Oct. 30, 2004 / COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- President Bush's favorite yarn about Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is gone, along with the joke about unwashed rental cars.
In Bush's fast-changing campaign speeches, old chestnuts are rapidly falling to the ground to make way for new zingers. Departing from long-standing practice, his team is tweaking the stump speech each day -- sometimes, like Friday, several times in one day.
What used to be a repetitive address is now a fast-moving vehicle for driving news coverage and rebutting charges from Democratic Sen. John Kerry.
In the frantic closing days of the campaign, Bush gives speeches four times a day, in four different cities. The day before the election, he will give seven addresses. Each is a potential weapon to reach thousands, even millions of people.
"Six months ago, both campaigns recognized rapid response had reached a new level," said Nicolle Devenish, the Bush-Cheney campaign's communications director. She spoke after a day in which the president's team had tinkered with his standard speech twice in response to remarks by Kerry, a four-term Massachusetts senator. "It's an evolution of the speed of the news cycle."
Dramatic changes began midweek, when Bush broke his nearly three-day silence on reports that nearly 400 tons of explosives were missing in Iraq.
"The senator is making wild charges about missing explosives, when his top foreign policy adviser admits 'we don't know the facts,"' Bush said Wednesday in Vienna, Ohio. "The senator is denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts."
Bush, meanwhile, made a new overture to Democrats as he traveled with Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga. "I'm a proud Republican, but I believe my policies appeal to many Democrats," he said.
The president's rallies are invitation-only, and dissenters are barred, so few if any Democrats were in his audience, but the news media on hand would carry his message beyond the rally site. "If you're a Democrat and you want America to be strong and confident in our ideals, I would be honored to have your vote," Bush said.
On Thursday, he launched a new assault on Kerry's "willingness to trade principle for political convenience," a trait he said made Kerry "the wrong man, for the wrong job at the wrong time."
Bush began Friday by taking the high road in Manchester, N.H. He set aside the assaults on Kerry and reminded the country about the human toll of Sept. 11, 2001, while laying out a second-term agenda, never mentioning Kerry.
But two hours later in Portsmouth, N.H., he pulled the tougher speech off the shelf.
"You know where I stand and, sometimes, you even know where my opponent stands," he said. "We both have records. I'm proudly running on mine. The senator is running from his."
At his third address Friday, he ratcheted it up and reacted to a Kerry statement from just a few hours earlier.
"My opponent has an interesting idea of how to win friends," Bush said in Toledo, Ohio. "Earlier today, my opponent even insulted the American people saying, you need to, quote, 'wake up.'
"Well, the American people are awake," Bush said. "Their eyes are wide open. They are seeing more clearly every day the critical choices in this election: the senator's failed, out-of-the-mainstream policies, or my commitment to defend our country, to build our economy and to uphold our bedrock values."
By his fourth speech, in Columbus, word had broken of a new videotape from Osama bin Laden. Kerry charged anew that Bush had allowed the terrorist leader to slip away.
Bush used his last speech to strike back.
"It's the worst kind of Monday morning quarterbacking. It is especially shameful in the light of a new tape from America's enemy," he said.
Bush dropped the line about Kerry and bin Laden in his speech Saturday, with aide Dan Bartlett arguing, "we made our point."
Yet most of his address on any given day is weeks, months or years old.
"We're challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations," the president says at most speeches. His use of the phrase dates back to at least the spring of 2000.
In a campaign that is largely being waged in the Upper Midwest, Bush likes to taunt Kerry's connections to the elites on the East and West coasts.
"At one time in this campaign, he actually said the heart and soul of America can be found in Hollywood," Bush said in Toledo, Ohio, drawing boos from his supporters.
He quietly dropped that line at his next speech, when he stood next to actor and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It came back Saturday morning.
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