Bush makes final appeal to true believers

When George Bush surveyed the gym at Le Mars Community High School, he saw a room packed with John Deere salesmen, Boy Scout leaders, Legionnaires, homemakers, cheerleaders, even an Orkin man, still in uniform.

They pressed close, climbed on chairs, bleachers, parents’ shoulders -- anything to better see their president. They nodded when he described his wife as “just like the people you live next door to.” They booed at mentions of the Democratic Party and shouted down a protester with a whooping “USA! USA!”

This was a world of true believers, people who enthusiastically support the president even as most Americans, in public opinion polls, give him poor job reviews. In Bush’s final campaign swing before election day, he is visiting a series of Republican-leaning communities, like this one in northwest Iowa that hosted him on Friday.

His shirt sleeves are rolled up. He is confident, beaming. He accepts cowboy hats and football jerseys from his fans. He works the stage as if it were 2004 and his job were on the line.

And in a sense, it is.

With his plans for Iraq widely questioned and his immigration and Social Security proposals stalled, Bush’s ability to maneuver in the next two years -- and to define his place in history -- will be much harder if Congress falls into Democratic hands.

The rallies are one piece in the machinery Republicans have built to prevent that.

By visiting Republican regions in a six-day sprint that started Thursday, Bush is trying to excite voters who form the core of the party’s base, and to make sure they go to the polls Tuesday. The rallies are also designed to turn enthusiastic crowds into volunteers for a nationwide effort to bring more Republicans to the polls.

On Saturday, local GOP campaigns set up banks of cellphones at a rally Bush attended in Greeley, Colo., and recruited volunteers from the audience.

“Each volunteer committed to making 10 calls before they leave,” said state party spokesman Bryant Adams. “Then they return to the staging areas in the district and make more.”

Tickets to Bush’s rallies are distributed at GOP campaign headquarters, and recipients are asked to volunteer. Blocks of tickets are set aside for students at conservative colleges such as Evangel University and Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo.

After Bush visited Montana on Thursday on behalf of GOP Sen. Conrad Burns, the Burns campaign said it had gained enough new volunteers to contact 21,000 voters a day, up from 15,000. On Saturday, volunteers sifted through lists of Burns supporters, removing those who had requested absentee ballots so that they could better target the rest.

Today, Bush is to appear at a rally with Rep. Jim Ryun in Topeka, Kan., where campaign officials hope to recruit volunteers to reach 84,000 voters by phone and 72,000 in person by Tuesday.

Chad Becker, who is helping Republican Rep. Jim Nussle in his race to become Iowa governor, said at least 25% of those who picked up tickets for the Le Mars rally last week agreed to work with the campaign.

Heidi Boehme, 36, brought her family to the Iowa rally so that Bush could “light a fire under us to rally around, and get people out to vote.” She plans to talk to her conservative friends and make sure they cast ballots.

“There are people who think, ‘Ah, it’s just not a big election,’ ” said Boehme, a stay-at-home mother of two. But Bush, she said, “still has a few years to get things accomplished.”

In the gymnasiums and arenas that Bush is visiting, there is no talk of recent news that has challenged the president and his supporters -- no mention of the Army Times calling for the replacement of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, or of the scandal involving a male prostitute that prompted the resignation of the leader of the National Assn. of Evangelicals, the Rev. Ted Haggard.

But the Bush campaign tour, 2006 edition, looks a little different than those of years past.

Though supporters come by the thousands, the venues are sometimes smaller than in past years. Recently Bush headlined a rally at the Silver Creek High School gym in Sellersburg, Ind., instead of at the nearby convention center in Louisville, Ky., that he visited in 2002.

And although a visit from the president can dominate local news coverage, it competes with TV ads and other messages from an energized Democratic Party, as well as with other headlines.

After Bush appeared in Le Mars on behalf of Nussle’s neck-and-neck campaign, the nearby Sioux City Journal devoted virtually its entire Saturday front page to Bush’s visit. The page carried a banner headline and a large photo of the president receiving a jersey from local high school football players.

But the page also had a prominent column headlined: “Mother of soldier wanted to ask about Iraq deadline.” It described a local woman’s anxiety over her son’s enlistment in the Army, and what she would have asked Bush if given the chance.

Across the state in Davenport, where Republicans have long feared that Nussle’s congressional seat will slip into Democratic hands, a story on Bush’s Le Mars visit claimed a bottom corner of the front page of the Quad-City Times -- below an article on antiwar referendums on ballots in neighboring Illinois.

There was more bad news for Bush on the page. A story on the sex accusations facing Haggard, the evangelical pastor, was headlined: “Resigned reverend has close White House ties.”

But Bush appears to be enjoying himself at the rallies. In Billings, Mont., on Thursday, someone behind the podium handed him a cowboy hat. He said he was glad to be “in a part of the world where the cowboy hats outnumber the ties.”

In Joplin, Missouri -- which he was careful to pronounce “Miz-er-uh” -- he paused as those on one side of the room chanted “George W. Bush” and the other side chanted “Welcome to Missouri.”

Bush tries to channel the energy toward his election goals. His parting words at the Saturday rally in Colorado were: “Go from this hall and turn out the vote.”

molly.hennessy-fiske@

latimes.com