Bush Supporters Rally Deep in the Heart of Florida

At a rally marking the kickoff of his reelection campaign, President Bush on Saturday unleashed a blistering attack on John F. Kerry’s domestic and foreign policy positions while portraying himself as a decisive leader who would keep America safe during troubled times.

Returning to the heart of the state that delivered him the White House in the disputed 2000 election, Bush was greeted by a crowd of some 10,000 supporters at the Orange County Convention Center here.

Clearly energized, the president responded by delivering his fiercest and most sustained assault yet against the Massachusetts senator, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Bush suggested that Kerry would make a weak commander in chief under whose leadership the world would “drift toward tragedy.”

“This will not happen on my watch,” Bush said.

The president characterized Kerry as “one of the main opponents of tax relief” in Congress, saying he once supported a gasoline tax hike of 50 cents a gallon.

“He’s going to tax all of you,” Bush warned, as a chorus of boos reverberated in the convention center. “Fortunately, you’re not going to give him that chance.”

While Kerry spent the day skiing in Idaho, his campaign responded with a statement attacking Bush’s record on the economy.

“Today George Bush proved to the American people that he is incapable of solving our economic problems, for the simple reason that he doesn’t even see them,” Kerry said in the statement. “In his first official campaign event outside of the Oval Office, the president refused to acknowledge the more than 3 million jobs lost on his watch or the impact of his failed policies on the middle class.”

The noon rally here marked a new phase in Bush’s reelection bid. He has traveled the country since June to raise money for his campaign, and will continue doing so. But now Bush also will begin attending rallies designed to energize his supporters.

After Bush spoke, legions of his backers began staffing telephone banks while others boarded buses and vans to canvass neighborhoods in this heart of the so-called I-4 corridor, a battleground within Florida that is rich with independent and swing voters.

Four years ago, Bush became the first Republican presidential candidate since World War II to lose Orange County, the epicenter of the I-4 corridor. It is named for the interstate highway that links Daytona Beach on Florida’s Atlantic Coast to Tampa Bay on the Gulf of Mexico.

The president vowed to campaign vigorously and often in Florida. “We’re going to be spending some quality time in this state,” he said. Saturday marked Bush’s 20th visit to the Sunshine State as president.

His appearance here capped a weeklong focus on the anniversary of the Iraq war -- an effort by the White House and the Bush campaign to recapture the debate after enduring weeks of partisan attack during the Democratic primaries.

“The White House and the Bush campaign have been like a car in which no one was at the wheel -- for about two months,” said Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist.

Now Bush is “trying to jump back into the campaign and seize control of the steering wheel and bring the debate back to the terrain he is strongest on: national defense, security and the war on terrorism,” Jacobs said. “What Bush is trying to do is bring back the equation: The war in Iraq equals safety in America.”

The Bush organization stage-crafted the rally with care, creating a made-for-television picture intended to resemble a political convention, complete with adoring supporters waving flags and placards.

High above the president hung a giant sign that read: “America: Safer. Stronger. Better.” Three huge U.S. flags were mounted on one side of the convention hall so that news cameras would capture Bush’s profile silhouetted against the flags. Behind Bush -- whose support is decidedly weaker among women than men -- six women, including First Lady Laura Bush -- sat in the first row.

When he burst onstage, Bush flashed “W” with three fingers -- a signature gesture from his 2000 campaign. (W stands for Walker, the president’s middle name.)

The Democrats also are targeting Florida’s I-4 corridor, and think Bush may be vulnerable here. While the state has gained more than 200,000 jobs since 2000, this battleground region, where many voters are employed by the recession-sensitive tourism industry, has not fared as well.

According to Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), Orange County’s unemployment rate has risen from 2.5% when Bush took office to 4.4% today, representing a loss of more than 40,000 jobs.

But Republican Mel Martinez, who resigned last year as the president’s housing secretary to run for the Senate seat that Graham is vacating, said he was not worried.

In an interview, Martinez said that the popularity of Florida’s Republican governor, Jeb Bush, the president’s younger brother, was likely to help the president on Nov. 2.

One reason that Democrat Al Gore carried Orange County, Martinez said, was a higher turnout among Democrats than Republicans. Hence Saturday’s rally to energize the GOP faithful, he said.

“No doubt the lesson of 2000 has been learned,” Martinez said.

Florida, which Bush won four years ago by 537 votes after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the controversial 36-day recount, has 27 electoral votes.

In his remarks, Bush mockingly recalled Kerry’s words in describing his position on a spending bill to help fund the war.

“Here is what he said: ‘I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.’ End of quote,” Bush said. “His answers aren’t always clear. But the voters will have a very clear choice in this campaign.”

“My opponent says he approves of bold action in the world, but only if other countries don’t object,” Bush said. “Yet America must never outsource America’s national security decisions to the leaders of other countries.... I will defend the security of America, whatever it takes.”

As the Bush and Kerry campaigns accused each other Saturday of misleading Americans on taxes, Kerry himself stayed above the fray -- on the ski slopes near Ketchum, Idaho.

Kerry spent much of the day on the runs at Warm Springs, schussing down a couple of difficult “black diamond” slopes. At about 2:30 p.m., he headed back to the lodge and briefly discussed swapping his skis for a snowboard and heading back up to take advantage of 60-degree temperatures and blue skies.

“It’s so great, I’m tempted,” he said, but instead he headed home for a quiet evening with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Kerry did not comment on the back-and-forth statements between his campaign and Bush’s -- though one of the statements was sent to reporters as a quote from Kerry even as he was lunching at a lodge at the top of the mountain. Instead, Kerry took photos with well-wishers, chatted about the weather and was applauded by fellow skiers as he passed the lodge on his way home.

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Times staff writer Eric Slater in Ketchum, Idaho, contributed to this report.