WASHINGTON – Democrats should welcome more pro-life candidates into their party and embrace the language of “life” used by opponents of abortion, said the defeated Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Kerry.

Mr. Kerry yesterday praised a recent speech by Senator Clinton in which she described abortion as “tragic” and called for people on both sides of the abortion debate to find “common ground.”

“Many of us have talked about this for a long period of time,” Mr. Kerry said, adding that traditionally conservative themes of adoption and abstinence “are worth talking about.”

Both Mr. Kerry and Mrs. Clinton are considered to be potential Democratic presidential hopefuls in 2008, though neither has declared a desire to run. Their comments come as the party grapples with the perception that it lost support among voters who say they care about moral values.

Noting that the minority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, opposes abortion, Mr. Kerry said Democrats should not exclude pro-life candidates.

“You can’t be doctrinarian negative against somebody simply because they have that position,” Mr. Kerry said in a lengthy interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Mrs. Clinton’s speech last week to a group of pro-abortion rights advocates in Albany raised concern among some pro-choice and family planning groups that she was softening her pro-choice position – a suggestion the senator has denied.

Opponents of abortion appear to continue to view Mrs. Clinton as a staunch supporter of abortion rights. Two Catholic groups recently pulled their sponsorship of an event at a Catholic college in Buffalo after learning that Mrs. Clinton would be speaking. The groups cited the senator’s support for abortion rights as the reason, the Buffalo News reported.

Mr. Kerry, a Catholic, said he is personally opposed to abortion, but he said the party need not change its position defending the right to abortion. “I don’t believe that I have a right to take what is an article of faith to me and legislate it to other people,” he said.

Nonetheless, he said Democrats should learn to speak the language of “life,” made popular by the opponents of abortion, euthanasia, and the use of human stem cells for medical research.

“The discussion is not about being pro-abortion. The discussion is about how you truly value life. Valuing life is also valuing choice. Valuing life is the exception for the life of a mother or rape or incest,” he said.

The Massachusetts senator said he favors laws that would require parents to be notified if their teenage daughter sought an abortion, a position that differs from Mrs. Clinton’s.

Mr. Kerry also said there were fewer abortions under the Clinton administration than in recent years because the Democrats offered more family planning and counseling. He added that he would not confirm any judge to the Supreme Court who was in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade, and he said he made a mistake in voting to confirm Justice Scalia to the Supreme Court in 1986. Mr. Kerry said would oppose the judge’s elevation to replace Chief Justice Rehnquist, should he be nominated.

He called the judge “ideologically rigid and so far to the right and unwilling to find the kind of common consensus.”

Turning to Democratic politics, Mr. Kerry said he did not believe that a former Vermont governor and presidential hopeful, Howard Dean, is too liberal to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee, calling him “conservative on a lot of issues” and noting that he balanced the state budget while in office.

With respect to his own electoral defeat, Mr. Kerry said he accepted responsibility and admitted that he “could have and should have responded faster and more forcefully” to attacks on his military record.

Mr. Kerry admitted he had provided a “jumbled” version of events when he claimed that he had been in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968 while President Nixon told the nation that American troops were not in Cambodia.

Despite once stating that the night was “seared” in his memory, Mr. Kerry conceded the charge of his critics that he was not in Cambodia on that day.

Mr. Kerry said that on Christmas Eve, he was on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border and that President Nixon was not president at the time, but president-elect. Nonetheless, he said that on a different occasion, he did venture five miles into Cambodia with a group of what he said were CIA special operations agents.

He appealed to the agents involved to “come out of the woodwork and say, ‘I’m the guy who went up with John Kerry. We delivered weapons to the Khmer Rouge on the coastline of Cambodia.'”

A key contributor to the effort to defeat the president, billionaire philanthropist George Soros, yesterday blamed Mr. Kerry for Mr. Bush’s re-election.

“Kerry did not, actually, offer a credible and coherent alternative,” said Mr. Soros, 74, who spent $26 million on anti-Bush advertising and organizing.

“That had a lot to do with Bush being re-elected,” Mr. Soros said in an interview with the Bloomberg news agency at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The Kerry campaign “tried to emphasize his role as a Vietnam War hero and downplay his role as an anti-Vietnam War hero, which he was,” said Mr. Soros, according to Bloomberg. “Had he admitted, owned up to it, I think actually the outcome could have been different.”

Mr. Kerry attributed his defeat to a better organized opponent who benefited from incumbency in the middle of a war.

While he said the Bush administration’s policies left America less safe since the attacks of September 11, 2001, Mr. Kerry disagreed with Senator Kennedy’s call for a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, saying the troops must remain until Iraqis can provide their own security and stability.

However, Mr. Kerry said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the new Iraqi government soon asked troops to leave, or even if the Bush administration privately asked the Iraqi government to ask American troops to leave.

Mr. Kerry also warned the Bush administration not to “over-hype” the election, which he called merely a “demarcation point,” for further efforts at “legitimate political reconciliation.

He said that while the voting was important, it has only “a kind of legitimacy.”

“I mean, it’s hard to say that something is legitimate when a whole portion of the country can’t vote and doesn’t vote,” Mr. Kerry said.

The Massachusetts senator accused Mr. Bush of “hyping a phony crisis” in the Social Security system, and retracted his own past suggestions that Congress consider raising the retirement age or increasing taxes to pay for the projected shortfall in the system.

“Precisely what I said in 1996 is: ‘We should consider a number of these things,'” he said. “We did consider them. I considered them. Others did. I rejected them.”