Utah's enthusiastic support for President Bush came across loud and clear Thursday during his appearance at a $500-a-plate fund-raiser held for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.

More than a thousand of the state's political and business elite who gathered at a ballroom in the Grand America Hotel for the midmorning event greeted the president with clapping, cheers, whoops and whistles.

One especially excited member of the partisan audience went so far as to shout out, "You're the man, George," just as the hoopla had started to die down, generating another round of noisy applause.

The shouter, Zach Smith of Salt Lake City, said later he just couldn't control himself when he saw Bush at the podium. "He's a man's man. He says what's on his mind and what's in his gut," Smith said, adding the president seemed amused.

Smith was among the dozens and dozens of attendees who was able to shake the president's hand following his speech. "I apologized for not calling him Mr. President and he said, 'George is better."'

Bush praised Utah's senior senator and recognized a laundry list of other GOP leaders in the state before launching into a reprise of the pro-war speech he'd just given at the American Legion Convention.

"The only way to protect the American people is to stay on the offense and defeat them overseas so we do not have to face them here at home," the president said, to more applause.

The crowd also clapped when Bush spoke of his personal belief in "an Almighty, and I believe that one of the great gifts of that Almighty to every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth is the desire to live in freedom."

And while during the ongoing midterm campaigns "there will be people — good people, decent people, patriotic people — who say, now is the time to leave Iraq, they are wrong," Bush said.

For the GOP faithful, the president also brought up the need for tax cuts. "Cutting taxes, trusting people with their own money, makes sense," Bush said, calling for recent tax relief to be made permanent.

He also touched on finding new and better sources of energy, including cleaner burning coal, that will "enable us to diversify away from oil form countries, particularly those countries that don't like us."

Speaking against so-called "junk lawsuits" against doctors, Bush referred to Utah's former governor, Mike Leavitt, now his secretary of Health and Human Services. "He's doing a great job," the president said, thanking the state for doing "a fine job of training" him.