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Bush Takes Campaign to Michigan, Ohio

Posted on: Monday, 3 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

WASHINGTON - Election Day is six months off, but President Bush is campaigning with the urgency of a politician in the home stretch, barnstorming across the battlegrounds of Michigan and Ohio by bus Monday and Tuesday.

Bush heads a convoy of about eight buses - red, white and mostly blue - trolling a voter-rich triangle along Michigan's southern flank Monday. The buses are emblazoned with the words "Yes, America Can" - a slogan meant to project optimism to a region demoralized by the disappearance of millions of manufacturing jobs.

Accompanied by his wife, Laura, Bush begins his day at a town-hall session in Niles, in Michigan's southwest corner; cuts north to Kalamazoo for a speech; then rolls east to the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights for an evening rally.

Bus tours are a staple of political campaigns, but they usually come late in the game.

Bush campaigned in battleground states including Ohio by bus in July 2000 and in Florida that October. This year he is climbing aboard months earlier, ushering in an intense new phase in his struggle against Democratic challenger John Kerry.

The bus tour is a way to capture the attention of millions of people, said John Kelly, a former Democratic state senator in Michigan who teaches political science part-time at the University of Windsor in neighboring Ontario, Canada. Kerry toured four battleground states, including Michigan and Ohio, by bus last week.

Many of the communities Bush will pass through are suburbs where voters have not developed strong party affiliations, Kelly said.

In a state hard-hit by industrial-sector losses, he said, "it doesn't appear (Bush is) in as good a shape as he should be in terms of working people."

To wring the most exposure possible out of the trip, Bush will conduct three round-table interviews with Michigan and Ohio journalists over two days.

Bush lost both the primary and general election in Michigan in 2000, and is determined not to allow a repeat. Monday marks his 13th visit to the state as president.

Yet voters remain about equally split in their preference for Bush or Kerry. In a Michigan poll last month, 47 percent said they favored Kerry, while 45 percent preferred the president, with 8 percent undecided.

Tuesday, Stage Two of Bush's bus tour runs north-to-south down through Ohio. It starts in the Toledo suburb of Maumee and ends in Cincinnati - the same city where he finished up his five-state bus tour in July 2000.

It marks Bush's 16th visit to Ohio, a state no Republican has won the White House without carrying and that have polls indicating a fairly even split between him and Kerry.

The Ohio format follows Michigan's: town-hall meeting, speech, rally. Bush throws in a pancake breakfast Tuesday.

The town-hall appearances are not exactly free-ranging sessions with a cross-section of voters. Instead, they will permit people who have benefited from the president's tax-cut policies to ask him questions.

Bush's re-election campaign is paying for the bus rental, campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

On Friday, the president embarks on a similar bus tour through Iowa and Wisconsin, two other fiercely competitive states that he lost by a combined 11,000 votes in 2000.

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