election campaign in which the war has been a sensitive subject for his Administration.

A day of half-apologies and insults cast between Mr Bush and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts appeared to liberate the President.

His attacks on Mr Kerry seemed to have been drawn directly from the archives of the presidential campaign two years ago, in which the White House and Republican groups managed to pour scorn on the senator's record as a decorated war veteran.

Mr Kerry spent most of the day refusing to apologise for what he described as a botched joke, aimed at Mr Bush, which appeared to question the intelligence of American soldiers fighting in Iraq. Mr Bush called his former opponent "shameful" to a cheering crowd in Georgia.

The subject of yesterday's controversy was a sentence spoken by Mr Kerry at a campaign rally for Phil Angelides, the Democratic candidate standing against the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, at Pasadena City College on Monday.

Mr Kerry told an audience of students: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq."

A spokeswoman for Mr Kerry said the prepared joke was: "Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush."

But the comment had escaped and was swiftly posted on right-leaning blogs and shown repeatedly on television yesterday, drawing responses from veterans' groups, which accused Mr Kerry of "slapping every soldier in the face".

In a sign of the seriousness of the Republican response, Senator John McCain, also a decorated Vietnam veteran and a potential rival in the race for the presidency in 2008, demanded an apology.

"The suggestion that only the least educated Americans would agree to serve in the military and fight in Iraq is an insult to every soldier serving in combat today," he said.

The leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, who is facing the prospect of losing control of the chamber and is also under pressure for his role in a sex scandal, joined the chorus: "Our soldiers risk their lives in the face of grave dangers on the battlefield, and no one who chooses to courageously and selflessly defend our country can be considered ’uneducated."

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