From the New York Times:

Mr. Kerry stepped boldly into the verbal minefield early, arriving at a front-porch session with supporters in Canonsburg, Pa., near Pittsburgh. As he likes to do, he brandished a bit of local color to show he wasn't just any interloping politician blowing through town.

But in so doing he seemed to forget that Republicans have been tearing him down for months as a vacillating, indecisive, finger-in-the-wind politician of the worst order.

"Everybody told me, 'God, if you're coming to Canonsburg, you've got to find time to go to Toy's, and he'll take care of you,'" Mr. Kerry said, dropping the name of a restaurant his motorcade had passed on the way in. "I understand it's my kind of place, because you don't have to - you know, when they give you the menu, I'm always struggling: Ah, what do you want?

"He just gives you what he's got, right?" Mr. Kerry added, continuing steadily off a gangplank of his own making: "And you don't have to worry, it's whatever he's cooked up that day. And I think that's the way it ought to work, for confused people like me who can't make up our minds."

Not to be left out, Bush slipped up, too:

Mr. Kerry's lapse, however, was matched by Mr. Bush's seemingly severed synapse of Monday night. At a rally in Poplar Bluff, Mo., he was breezing through his domestic agenda when he came to a favorite: what he calls medical liability reform.

"We got an issue in America," he began, in a folksy diction aimed at his small-town crowd. "Too many good docs are getting out of the business."

Mr. Bush then turned to another point he has been making lately to appeal to women - that among those doctors being driven from the business are many obstetricians and gynecologists.

But Mr. Bush seemed to get derailed on the way to his point.

"Too many good OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their" - he paused a split second, as if searching for a word, then continued - "their love, with women all across this country," he said.

Women all across the country might actually be relieved by such a shortage.