PRESIDENT BUSH unveiled the central points of his re-election campaign yesterday, mixing muscular rhetoric on the war against terror with economic optimism.

Mr Bush made his biggest foray into domestic politics since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, travelling to Ohio to push his endangered package of tax cuts, which he insists are a vital spur to the United States’s faltering economy.

But the President’s message, and the choreography of his White House officials, ensured that he never strayed far from the theme of national security that will dominate his drive for a second term.

After delivering an unusually lengthy speech on the economy to a business audience, he made a second stop in the political bellwether state at the factory that makes the US Army’s M1A1 Abrams tanks.

Even in his economic speech, at the Timken manufacturing company in Canton, Mr Bush began by saying his first priority was to “confront and defeat threats to America wherever they gather”.

After the conflict in Iraq, where he said the United States had “finished a war” before correcting himself to say it was “in the process of finishing a war”, Mr Bush warned other states and terrorist groups against challenging Washington. “The world now knows we keep our word,” he said.

The events, in a largely blue-collar and suburban state where Mr Bush only scraped home in the 2000 presidential election, served to underline how White House strategists are preparing to challenge the electoral wisdom promoted by Bill Clinton that contests boil down to the maxim “It’s the economy, stupid”.

In declaring an ongoing war on terror, Mr Bush will be going to the country on a war footing even in the absence of any further looming conflicts. He told his audience yesterday that the lesson of September 11 was that oceans would no longer protect America from “the threats of a new era”.

Mr Bush will present Iraq as part of a process rather than a fixed event. Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s hugely influential strategist, sketched out the approach this week, saying: “It’s not like it’s going to be, ‘Iraq is over, America can withdraw into itself again’.”

In a sign of political sensitivities about the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction, Mr Bush failed to mention them in his first speech, saying only that the US and Britain had gone to war to bring freedom to the Iraqi people. “It was with that value that our soldiers are now acting in Iraq,” he said.

In his second appearance, he said: “We’re witnessing historic days in the cause of freedom. This is a historic moment.” But he added that he was confident that coalition forces would find evidence of banned weapons programmes.

However, the economy remains critical to Mr Bush’s re-election hopes.

On current form, he may become the first President since Herbert Hoover in the early 1930s to preside over a fall both on Wall Street and in the number of jobs in the US economy during his term of office.

His father was blamed for failing to devote enough attention to an economic downturn, and failing to use the enormous political capital he won with victory in the 1991 Gulf War for domestic ends. This President is seeking to correct both, devoting much of his energies in the short term to securing the backing of the Senate for his controversial multi-billion dollar tax cuts.

The have already been cut by the House of Representatives from $726 billion over ten years to $550 billion, and Mr Bush is battling to prevent the Senate cutting them further to $370 billion.

The issue threatens to deepen the divide in Republican ranks between the party’s ideological tax-cutters and those who give priority to balancing the budget, also reflected in Mr Bush’s decision to go to Ohio.

George Voinovich, one of the state’s Republican senators, is refusing to back Mr Bush’s tax plan. In the 51-49 divided Senate, his vote, along with the Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, is sufficient to deny Mr Bush his way.

Both have been compared in television advertisements to Jacques Chirac, the French President, and branded “Franco-Republicans” by conservative groups, as great an insult as is possible in Washington at the moment.

Mr Bush said he had “so much optimism” about the recovery of the US economy. He conceded that there was “too much economic uncertainty today” but absolved himself of blame. “When I was campaigning (in 2000), our country’s economy was slowing down, and then the minute I got sworn in, we were in a recession.” September 11, corporate scandals and two wars had deepened the effect, he said.

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