Bush National Tour Resembles Campaign Trail

President Bush spoke Thursday at the opening of a new Coast Guard station and graced the dedication of a treatment center for Alzheimer’s disease, closing off a trip that already had him planting a tree at a ceremonial anniversary in North Dakota and kissing babies at a Latino rally in Los Angeles.

“It feels like we’re back on the campaign trail,” Bush told his friend, Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), halfway through the trip.

The logistics are a little shaggier, the speeches somewhat less practiced and the band now plays “Hail to the Chief” when Bush appears on stage. But otherwise, Bush’s tour of the country this week has been largely indistinguishable from his campaign swings last fall.

White House planners set up the trip to hit four of the nation’s biggest vote prizes--the states of Illinois, California, Texas and Florida. And they loaded Bush’s schedule with events that would generate good coverage in local media, often making their priorities clear by leaving the traveling national press corps little or no time to file stories on Bush’s actions.

Bush, himself, has acted more as if he had 1,360 days of office behind him and only 100 to go before the next election than the other way around. The only thing that has been missing is banners proclaiming “Bush for President.”

That and, of course, news.

Bush’s speeches have been long on references to the accomplishments of his Administration so far, but short on new initiatives. Thursday, for example, he spoke to an international drug enforcement conference in Miami and urged U.S. chemical manufacturers to cooperate in efforts to keep drug rings from gaining access to the chemicals needed to refine cocaine.

But Bush proposed no new effort on the subject and his audience of U.S. and Latin American law enforcement officials listened to him in polite silence, applauding only once--when Bush offered praise for a Colombian general who has led anti-drug campaigns.

Last year, Congress passed anti-drug legislation that among other things requires companies to keep a “paper trail” to track major chemicals used in drug manufacture. Drug Enforcement Administration officials say that regulations to enforce that law will be out within the next month.

But because many of the chemicals involved are common compounds used for many purposes--chemicals such as acetone, ether and industrial acids, for example, are used in refining cocaine--chemical industry officials have pushed to limit the number of chemical shipments that would be covered by the regulations, DEA officials said.

White House officials seemed unsure what message they were trying to send with the speech. The manufacturers had made statements that “were a little negative,” said Bush’s spokesman Marlin Fitzwater. “We would hope they would be more positive.”

Representatives of the chemical industry offered a strong defense of their actions, saying that chemical manufacturers had supported efforts to reduce the use of their products by makers of illicit drugs.

“The best we can make out, the President’s got to be misinformed or at least ill-informed about what chemical manufacturers are doing,” said Jeffery Vann, a spokesman for the Chemical Manufacturers Assn.

“The picture drawn by the President is that the industry has done very little,” Vann said. “The opposite is true.”

But CMA officials acknowledged that the industry had strongly opposed efforts by the DEA to draft regulations more stringent than those specifically authorized by Congress.

“We’re willing to take on new burdens,” said Garrity Baker, the association’s director of international affairs. “But these serve no useful purpose.”

White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, however, insisted that Bush’s speech implied “absolutely no accusation” that the companies had failed to cooperate so far.

But Justice Department spokesman David Runkel, asked whether some chemical companies were knowingly shipping chemicals to drug manufacturers, replied: “Some of them. Sure.”

Runkel added that the chemical manufacturers had filed a series of objections to the government’s proposed rules on chemical shipment. DEA officials had told Bush, Sununu said, that in some cases “bargeloads” of chemicals have been shipped to South American ports. That sort of “unusually large quantities of chemicals” should raise the suspicions of “someone in the legitimate chain of commerce,” who, in turn, should report the transaction to the government, he said.

Sununu and other Bush aides have seemed generally pleased with the outcome of the trip. “The regional aspect is very critical,” Sununu said. Bush, he added, likes to get out of Washington. “It’s good for him.”

Sununu also said that he expects the Administration to produce an anti-crime package sometime next week or early the week after.