Time: Raising the Volume [View All]

[kskiska]

President Bush was feeling back in the game as Air Force One headed to Cleveland last week. Just that morning, aides had put the final polish on a new speech, in which Bush would make his first full run at what his team calls the economic-isolationist policies of John Kerry. After months of being pounded by the Democratic candidates, "the President was really fired up," says Representative Steven LaTourette of Ohio, who joined Bush for a private pizza lunch in his airborne office. Once considered solidly Republican, Ohio is now up for grabs in the presidential election, thanks to its having lost more than 250,000 jobs in the past three years. But Bush had dived into his internal Ohio polls, and he reassured LaTourette that the water was fine. "My numbers are great," Bush told the Congressman. "I'm going to connect with those people. I do care about them and their situation." To top it all off, Bush had a surprise in store. That afternoon he would finally nominate someone to fill the new job of manufacturing czar, which he had announced in another Ohio speech six months before.

What the President didn't know was that at that moment, Kerry's campaign was planning a surprise of its own. Tipped off by Democrats on Capitol Hill that the appointment was in the works, Kerry's staff had quickly done a LexisNexis search on the proposed nominee, Anthony Raimondo, and discovered that the Nebraska manufacturing executive laid off 75 U.S. workers in 2002 while building a $3 million factory in Beijing. That might make it awkward for him to champion keeping jobs at home. Two hours before the Commerce Department was scheduled to announce Raimondo's nomination last week, the Kerry campaign did it for them. A day later, Raimondo had withdrawn his name from consideration, and Team Kerry was chortling about how difficult it had been for the White House to create even one new job. Sighed an Administration official: "It's clear these guys are pros and they know what they are doing."

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Many Bush allies are trying to push up the return of the President's longtime aide Karen Hughes from her semi-retirement in Austin, Texas, to restore the balance in Bush's world between Rove's political instincts, which lean toward tending the party's base, and her more "Mom-in-the-kitchen sense of the country," as an adviser described it. "There is a necessary push-pull between the two of them that can't happen on the phone," says a Bush official. Another puts it more darkly: "The longer they wait for her to get back, the less it will matter." On the other hand, Hughes has already been intimately involved in many of Bush's most controversial moves. She helped craft the poorly received State of the Union address, then closely advised on the much criticized campaign ads that used images of 9/11. As the Bush team sorts out its internal mechanics, it will press the advantage of incumbency. Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.

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http://www.time.com/time/election2004/article/0,18471,600858-1,00.html