Bush Campaign

WASHINGTON -- In the first high-level departure of Texas Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign, press spokesman David C. Beckwith has been pushed out.Beckwith left abruptly, after publicity problems that included publication of a magazine article questioning Bush's intelligence.The article, in the current U.S. News and World Report, runs under the headline "Is it wrong to call him George Dumbya Bush?" and called it "revealing that the Bush campaign does not make any great claims as to Bush's intellect."

WASHINGTON -- President Bush launched an effort yesterday to preserve new spying powers for U.S. intelligence agencies that critics worry could ensnare unwitting American citizens. Bush said restrictions being considered by Congress would leave the country less prepared to combat terrorism. During a visit to the National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, the president said that workers who collect and interpret communications need provisions contained in the Protect America Act, adopted last month, to do their jobs.

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State James A. Baker III's expected move to the White House, designed to salvage President Bush's re-election prospects, will also have a strong impact on how foreign policy is managed, even though the actual policies won't change.Mr. Baker, the president's closest friend, political partner for the last 15 years and 1988 campaign manager, is to resign from his Cabinet post in mid-August, shortly after a scheduled visit to the United States by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the New York Times reported last night.

WARREN, MICH. -- President Bush and his predecessor, Bill Clinton, campaigned for congressional candidates across the nation's Rust Belt yesterday, speaking on issues that could spell the difference in determining control of the House and the Senate in the midterm election. At fundraising receptions in Iowa and Michigan, Bush returned to "family values," denouncing a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that same-sex couples are guaranteed the rights and benefits of marriage. Clinton, speaking at a rally for Democratic congressional and state legislative candidates in Syracuse, N.Y., responded to Bush's recent characterization of the Democrats as "the party of cut and run" in Iraq.

We are a nation of sports nuts. Which means we are fickle, impatient, demanding, in need of instant gratification. And it shows in our politics.As sports fans, we demand that the manager or coach be fired when our favorite team fails to give us vicarious pleasure. We don't care if he has a mortgage, a wife, kiddies and a feeble mother. Or that only a year or two ago, when the team was winning, we were hailing him as a genius and a great leader of men. Give him the pink slip, we shout.When our pitcher is befuddling the enemy and our slugger is putting balls into orbit, we cheer and shriek and weep with joy and hold civic parades.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush campaign may have played a hidden role in producing the devastating "Willie Horton" ads that helped defeat Michael S. Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election, recently released Federal Election Commission files suggest.Democratic Party officials late Friday filed suit in U.S. District Court here demanding that the FEC reopen an investigation into the matter.The TV ad campaign, perhaps the most enduring image of the 1988 election, used the story -- Willie Horton, a black inmate, fled while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison and later raped a white Maryland woman -- to attack a furlough program during Mr. Dukakis' term as governor of Massachusetts.

WASHINGTON -- Call it a pre-emptive strike by George W. Bush against his enemies-in-waiting on the Internet.Burned once by a Web site address that fell into the wrong hands, the Bush campaign has been snapping up real estate on the World Wide Web -- some with off-color addresses -- before the Texas governor's political opponents can get to it first.From the benign GovGeorgeWBush.com to the vulgar BushBites.net, campaign strategist Karl Rove has been buying addresses at $75 a pop, hoping to head off another wicked parody page such as the one at GWBush.

BLUE BELL, Pa. - With the presidential candidates fighting for every last vote in the final weeks, the Bush campaign is now turning to its most lethal weapon: the mother. Barbara Bush is taking no prisoners, hitting the campaign trail for her son Gov. George W. Bush with a pugnacious starring role in the "W is for Women" tour that began this week. With her New England flint sharpened and her white bouffant hairdo firmly in place, she is on a mission to convince female voters that her son is their man. "I know about our son, what he's accomplished, what he believes in, what kind of person he is and what kind of president he'll be," the former first lady told a pompom-waving rally here.

AUSTIN, Texas - Officials with the Bush campaign said yesterday that they did not believe that an employee of the campaign's advertising firm, who has drawn the attention of FBI investigators, was involved in sending confidential debate-preparation materials to the Gore campaign. The Bush campaign officials' defense of Yvette Lozano, an administrative assistant at the firm, Maverick Media, came as law enforcement officials said that the bureau's investigation had broadened in the past several days and that investigators were expanding the number of people at whom they were taking a close look.

WASHINGTON - Sen. John Kerry announced yesterday that his presidential campaign has collected more than $100 million in the past three months, hitting its goal more than a month early and out-raising President Bush each month since the Massachusetts Democrat clinched his party's nomination March 2. With six weeks to go until the Democratic National Convention, Kerry's campaign asserted yesterday that he has done better than the president in collecting Internet...

