Tight race puts pressure on GOP at convention

NEW YORK — On the eve of his nominating convention, President Bush is facing a tighter and tougher re-election fight than many of his fellow Republicans expected, elevating the stakes — and jitters — as Bush heads into one of the most crucial weeks of his re-election bid.

While recent public opinion polls show a slight tilt in the president's favor, the race against Democrat John F. Kerry remains essentially tied, making it far too close for the comfort of several GOP strategists who say Bush has yet to present the forward-looking agenda they deem essential to winning a second term in November.

"I'd like to see him do more than just Kerry-bashing," said Dick Dresner, a Republican consultant for candidates across the country. "He has to provide some overall vision and a few specifics around it. . . . He has to show some sense of optimism, where the future's going."

The president has promised to offer that look-ahead in his acceptance speech Thursday night, the highlight of four days of presidential pomp and political stagecraft that begins Monday at Madison Square Garden, the fabled sports and entertainment center.

"The speech will focus on moving forward, what needs to be done in order for America to be a hopeful place, what needs to be done to spread the peace," Bush said in an interview published Friday in USA Today. "That's what I think a convention speech ought to be: vision and how to achieve the vision, and that's what the people will hear."

As the president stumped Saturday in Ohio, tens of thousands of Republican faithful, political activists and convention chroniclers poured into this hot, humid city, fortified by a literal army of police swarming the streets of Manhattan.

Despite the massive show of force, and the attendant street tie-ups, seen-it-all New Yorkers seemed characteristically blase.

In an opening wave of demonstrations, thousands of abortion-rights activists marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, encountering anti-abortion foes on the Manhattan side. Officers kept the two factions apart, and there was no violence.

Arab-American groups, denied a rally permit for Central Park's Great Lawn, gathered on the green anyway, largely blending in with sunbathers and softball-players.

Across the country, in Washington state, Kerry finished a West Coast campaign swing with a rally in Tacoma, a blue-collar city south of Seattle, before leaving for his family's vacation house in Nantucket, Mass. He plans to lie low for much of the Republican convention.