DETROIT ? Democrat John Kerry on Wednesday delivered a stinging indictment of President Bush’s economic record, charging the president has offered “more excuses than jobs” and presided over record employment losses and a swollen deficit.

In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, a traditional stop for presidential candidates, Kerry cast himself as “an entrepreneurial Democrat” and said Bush “consciously, willfully” turned the $5.6 trillion surplus he inherited into a deficit that former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said has climbed to more than $9 trillion.

Kerry said his rival’s “failed policies” have reversed economic gains won during the Clinton administration and hit the middle class particularly hard.

“Now the president wants you to believe that this record is the record of the victim of circumstances, the result of bad luck, not bad decisions,” Kerry said, adding that of the last 13 presidents, Bush is the only one to have seen the number of jobs decline during his administration.

“This president has created more excuses than jobs. His is the excuse presidency: Never wrong, never responsible, never to blame … He’s blamed just about everybody but himself and his administration for America’s economic problems as well as other problems like Abu Ghraib,” Kerry said.

The speech was remarkable less for its specific proposals — it recited plans Kerry has previously unveiled — than for its hard-nosed rhetoric, which was tougher than any of his earlier critiques of Bush’s economic policies.

Earlier, in an interview with radio host Don Imus, Kerry also sought to deliver a more definitive pronouncement on Iraq, saying nothing has occurred that would have led him to exercise the authority Congress granted Bush to take the nation to war.

Even so, Kerry defended his vote in support of giving Bush that authority. He said Bush deceived the American public about the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Democratic Presidential Nominee Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., arrives at a campaign rally in Madison, Wis. Kerry returned to Wisconsin on Wednesday after a morning speech in Detroit.

The formulation altered in a politically significant way Kerry’s statement in August that he still would have voted to authorize the Iraq war even if he had known that weapons of mass destruction were not to be found. In contending that no circumstances justified actually going to war, the senator shifted the focus back on the president.

In the radio interview, Kerry vowed to take on his rival in other ways. “We are punching back. I am absolutely taking the gloves off,” Kerry said.