"When I see people on the other side of the fence say, 'Four more years,' I sometimes say to myself, four more years of what?" said Kerry, who is traveling through a series of battleground states en route to his hometown convention in Boston, which starts today.

"Four more years of jobs being lost?" Kerry asked rhetorically. "Four more years of the deficit growing bigger and bigger? Four more years of losing our allies around the world?"

Hours later, Kerry made a surprise appearance in Boston, where he threw out the first ball in the Red Sox-Yankees baseball game. The senator had planned the trip for a week but had kept it secret until his campaign plane took off from Ohio.

After the game, the candidate headed to Cape Canaveral, as planned.

"It's interesting that the same week they're trying to undergo an extreme makeover and roll out the softer, gentler side of the most liberal U.S. senator that he would attack using issues on which he has so little credibility," said Reed Dickens, a Bush campaign spokesman.

But Kerry made his remarks in response to a group of Bush supporters who stood across the street during his Ohio appearance and chanted, "Flip-flop Kerry!"

"I want to thank all the neighbors, including neighbors who don't support me at this point in time or may not support me at all," Kerry said in front of the home of Janet and Jessie Aikens, who hosted a gathering of roughly 70 Kerry backers. "What we really need to do in America, frankly, is to stop shouting at each other and start listening to each other. And what we need is leadership that inspires people to actually listen."

The lively scene in Park Ridge — a tidy neighborhood of ranch houses, begonia beds and carefully cropped lawns — contrasted with the grim business of securing Boston for the country's first post-9/11 political convention.

The sidewalks surrounding the Massachusetts State House and the convention center just down from Beacon Hill were bristling with police clad in black body armor. Sharpshooters were stationed on buildings and nearby railroad tracks. Helicopters clattered overhead as roughly 3,000 demonstrators paraded outside a 7-foot metal barricade surrounding the convention complex.

Taking advantage of their one officially sanctioned opportunity to march, demonstrators represented dozens of causes and organizations. Most, however, were protesting the war with Iraq. Some directed their ire at both Bush and Kerry.

"I am opposed to the war and therefore I am opposed to Kerry because he will continue the war," said Genny Kortes, 64, who traveled from Vancouver, Wash., to voice her dissent.

Kerry, like Bush, has declined to set a proposed timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops.

While the convention is intended to showcase all things Kerry, with a series of testimonials building to Thursday night's speech accepting the presidential nomination, Monday night's program will offer a look backward. The highlights include speeches by former Presidents Carter and Clinton, and former Vice President Al Gore.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is scheduled to introduce her husband.

Democratic partisans took to the Sunday-morning talk shows to market the themes and preview some of the rhetoric expected when the gavel comes down at 4 p.m. local time.

Barack Obama, a Punahou School graduate and Illinois state lawmaker, used an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" to sound the positive note that Kerry convention planners hoped to project.

"What I'm struck by is how much people just want practical, common-sense solutions to the concrete problems that they're experiencing," said Obama, who is set to deliver the convention's keynote speech tomorrow night. "What they don't want to hear is a bunch of partisan bickering."

But on NBC's "Meet the Press," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson seized on the findings of the 9/11 commission report, even as he maintained that Kerry was "not going to politicize this issue." The commission spread the blame for the 2001 terrorist attacks on the Clinton and Bush administrations, among others.

"There are a lot of shortcomings in the 9/11 report with the conduct of this administration," Richardson suggested, saying "what Kerry wants to do is fix the problem" by passing legislation to create an intelligence czar and not focusing "our entire national-security objectives" on the war in Iraq.

Bush has praised the work of the 9/11 commission and said he and his advisers are studying its recommendations.

Kerry running mate John Edwards, appearing on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopo-lous," was asked to explain to conservative rural voters his stance against legal limits on abortion, a constitutional ban on flag-burning and support for certain gun controls.

"I don't think somebody should be able to walk out of prison, convicted of a violent crime, walk across the street and buy a gun," the vice-presidential hopeful said.

"I don't think it's the role of government to decide what a woman will do," Edwards said on the abortion issue, though he deviated from some fellow Democrats by saying he believed the procedure should be restricted late in a pregnancy "except for a serious threat to ... the physical health of the mother."