Bush Sounds 9/11 Refrain

President Bush, arriving in a city that has made heroes of firefighters for their bravery on Sept. 11, visited Wednesday with a group of firefighters who supported his candidacy.

Bush has been on the campaign trail while his party has been holding its national convention here. Shortly after landing in New York, the president headed to a community center in Queens, where he accepted the endorsement of the Uniformed Firefighters Assn. of Greater New York, a union representing about 8,600 firefighters.

The nation’s largest firefighters union has endorsed Bush’s Democratic opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

Bush is to address the Republican National Convention tonight as he accepts the GOP nomination for a second term.

The president’s visit with firefighters came after he attended a campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, where he recalled standing in the ruins of the World Trade Center three days after Sept. 11. “It’s a day I will never forget. There were workers in hard hats yelling at me at the top of their lungs, ‘Whatever it takes,’ ” he said.

“Since that day, I have a duty that has gone on,” Bush said. “I wake up every morning trying to figure out how best to protect our country. I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes.”

In speaking forcefully about prevailing over terrorists, Bush was emphasizing for a second consecutive day the importance of winning that war. He has thrown that goal into doubt by saying in a television interview that aired Monday that the war could not be won. Later, the president explained that he had meant to say the war would not be won in the conventional sense, one that ended with an official peace-treaty signing.

In Columbus, Bush was introduced by a hometown hero, golf legend Jack Nicklaus, who said he normally eschewed partisan politics but was endorsing Bush because he viewed the coming election as “the most important election this country has faced in decades.”

Employing golf slang, Nicklaus said with a smile that the president “doesn’t need mulligans ... and he’s got the scorecard to prove it.”

Before leaving the White House on Wednesday afternoon, Bush rehearsed his convention speech for about two hours. He plans to do so again this morning at his hotel, aides said.

Bush’s speech tonight will mark “an important moment at which the president will talk about what he has accomplished and where he wants to lead the country for the next four years,” said Karen Hughes, one of the president’s closest advisors.

She said Bush also would talk about “his plans to make the world a more hopeful and safer place,” adding: “The construct of the speech will be a safer world and a more hopeful world, and the transformational power of freedom.”

Also on Wednesday, Bush’s campaign filed a lawsuit in Washington seeking to force the Federal Election Commission to act on its complaints against independent groups that have spent tens of millions of dollars on ad campaigns this year.

In the lawsuit, campaign attorneys argued that the agency was taking too long to address what they called illegal spending of corporate, union and big individual donations to influence the presidential race. The campaign was pursuing a preliminary injunction that would force the FEC to act within 30 days on complaints that the campaign filed in March.

Independent groups seeking to oust Bush have spent more than $60 million on advertising, far outstripping organizations sympathetic to the president that have promised a late campaign drive to match their rivals. An anti-Kerry group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, has recently brought attention to such outside groups, which by law are banned from coordinating their activities with the campaigns.

If the court and the FEC both move quickly, the campaign could get action before election day and curtail the soft-money groups, said Tom Josefiak, general counsel for the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Associated Press was used in compiling this report.