Wheeling, W.Va. ? Firing back in the debate over American values, Vice President Dick Cheney used his first campaign bus tour Saturday to label Democrat John Kerry “on the left, out of the mainstream and out of touch with the conservative values of the heartland.”

Kerry in recent days has been invoking values with increasing frequency, promising a crowd in Minnesota on Friday, for example, that he would “honor the values that built our country.”

Cheney, serving notice that the Bush campaign won’t cede what has traditionally been a Republican issue, told a crowd at Wheeling Park High School: “Sometimes I think John Kerry developed amnesia out on the campaign trail. His latest thing is to tell audiences that he holds conservative values.

“Did he forget his voting record, a voting record that makes him the most liberal member of the United States Senate?” Cheney asked. He cited Kerry’s vote against a ban on flag-burning, tax relief and banning what opponents call partial-birth abortion.

“On these and a whole host of values, John Kerry’s votes and statements over the decades that he’s been in office put him on the left, out of the mainstream and put out of touch of the conservative values of the heartland.”

The Kerry campaign was quick to respond. “Considering that Dick Cheney got five deferments from the military to avoid combat, he’s the last person who should be attacking Vietnam veteran John Kerry’s commitment to the flag,” said spokesman Phil Singer. He added that if the Bush campaign chooses to use “shrill speeches, they’re going to do so at their own peril.”

Cheney declared it “a great day for a bus ride” at the outset of a two-day tour in a red, white and blue bus through Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, three battleground states in the electoral politics of 2004. In fact, it was a day of dueling bus tours as John Kerry’s campaign staked out the highways of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota.

First stop for Cheney: the sweltering banquet hall of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Parma, where hundreds of GOP faithful bellowed cheers for the Republican ticket and plentiful boos at the mere mention of Kerry.

“This is the good part of the speech,” Cheney grinned, as he launched into a critique of Kerry’s economic policies.

Vice President Dick Cheney raises his hands to quiet his supporters as they chant four

“His big idea for cheering up the country? Raise your taxes,” Cheney declared.

Cheney repeated the Bush campaign’s often-repeated assertion that Kerry in his three terms as senator has voted for higher taxes 350 times.

“That’s an average of a vote for higher taxes every three weeks for the last 20 years,” he said. “At least the folks back in Massachusetts knew he was on the job.”

The vice president brought along his wife, Lynne, daughter Mary and 10-year-old granddaughter Kate for some holiday-weekend retail politicking.

Mary and Kate, along with various Cheney staffers, sported patriotic tattoos for the occasion — the washable kind, of course — but there was no evidence Cheney opted to join in the body art.

The group stopped for a quick tour of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

Yolana Wilson, visiting the Hall of Fame from Indianapolis with her husband and three children, was startled to encounter the vice president as a fellow tourist.

Wilson said it was good for the vice president to get out around the country, but said she hadn’t made up her mind about whom she will be voting for in November.