To hear Kerry tell it, he's been consistent, just nuanced.

He's always supported getting rid of Saddam Hussein - just not the way President Bush has gone about it.

The reality? Bush talks like an executive. Kerry talks like a legislator.

One is used to acting and taking the consequences. Right or wrong, governors and executives like Bush get credited for decisions and take the heat.

The other is used to parsing sentences.

WHAT THEY SAID

What Kerry, Bush have to say on the Iraq war On bringing home U.S. troops • Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said this weekend he hoped to have all troops home by the end of his first term. • President Bush has said setting a date certain to bring home the troops will undermine rebuilding efforts by emboldening insurgents. Bush has promised to stay "as long as necessary and not one day more." On the use of other nations • Kerry has said he would "internationalize" the security forces in Iraq by bringing in NATO. • Bush has tried, but NATO countries like France have refused - a result, Kerry charges, of Bush's "go-it-alone" attitude that has alienated allies. On Iraqi security forces • Kerry has said he would launch a "massive training effort" to build a professional Iraqi force. • Bush is pushing the same thing. A new Iraqi battalion comes on line every two weeks. Source: GNS research

Kerry works in a setting where an added word in a bill is reason for celebration and victory is a signature on a piece of parchment.

"There are good reasons why we've had only two sitting senators in the history become president, because they run into this problem," said Charles O. Jones, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution and a former president of the American Political Science Association. (The two: John F. Kennedy and Ohio's Warren G. Harding.)

Kerry is in Cincinnati hoping to erase the impression that he has a different stand on the war each month.

"I don't buy this senatorial thing. Some of the best orators I've seen have been senators," said Kerry's senior adviser, Joe Lockhart.

"The impression comes from the administration. ... They take Senator Kerry's words and twist them," Lockhart said. "They are essentially dishonest."

The United States already is on the cusp of 1,000 troop deaths, tallying 999 Tuesday, in addition to three civilian contractors killed while working for the Pentagon.

Appearing at the same spot where President Bush gave a national speech in October 2002 on Iraq -- Cincinnati's Union Terminal - Kerry hopes once and for all to show that he is the candidate to get the United States out of Iraq honorably.

The ultimate complication for Kerry is his Oct. 11, 2002, vote in favor of giving Bush the authority to go to war.

In his long speech on the Senate floor Oct. 9, 2002, Kerry analyzed every important word in the resolution itself, including "national security" and "relevant." He declared a victory because the resolution's wording had changed under Senate pressure.

Senate bills tend to be convoluted, confusing and contradictory, full of exceptions carved from exceptions. Kerry himself said he would support a multinational effort, but not a unilateral one unless the threat was "imminent." Or unless attempts to rope in other countries had failed. He declared that Saddam wasn't an imminent threat yet.

But he voted "yes" nonetheless (as did the entire Tristate delegation). A Boston Globe article at the time said Kerry did not decide to support the war until after he watched Bush's Cincinnati speech.

A year later, Kerry voted against spending $87 billion to support financing the military and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As Kerry said in a remark repeated more often than he ever could wish, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before voting against it."

That's exactly what happened. Democrats brought up their version of the bill, in this case one that paid for the reconstruction by rolling back some Bush tax cuts. Kerry voted for it.

That's a standard practice for a minority party in Congress. Republicans did the same when they were in the minority.

The vote against the $87 billion, portrayed in Bush ads as a vote against the troops, "has continued to dog him," said Bathsheba Crocker, an Iraq expert at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But she said Kerry raised questions about whether the administration had a good enough plan for spending the money.

Part of Kerry's struggle: He has had to appeal to heartland voters like those in Greater Cincinnati and diehard Democrats who opposed the war from the beginning.

"He's tried to walk a tightrope," said Nancy Roman, director of the Washington program of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank.

"His positions are pretty nuanced. He doesn't say unequivocally that we shouldn't be where we are but that we should have done it with more thought, more care," she said. "It's a very subtle difference, which makes it hard for him to very aggressively attack Bush without seeming hypocritical."

Kerry got into trouble in August at the Grand Canyon, when he answered Bush's challenge: Would he have voted yes knowing no weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq?

Yes, he said, remarks Bush seized on as evidence that Kerry had switched positions again and now agreed with him.

But Kerry actually had continued speaking, adding his usual "but."

"Yes, I would have voted for the authority, but I would have used that authority, as I have said throughout this campaign, effectively. I would have done this very differently from the way President Bush has. And my question to President Bush is: Why did he rush to war without a plan to win the peace?"

Kerry's sometimes-agonized efforts to explain himself have been seized by Republicans, who have set up a special Web site - www.kerryoniraq.com - dedicated solely to Kerry's alleged flip-flops. It includes an 11-minute video that as of Tuesday had garnered nearly 7 million hits.

"I think voters are going to look for a president with decisiveness," Bush campaign spokesman Kevin Madden said.

"I will be interested to hear what Senator Kerry's latest position is on Iraq. His inconsistencies are confusing to us as voters, but they are also sending a mixed message to our allies in the war against terror, our brave men and women in uniform and the Iraqi people," said Rep. Rob Portman, the Terrace Park Republican who also serves as communications director for the Bush campaign in Ohio.

"Senator Kerry has been for the war, against the war, for funding our troops, not funding our troops, committed to finishing the job and not committed to finishing the job," Portman said. "We'll see which John Kerry shows up in Cincinnati."

Virtually no one has accused President Bush of inconsistency on Iraq, though some have complained of the opposite: an unwillingness to adapt when things seem to go wrong.

Bush famously refused to acknowledge any mistakes at a prime time news conference in April. On Aug. 26 for the first time, he acknowledged "a miscalculation" in planning for post-war Iraq.

"I think Bush has been consistent. He's embraced a policy and he's stayed the course," Roman said. "What they don't acknowledge publicly is it was much more challenging than they anticipated. I don't think they envisioned the situation would be quite this messy sitting here in September 2004."

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Email cweiser@gannett.com