Bush Advisers Blitz Radio Airwaves

Radio talk show hosts, left, wait in a tent for visits from White House officials to talk with, in a tent outside the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2006. Bush administration officials set up camp on the White House lawn for interviews with out-of-town radio talk show hosts, hoping to boost Republicans as elections near. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds) (Ron Edmonds - AP)

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's political top gun Karl Rove gushes with optimism about Election Day. National security adviser Stephen Hadley says the Iraqis need to do more to secure their nation _ and do it faster. Presidential confidant Dan Bartlett takes a few verbal punches at Democrats.

It was "Radio Day" at the White House, where more than 30 talk-show hosts were invited to set up shop in a heated white tent on the North Lawn to quiz senior administration officials. Beginning at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, the broadcasters chatted live about everything from Iraq to homeland security to the Nov. 7 elections.

Rove predicted the Republicans would retain control of Congress, discounting polls that show the Democrats threatening to take over.

"You heard it here first," Rove declared in his interview with Fox News Radio.

Nearby, Charlie Sykes with WTMJ in Milwaukee, Wis., told White House counselor Bartlett, "I think we're about a minute out."

Bartlett, sitting with earphones hugging his head, also predicted a Republican victory. He said that while the Democrats attack the president, they don't articulate a different direction for America.

"They have yet to make the case about what they are for, and that's why I think they're going to come up short in this election," he said.

Talk about Iraq was buzzing in the tent.

"We are going to adapt," Bartlett said. "We are going to have a dynamic approach to the situation on the ground, but we're not going to throw up our hands and say, 'It's unwinnable.'"

Hadley said Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the fledging government are starting to take steps to quell rising sectarian violence to help move Iraq toward prosperity and peace, but he added that they must do so more quickly.

"We're not making the progress we would like, and that's why we have to look at what we are doing and see what we need to change to get the kind of progress that we need," Hadley told Robert Siegel from National Public Radio.

"I think they've got to do more and they've got to do it faster, and I think if you talked to Prime Minister al-Maliki he would say, to you, the same thing."

Other officials who stopped by the tent or were interviewed at other spots at the White House included Vice President Dick Cheney, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and White House press secretary Tony Snow.