Desperate Times

With just a week left before mid-term elections that could effectively reduce him to a lame duck, President Bush is waging a fear-and-smear campaign against Democrats.

Bush's political rallies are carefully constructed artifacts. The White House meticulously controls access, manipulates imagery and selects locales where the Republican candidates are actually happy to see the deeply unpopular president.

But Bush and his aides know that his red-meat rhetoric will fire up his base. And they are appropriately confident that the press coverage will faithfully convey his message -- without too much context or fact-checking.

Here are the transcripts from Bush's rallies yesterday in Statesboro, Ga. , and Sugar Land, Tex .

Michael Abramowitz writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush said terrorists will win if Democrats win and impose their policies on Iraq, as he and Vice President Cheney escalated their rhetoric Monday in an effort to turn out Republican voters in next week's midterm elections. . . .

"Faced with potential GOP defeat in both chambers, Bush and Cheney aimed to avert that by convincing voters that they cannot risk giving the opposition party any power in Washington.

"'However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses,' Bush told a raucous crowd of about 5,000 GOP partisans packed in an arena at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, one of his stops Monday. 'That's what's at stake in this election. The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq.' . . .

"The increasingly combative tone from the White House signaled a coordinated GOP effort to use every channel to remind conservatives why they should turn out to vote, despite what many say is their disenchantment with the Mark Foley page scandal, anger over escalating federal spending and anxiety over the course of the Iraq war."

Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times that Bush is holding rallies in places where he is greeted "like a man whose public approval ratings are 73 percent, not 37 percent."

Yesterday's "back-to-back rallies created just the image White House strategists are seeking for the president in the waning days of the campaign: that of a confident leader, surrounded by adoring supporters.

"The intent is to fire up the party faithful and push them to the polls, but at times it seemed as if Mr. Bush was the one being fired up."

Todd J. Gillman writes in the Dallas Morning News: "If someone had bet a year ago that the president, eight days before Election Day, would devote half a day to rallying Republicans in a House district held for two decades by Tom DeLay, the best minds in both parties might have scoffed.