Bush returns to campaign for GOP Senate candidate

SHREVEPORT, La. -- Emboldened by November election triumphs, President Bush urged Louisiana voters Tuesday to pad the GOP Senate majority and defeat a Democratic incumbent who claims her own Bush-friendly voting record.

The president said first-term Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., should be replaced by Republican Suzanne Haik Terrell to give him a true partner in battles to lower taxes and put conservatives on the bench.

"There's one person in this Senate race whose willing to stand up and say she will join the president in listening to the people and make the tax cuts permanent -- and that is Suzie Terrell," the president told a boisterous, flag-waving crowd of at least 5,000 Terrell backers.

The daylong trip, which included a $1.25 million fund-raiser in New Orleans, marked Bush's return to the campaign trail after the Nov. 5 elections. Republicans rode the president's midterm coattails to widen their House majority, regain control of the Senate and do better than expected in governors' races.

Landrieu and Terrell meet Saturday in a runoff. There is also a House seat at stake in the voting.

For Republicans, a victory would solidify their hold on the Senate, help Bush pass his agenda and magnify the president's political stature.

Minus this race, Republicans control the incoming Senate with 51 votes against 47 Democrats and one independent who sides with Democrats. Terrell would be the first Louisiana Republican ever elected to the Senate; a Republican was last appointed during the Civil War Reconstruction.

For Democrats, a victory would help the party rebound from their November losses.

Indeed, the Landrieu-Terrell contest epitomizes the challenge Democrats failed to overcome in November, and the dilemma they must solve before 2004: How do they run against a popular wartime president without alienating their most loyal voters?

Landrieu hopes to show them how, but her prospects have been slipping.

Though the top vote-getter last month, the senator failed to win a majority of the votes, thus was forced into a runoff with the second-place candidate. Polls show that Terrell has moved into a statistical tie with Landrieu, and that Bush himself is wildly popular here.

"If I had any doubts," about voting for Terrell, "they were erased just now," said Judy Carson, 21, of Monroe, La., who waved an American flag and disposable camera in hopes of catching Bush's attention from her arena bleacher seat.

Bush himself is a major issue in the campaign, one that Landrieu is trying to finesse in a way that produced mixed results for Democrats last month. She has drawn attention to a record of voting with Bush 75 percent of the time, including on his tax cut, while pledging to be an independent-minded check against the GOP majority in Washington.

The strategy has left some of her party's core voters cool to her candidacy because, Democratic analysts say, liberal voters want somebody who will criticize Bush's domestic and foreign policies.

In the November election, voting was light in many Democratic precincts, particularly among blacks who comprise 30 percent of Louisiana's voting-age population. About 35 percent of blacks voted, while about 50 percent of whites did.

That pattern prevailed throughout the South on Nov. 5, when candidates such as Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., lost to Republicans when their efforts to cozy up to Bush turned off some blacks.

Adding insult to injury, the Democratic strategy had only a modest impact on whites because GOP candidates -- with help from a politically aggressive White House -- seized on differences between Bush and the Democratic candidates, particularly on national security.

Without mentioning Landrieu, Bush drew distinctions between his record and hers by asking voters to elect the more conservative Terrell.

At the New Orleans fund-raiser, Terrell said Louisiana needs "a senator who can bend the president's ear and bend the leader of the Senate's ear."

She is the last in a long line of GOP candidates receiving a midterm boost by Bush. Some three dozen of the GOP candidates he campaigned for last year won their races.

Terrell was one of the first Republicans to travel to Austin, Texas, in the late 1990s to encourage Bush to run for president, and was a co-leader of his successful Louisiana campaign in 2000.

Landrieu has accused Terrell of being blindly loyal to the White House, an idea the president went out of his way to counter.

He called Terrell "somebody who's not afraid to speak her mind to the president of the United States."

The president last visited Louisiana on Sept. 11, 2001, when he landed briefly at Barksdale Air Force Base while trying to elude a perceived terrorist threat against Air Force One.