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Don Sherwood shouldn't have needed President Bush's help in his re-election campaign. Sen. George Allen shouldn't have, either. But there was Bush yesterday, first in the small town of La Plume, Pa., and then in Richmond, Va., raising money and rousing the faithful - each appearance illustrating the difficulties Republicans are facing as they seek to hold on to what have in the past been safe seats. Sherwood won 92 percent of the vote in his northeastern Pennsylvania district two years ago, just as he did two years before that, each time with no Democratic opposition.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Opening a new phase in his campaigning for the midterm elections, President Bush delivered a tough attack yesterday on the Democratic Party's policy on taxes. At two political fundraisers in Florida, Bush sought to distinguish Republicans from Democrats on a core issue that political operatives believe can be counted on to motivate GOP voters. "There's a fundamental difference in this campaign and campaigns all across the country about who best to spend your money. We believe that the best people to spend your money is you," the president said at an appearance in Tampa, citing tax cuts passed by the Republican-led Congress since 2001.

WASHINGTON - President Bush, laying out his domestic priorities in the days leading up to his State of the Union address, visited the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda yesterday to promote his plan to control health care costs. Telling an invitation-only audience that putting the federal government in charge of health care would be "bad medicine for the American people," Bush argued for private solutions instead. He pushed his proposals - including widening the use of inexpensive, high-deductible private insurance plans for individuals - with the help of a panel of like-minded citizens from around the country, put on stage by the White House to give testimonials to his program.

WASHINGTON - President Bush is jetting to the Midwest today while Republican interest groups in Washington are raking in advertising money. It may seem like it's still election season. In fact, Bush and his allies are waging a new campaign to amass support for a second-term agenda that includes revamping Social Security, rewriting medical malpractice and immigration laws, and overhauling the nation's tax code. If history is a guide, the president's toughest opponent is time. He probably has a narrow window in which to capitalize on post-election momentum and push ideas through Congress before he is regarded as a lame duck.

The Bush administration dug in its heels yesterday against importation of prescription drugs from Canada and other countries, questioning the savings and safety of such purchases. Confronting the growing public and bipartisan popularity of such imports, the administration - which prior to last month's election suggested it could embrace importation - reverted to its earlier opposition and warned that legalization would hinder the development of new medicines. In response, supporters of drug importation accused the administration of taking a "one-sided" approach that favors the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.

WASHINGTON - President Bush tapped his 2004 campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, yesterday to head the Republican National Committee. Mehlman, 38, a Pikesville native, would take over the chairmanship from Ed Gillespie, who is returning to his private lobbying firm. The committee is expected to officially ratify the president's nomination at its winter meeting in January. Mehlman, the chief tactician of Bush's re-election effort, is credited along with White House strategist Karl Rove with bringing out Bush supporters in large numbers on Election Day. In an interview yesterday, he said he is looking forward to traveling around the country as chairman and "seeing the goodwill of so many party supporters."

WASHINGTON -- Among those who make their living by running political campaigns, there has to be great admiration these days for the way Gov. George W. Bush handled two burgeoning controversies about his money. He simply reversed himself before his critics could build an audience for their complaints.Thus, the Texas governor and his strategists demonstrated that they know the value of prompt action in defusing a touchy situation. This may be Mr. Bush's first run for president, but he didn't just fall off the turnip truck.

WASHINGTON -- As President Bush keeps dropping in the polls, the negative tactics that the Bush campaign used successfully against Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988 are being trotted out again.That is so despite the president's saying he wants no part of campaign "sleaze." He says he has so ordered all his associates -- as if he didn't dish it out himself in 1988 in playing on racial fears with the Willie Horton prison furlough story and painting Dukakis as less than patriotic.Bush's chief campaign aides, too, insist they have no intention of going after Bill Clinton personally, and specifically not on the charges first raised in the primaries of womanizing and draft-dodging.

11 days until Election Day, Tuesday Nov. 2 HERSHEY, Pa. - The portrait of Sen. John Kerry that President Bush sketches in stump speeches could not be less flattering: Kerry is an aloof man, who says the Sept. 11 attacks didn't change him. He lacks moral clarity, saying he voted to support U.S. troops before deciding not to support them. And he shifts with political winds, saying he is a liberal who promotes conservative values. The picture reflects the Bush camp's strategy of turning the campaign's final days into a personality contest - in essence, a referendum on the challenger.

BOSTON - Now that her 15 minutes of fame are over, may I tip my hat to Linda Grabel? It isn't easy to give the president of the United States a pop quiz. But at the second debate, the 63-year-old legal secretary asked: "Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision and what you did to correct it." By now it's well known that the president couldn't come up with a single mistake except, shucks, maybe an appointment or two. The question, as he restated it, was, "Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?"