US President George W. Bush, fighting to hold on to the White House, campaigned furiously on Monday at raucous rallies across the breadth of the US before he was due to arrive in the small hours of Election Day in the silence of his central Texas ranch.
From 6:30am Monday, when the president's motorcade left a downtown Cincinnati illuminated only by street lamps, to 1:40am yesterday, when Marine One was due to touch down in the darkness of Prairie Chapel Ranch, Bush logged 4,100km and 19 consecutive hours at seven rallies in six states, five of them too close to call -- and all essential to a victory should he lose Florida.
"That finish line is in sight," Bush told reporters as he arrived in Pittsburgh, his second stop of the day. "And I just want to assure you I've got the energy, the optimism and the enthusiasm to cross the line."
At each stop, Bush exhorted the crowd to vote in an election in which the winner is almost certain to be the man who turns out more of his own party's supporters.
"I'm here to ask for your help," Bush said at his first stop in an airport hangar in rural Wilmington, Ohio, where Marine One roared to a halt soon after dawn. "You get your friends and neighbors to go to the polls. Find our fellow Republicans, wise independents, and discerning Democrats and tell them, if they want a safer America and a stronger America and a better America, to put me and Dick Cheney back in office."
In Milwaukee, his third stop of the day, Bush rallied supporters only a few blocks and an hour apart from his opponent, Senator John Kerry. Later, parts of the two candidates' motorcades crossed paths near the airport. The campaigns were physically so close that a bus of White House reporters drove right past Kerry's campaign plane, which was parked on the other side of the airport from Air Force One.
For the last rally of the day, Bush returned home to Texas, into a jammed sports arena at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where his wife, Laura, went to college, for an 10:30pm rally filled with thousands of young people waving red and white "W" signs.
It was a rarity for Bush, who is usually in bed by that hour. What was even more of a rarity was that Bush was running late, leaving more than 5,000 eager supporters screaming, and everyone from Governor Rick Perry to Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison to extol the president's character and bring the crowd to its feet by denouncing Kerry as a "Massachusetts liberal" too weak to take command of a war in Iraq or against terrorism.
Earlier in the day Bush's aides, after asserting for weeks that they were confident and calm, finally admitted in the last marathon stretch that they were on edge. But they insisted the president was serene.
"Everybody's nervous," said Mark McKinnon, the president's chief media strategist. "He has a total Zen attitude about it."
McKinnon said Bush was playing a running game of gin rummy throughout the day with Karl Rove, the powerful White House political adviser, and other longtime aides in the conference room on Air Force One, and that he felt he had done everything he had to do to win.
"He knew he had to earn it, not inherit it," McKinnon said.
He added: "I think both campaigns will go out swinging and say we left it all on the field. They ran tough and hard and we ran tough and hard."
Notably, McKinnon spoke about the recent polls with less bravado than other Bush advisers in the closing days of the campaign, and made no promises of the outcome.
"We averaged it all out, and the numbers over the last week have been good for us -- better for us, anyway," McKinnon said. "Ultimately, you can argue the numbers either way, but my acid test, at the end of the day, is I'd rather be us than them going into the final 24 hours."
The race was so excruciatingly close for the White House that Bush spent part of the last day of what he said would be his last campaign without his wife at his side. First lady Laura Bush, after accompanying the president from Cincinnati to Wilmington, flew separately to rallies in Cleveland and Clinton Township, Michigan, where she echoed the president's stump lines.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was