BANGOR – Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell on Thursday panned the Bush administration’s foreign policy initiatives – particularly its handling of the Iraq war – as fundamentally flawed and in large part responsible for a rift between America and many of its allies.

“American power is now at its zenith, the greatest in all of human history, but American prestige is at [its] lowest,” Mitchell said during a Bangor campaign stop for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. “That is the direct result of a foreign policy that has alienated allies and former adversaries alike.”

Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader now considered among the country’s top foreign diplomats, made the comments during a Veterans for Kerry event at Davenport Park, the site of the USS Maine memorial.

The Mitchell visit comes in the midst of what polls say remains a close race for the White House, most recently demonstrated by a George Washington University Battleground 2004 poll released Thursday.

The survey of 1,000 likely voters shows Kerry with a slight edge over Bush, 49 percent to 47 percent. The poll has a 3 percent margin of error.

During the past two weeks, much of the presidential campaign has focused on a recent advertising campaign accusing Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, of inflating his wartime accomplishments and injuries.

At the Bangor event, Mitchell, himself a former counterintelligence Army officer, called upon the president to specifically disavow the ads, which were produced by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

“There is no other way to describe it other than to say they are lies,” Mitchell said of the ads, claims in which have been disputed by Kerry’s crew mates and by official military records. “It’s the oldest political dirty trick in the book: If you repeat a lie often enough someone will believe it.”

The Bush campaign had maintained it had no ties to the ads, but a campaign lawyer recently resigned after admitting he had advised the group.

The Kerry camp has seized on the apparent connections and has sought to keep the story alive in hopes of reversing the damage done by the ad, which ran in the battleground states of Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia.

President Bush, for his part, has condemned all ads from so-called 527 groups, named after the section of the tax code that gives them tax-exempt status.

“President Bush stands with all Americans who want to see shadowy political activity removed from American politics,” Bush’s national campaign chairman, Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, said in a statement this week. “We call on John Kerry to join us in condemning all political activity by 527 groups.”

During Mitchell’s speech, about a dozen Bush supporters stood quietly as Mitchell outlined Kerry’s plan to modernize the military and rebuild international alliances.

Holding his Bush-Cheney sign, James Smith, a 28-year-old former Marine who was stationed in Iraq, said he trusted the current commander-in-chief to continue his support for the troops. He said Bush, unlike Kerry, had the resolve to see the Iraq conflict to its conclusion.

“He’s not going to leave us high and dry,” Smith said as his three daughters ran around Davenport Park. “That’s unlike [Kerry] who voted for the war but not the funding. I think that says a lot about John Kerry.”

Kerry did vote to authorize the war and ultimately voted against an additional $87 billion to help finance it. Kerry instead supported an amended bill that would have financed the added war costs by repealing some of the Bush tax cuts.