PRESIDENT BUSH yesterday sought to rattle US Democrats and shake the established arithmetic of the congressional elections by predicting that the Republicans would buck the national trend by picking up southern seats on November 7.

The President, whose personal unpopularity has until now forced him to remain in the background of the elections, is at last kicking off his campaign rust and taking the battle to his opponents.

Democrats have featured Mr Bush repeatedly in their own attack adverts, while many Republicans have preferred not to be seen with the President in public. But, in what will be his last campaign, he spoke wistfully last week of how much he enjoyed the cut and thrust, saying: “This is what people like me do.”

At the weekend he went to Indiana for his first public election rally, where he rolled up his shirtsleeves and shouted himself hoarse.

Yesterday he was out on the stump again, travelling to rural Georgia — which he won easily in 2004 — to campaign in 12th congressional district. Today he is scheduled to return to the state to attend another rally 130 miles west in Perry, Georgia’s 8th district. Both seats are held currently by conservative Democrats, Jim Marshall and John Barrow. But such is the strength of the Republican organisation on the ground in Georgia, as well as the prevalence of right-wing “values voters”, that the two seats are seen as vulnerable.

The Democrats need to make 15 net gains to get control of the 435-member House of Representatives. But the scale of their task will be much bigger if they lose seats such as that in Statesboro, Georgia, on which Mr Bush descended yesterday.

“It makes me feel comfortable to be in a state where your governor wears cowboy boots,” he declared to a frenzied crowd of 5,000 people in a basketball court at Georgia Southern University.

Speaking in front of an enormous US flag, he insisted that the elections were far from over and derided talk of Democrats already considering which offices they would occupy if they won control of Congress.

“You might remember that about this time in 2004, some of them were picking out their new offices in the West Wing,” Mr Bush said of his own victorious re-election campaign in, adding: “The movers never got the call.”

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