BATHED in the glow of a glorious early morning Colorado sun, sleeves rolled up, shirt open, and utterly relaxed, President Bush leans toward his audience. With a Texas twang as rugged as the Rocky Mountains on the horizon, he declares: “It’s nice to be out West, where the cowboy hats outnumber the ties.”
Mr Bush has been speaking for just three seconds but already he has connected with his huge crowd. Before them stands not an aloof president but a friend, a straight-shooter, one of them, and as he continues in his easy, conversational style, his sentences short, deliberately lacking in polish but always packing a punch, one learns the secret of his success as a campaigner.
Mr Bush is one of the political world’s most underestimated orators. He does not have the lyrical brevity of Abraham Lincoln or the screen-tested skills of Ronald Reagan. But he uses a folksy, unsophisticated style and short, declarative sentences that hide his patrician roots and make his message brutally clear and reassuringly easy to understand.
In recent days, with a lead in the polls and the political winds suddenly filling his re-election sails, Mr Bush has been stumping with new vigour and confidence.
At press conferences, faced with hostile questions, or when delivering serious speeches, Mr Bush can appear awkward, unsure and ill at ease. But in front of invited crowds and hand-picked audiences, where opponents are arrested merely for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts, there is a different President Bush, one not seen by Europeans still perplexed by his political success: a former Yale cheerleader, among friends, rousing crowds with a skill that eludes his opponent, John Kerry.
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With the help of his brilliant chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, Mr Bush has honed a speaking style full of colloquialism, tough but with a touch of humility, never admitting to mistakes but always charming his audience with an easy self-deprecation.
And as he travels further west of the Mississippi, to such rugged Western states as Colorado, that down-home Texan drawl gets longer.
“I’m proud of mah runnin’ mate,” Mr Bush told his Denver crowd, referring to the largely bald Vice-President, Dick Cheney. “I admit he dunn’t have the waviest hair in the race. I did’n pick him for his hairdo,” a dig at Mr Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards. The crowd roared with laughter.
Adding a touch of cowboy to his standard stump speech, Mr Bush continued: “See, when you’re out roundin’ up the vote, remind people I understand the world in which we live is changin’.”
Each sentence is short, the message clear and strong, the self-belief evident. “See, somethin’ else about taxes. Our tax code is a complicated mess.”
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Or: “We stand for marriage and family, which are the foundations of society; I believe when the US President speaks he must mean what he says”, a line that got one of many standing ovations.
The myriad problems in Iraq and Afghanistan are never mentioned. “In Afghanistan young girls now go to school for the first time.”
On Iraq: “Because we acted to defend our country, 50 million people live in freedom.”
But Mr Bush is never more effective than when he is skewering Mr Kerry over the issue of Iraq. “Here’s the latest twist,” he told the crowd in Denver. “He’s now decided we’re spendin’ too much money in Iraq, even though on national TV last summer he criticised us for not spendin’ enough” To audience cries of “Flip-flop, flip-flop”, Mr Bush declares: “Now, I’ve spent time in Colorado. People out here don’t talk like that.”
Another ovation.
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According to polls, Mr Bush is liked by Americans far more than his policies. At a recent “Ask the President” event, it is easy to see why. “I’m going to appear to be sophisticated but I’m a wreck,” one woman told him.
“That’s what I try to do too,” Mr Bush replied. “I try to be sophisticated. I have trouble pulling it off, though, you know?”
Rahm Emmanuel, a former aide to President Clinton, said: “I wish he was half as good a president as he is a campaigner.”