Bush's Aides Plan Re-election Strategy: NY Times

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Bush's Aides Plan Re-election Strategy: NY Times

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Advisers to US President George W. Bush have drafted a re-election strategy built around staging the Republican's nominating convention near the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The convention, to be held in New York City, will be the latestin the history of the Republican Party and Bush's advisers said they chose the date so the event would flow into the commemorations of the third anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

Bush is planning a sprint of a campaign that would start, at least officially, with his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, a speech now set for Sept. 2 in 2004, the paper said. The convention will start on Aug. 30, a month after Democrats choose their candidate.

The strategy is intended to highlight what Bush's advisers want to be the main issue of his campaign, national security, the paper said. Republicans close to the White House said they hoped the timing would deprive the Democratic nominee of critical news coverage during the opening weeks of the general election campaign.

The timing is also intended to enhance Bush's fund-raising advantage. Under US campaign spending laws, candidates who accept public financing will have about 75 million dollars to spend between the nominating conventions and Election Day.

Because the Democrats scheduled their convention for late July, the party's candidate will have to stretch out the same allocation over a longer period.

Bush's advisers say they are prepared to spend as much as 200 million dollars, twice the amount of his first campaign, to finance television advertising and other campaign expenses through the primary season that leads up to the Republican convention, the Times said. They plan to begin broadcasting television advertisements as early as next spring.

The strategy of starting so late and building the campaign around the events in New York is not without risks, the paper said.

Bush's advisers said they were wary of being portrayed as exploiting the trauma of Sept. 11 attacks. They also remained worried by the economy's persistent weakness, an issue that could trump national security if the threat from terrorism appeared to recede, according to the paper.

White House officials have portrayed Bush as a president with little involvement to date in planning his re-election campaign, but his advisers have been assembling the framework for the 2004 campaign behind the scene.

They have set fund-raising targets, made personnel decisions and made calculations of the contest's ideological and geographic contours to try to turn Bush's incumbency to his advantage at every opportunity, the Times said. White House officials said they expected the Democratic opponent to become clear by the first or second week of March 2004.

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