Campaigner in Chief Has Limited Reach

Later this week he will be in Montana, where Sen. Conrad Burns (R) has been in an uphill battle all year, and in Nevada, where Republican candidates for governor and the House are running into problems. He will touch down in rural Missouri and western Iowa, where Republican voters are plentiful but less motivated than needed to push Senate and gubernatorial candidates to victory.

But as if to underscore his more limited reach this fall, it was first lady Laura Bush who showed up in Connecticut on Monday to campaign for Rep. Nancy L. Johnson (R), one of three vulnerable GOP incumbents in the state. And it was Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) who was there Saturday to campaign for the other two, Reps. Rob Simmons and Christopher Shays.

Opposition to the war has forced Bush to avoid campaigning in these final days in many of the most competitive suburban districts this fall, said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "Everywhere he goes, there's this banner above his head -- 'Failed Iraq Policy' -- in these suburban districts," he said.

Republican candidates have welcomed the president in their districts to help raise money for their campaigns, but they have run from him in their television ads. According to officials at the Republican House and Senate campaign committees, just one GOP candidate is using the president in a television commercial, LaVar Christensen in Utah's 2nd District.

Christensen has been running an ad that shows a photograph of him with the president. But the ad never mentions the president. Instead, it opens with a photo of former president Ronald Reagan, with Christensen describing himself as a "conservative, Ronald Reagan Republican."

That hardly means Bush has been absent from television screens this fall. Democrats by the dozens have featured him in their ads, trying to tie their opponents to the president and his policies. Bill Burton, a DCCC spokesman, said that, as of the beginning of this week, Democratic candidates and the DCCC have run more than 90 ads in 34 districts featuring the president and the Democrats' opponent.

In Pennsylvania's 8th District, the DCCC attacked Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick for standing with Bush on stem cell research. In Colorado's 7th District, a party-sponsored ad shows footage of Republican candidate Rick O'Donnell coming off Air Force One with the president and ends with the announcer saying: "Rick O'Donnell. Radical ideas and another vote for George Bush's agenda."

In New Mexico's 1st District, Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R) comes under attack for "standing with Bush . . . echoing Bush . . . voting with Bush on Iraq." The tagline at the end reads: "Heather Wilson and George Bush. Nothing will change."

Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) came under attack in another ad for working with Bush to pass the prescription drug bill, which Democrats have criticized as a windfall for drug companies. "The drug companies shaped the law," the ad claims. "George Bush backed it, and Clay Shaw helped write it and ram it through."

To save his congressional seat -- in one of the more bizarre twists in this campaign -- Shaw has turned to another president to inoculate himself against attacks that he has marched in lockstep with Bush. Last week he ran a radio ad touting his cooperation with former president Bill Clinton, who was on his way to the state to raise money for Shaw's opponent, Democrat Ron Klein.

"The greatest moments of the Clinton years came when Democrats and Republicans worked together," the ad said. "Like welfare reform. . . . Signed by Bill Clinton and written by our congressman, Clay Shaw."

The ad went on to cite Shaw's work with Clinton to repeal the earnings tax on Social Security and the bill to restore the Everglades. "More than almost anyone else in Congress, Clay Shaw solves problems across party lines," the ad concludes. "So as Palm Beach County welcomes Bill Clinton to town, let's say 'thank you' to Clay Shaw. He's independent and effective."

With his approval rating just below 40 percent, Bush approaches Election Day less popular than all but two presidents in the post-World War II era. Only Harry S. Truman in 1946 and Richard M. Nixon, who had resigned three months before the 1974 midterms, were lower. Even presidents going into midterm elections with higher approval ratings than Bush's -- Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, Ronald Reagan in 1982 and Bill Clinton in 1994 -- have seen their parties suffer major losses.

The best any president has done with an approval rating below 50 percent was in 1978, when Jimmy Carter was at 49 percent. That year, Republicans picked up 15 House seats, exactly the number Democrats need this year to take control of that chamber.

Bush is less unpopular in states whose Senate races are likely to determine whether Republicans retain their majority. With most voters likely to vote Republican or Democratic based on their perceptions of his performance, those differences are enough to affect the outcome of those close races. That has prompted the president to put Missouri on his campaign schedule for Friday.

Bush also will return to Iowa on Friday. David Roederer, who was Bush's Iowa chairman in 2004, said Republicans wanted the president to add a late stop in heavily Republican western Iowa to help Rep. Jim Nussle (R), a gubernatorial candidate who is trailing Democratic Secretary of State Chet Culver -- in part because he is losing in his own congressional district in eastern Iowa.

"We need to have a good turnout in the west," Roederer said.

In past campaigns, Bush's late visits to Iowa have concentrated on the state's eastern battlegrounds. In 2002 he helped save several vulnerable House seats in eastern Iowa, and two years ago his efforts there helped turn Iowa, a blue state in 2000, to red. This year, Nussle's House district could fall to the Democrats. That Bush will campaign in safe Republican territory, rather than in a competitive House district, is one more indicator of the toll that six years and an unpopular war have taken on his presidency.