Bush Speech a Hit With Nixon Library Crowd : Reaction: President had said he needed a home run, and supporters say that’s what he delivered.

By his own words, President Bush had said before Thursday evening that he would have to “hit a home run” with his acceptance speech before Republican Party delegates.

And for supporters who gathered at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace to hear the President accept his party’s nomination for a second term, he knocked one out of the ballpark.

“In our book, he bats a thousand,” Orange County Republican Central Committee member Rose Anderson said.

The speech, viewed by the standing-room-only audience on a large-screen television, also received above-average to excellent marks from a five-member panel of political experts who analyzed the address afterward.

But the analysts also noted that the much-anticipated speech was only the “end of the beginning” of what is expected to be a bruising battle between two expert politicians.

“The campaign will be tough. It will be very, very tough,” said Gerald Warren, editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune and deputy press secretary in the Nixon White House.

Few denied the importance of the speech, even in conservative Orange County, where pre-convention public opinion polls showed President Bush far behind his Democratic rival, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

But Laguna Hills resident Larry Russ, who called himself “solidly Republican,” said the convention address gave Bush the opportunity to speak to voters directly instead of through the media.

Russ said the campaign is now “back on track.”

During the speech, the largely Republican crowd laughed with convention delegates as the President took swipes at Clinton and jeered when he spoke of tax increases in the Democratic plan.

The audience grew enthusiastic when Bush accused Clinton of vacillating on issues. One of their favorite lines came when he jibed that Clinton has “been spotted in more places than Elvis Presley.”

They also cheered when Bush promised to cut taxes and congressional spending and when he pledged to be the first President to visit a “free, democratic Cuba.”

Following the speech, radio and television commentator Hugh Hewitt said the President’s performance was “magnificent” and concluded that if Bush maintained the political form he showed Thursday, “he will be returned (to office) on the back of a great majority.”

Former Republican presidential speech writer James Humes added: “This was a feisty, combative speech. . . . I don’t think I have ever seen George Bush as feisty as this.”

Two panelists, Los Angeles Times political columnist Bill Boyarsky and Orange County Register editorial director Ken Grubbs, observed that Bush’s last great speech was four years ago when he last accepted his party’s nomination.

“If he did that more often, he would not be in so much trouble,” Boyarsky said.

However, Boyarsky and Grubbs agreed that the President’s message lacked a clear strategy to fix economic and health care problems.

But Hewitt countered that the President had effectively laid out his domestic agency while blaming its lack of success on the Democratic-controlled Congress.