Four years ago, George W. Bush vowed to be the education president, to reunite a country divided by partisanship and to sustain an economically prosperous America.

This newspaper endorsed him for president. We believed that after the Clinton years, a time in which economic prosperity and peace were tainted by personal frailties and failures, the country was ready for a change.

After the election, we thought Mr. Bush, without a clear mandate from voters for his policies, would move toward the middle, forming a more centrist government that reached out to the vast majority of Americans who do not see themselves on either edge of the political spectrum.

He did not. Instead he stayed to the right with both his policies and his appointments, especially with the appointment of John Ashcroft as his attorney general. A divided country remained so.

The tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, unified Americans behind their country and their president. We remember the images of President Bush standing with the rescue teams at Ground Zero promising to catch those responsible. He was truly presidential and we admired him. We Americans stood united with our president and with resolve that our nation and our values would prevail.

Virtually the entire civilized world mourned with us and supported our vow to hunt down Osama bin Laden and bring him and his colleagues to justice.

That was then. The situation we find ourselves in today is far from that unity, both in the nation and the world.

We cannot support Mr. Bush for re-election. We’re not going to go through a long list of issues and attempt to sort out the differences between the two candidates.

Instead we will concentrate on two major issues: tax cuts and the Iraq war.

We’re not enamored with tax cuts and the accompanying deficit spending as a way to stimulate the economy, unless they are tied to job creation, although we acknowledge that many disagree with our view. Where we especially fault President Bush is his failure to give up the break on taxes when it became evident that homeland security and the war on terror in Afghanistan would consume billions our government does not have. The American people would have supported that decision knowing that wars cost money and historically we have raised taxes to pay for them. The failure to do so mortgages our future and that of future generations.

Which brings us to Iraq. We supported the president’s decision to go to war, believing the administration knew with certainty that the Middle East region faced an imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction and perhaps even nuclear weapons. And that Iraq was linked to Al-Qaida. Neither turned out to be true.

No one outside the administration really knows whether our intelligence was totally wrong or whether advisers somewhere in the administration chose to focus on information that supported their desire to go to Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein.

But today we are embroiled in a war that has been stripped of its purpose and for which there is no clear path to a stable country or a popularly supported democratic government. Many of us fought in such a war 35 years ago, watching our friends die around us. There is no better reason for this war than for that one.

There are a lot of vicious dictators and practices we find abhorrent in countries throughout the world. We have neither the military ability nor the legitimate right to impose our will on all of those nations. The ultimate responsibility for the situation today rests with the president.

We think both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry are honorable men with love of country and respect for family. No one knows whether President Bush or Sen. Kerry would be the better leader in the world the next four years.

But we think once again the nation is ripe for change. We endorse John Kerry and his Seneca-native running mate, John Edwards.

In the 2000 general election, this publication endorsed George W. Bush for President.