White House: McCain 'time to close'

by Mark Silva

CORAL GABLES, Fla. - Sitting near the home of Sergio Pino, a Miami-area developer playing host to a $500,000 fundraiser for the Republican Party's congressional candidates this afternoon in the gated, mansion-studded community of Cocoplum:

This is the first of two fundraisers that President Bush is attending for his party's candidates today. About 90 people are attending the fundraiser here in Cocoplum, which is off-limits to the reporters traveling with Bush. The second, tonight at the Sanctuary at Kiawah Island in South Carolina, will raise $1.4 million for the Republican National Committee, with about 100 people expected at the evening event.

The president's party, for sure, is fighting against the stream in an economy which, as the president conceded in the Rose Garden this morning, is causing anxiety upon anxiety for the American people. Bush plans another Rose Garden appearance Saturday morning to offer yet more assurances that the government is taking action.

Aboard Air Force One en route to Florida, the president's press secretary was asked if Bush has voiced any concern about the political fortunes of Republican presidential nominee John McCain in recent weeks.

"The president is convinced that John McCain still has time to close up this race,'' Dana Perino said, noting that Bush was down once in his own race, she noted, and "came back to win.''

Asked about Bush's "communications strategy'' in the economic crisis underway, Perino said: "We know that people are very anxious'' about what is happening. But Congress has acted on the rescue that the White House sought and Treasury is "moving at all deliberate speed.... The federal government is going to do what it takes.''

"If he wasn't talking all the time... the questions from the media would be, why isn't he talking?'' Perino correctly said of the repeat appearances by the president. "It is important that they know the leader of the free world has his full attention focused'' on the problem.

This morning, she said of his Rose Garden appearance, "he was reassuring, realistic and pragmatic'' and also "robust'' about what the government is doing. Asked about the TV commentators who were saying after the address this morning that the market was falling even while the president spoke, she said, "I guarantee that, if we weren't out there,'' the same people would be asking why.

Meanwhile, the president is out here raising money for the day, nearly $2.5 million for a campaign that is coming face to face with the economic problem confronting the nation. Here in Coral Gables, however, for the moment, there is no sign of anxiety.