Thank you Ken [Mehlman] and Maria [Cino] and thank you all for being here today.  I think, and Ken expressed it well, we have many challenges and opportunities in this election, and I thought it would be good for us to talk about how we that from our day to day work in the party in in our campaign so that we can make sure we transform our party into even a greater [inaud.] for victory, not only for the President but for candidate up and down the ballot.

We have a few underlying principles that we focus on in the campaign on a regular basis and I though it would be good to go through three of those and then talk about how that impacts the work that you do each and every day.

Number one, we always assume that the 2004 election will be just as close as the 2000 election.  That assumption lives in every thing that we do in the campaign and it certainly will find expression in the grassroots organization that we work with you all to put together over the course of the next 15 months.  Why is this so important?

Well Ken mentioned in his presentation a number of states that were very close in 2000.  And I just think about three of them that were won by one--that were decided by 1 percent or less.  My own home state of Iowa, New Hampshire, and New Mexico.  Three states that one of which we came out on the right side of, two states we came out on the wrong side of--where we know that a grassroots effort can make a difference and an improved grassroots effort in 2004 will make a difference and make sure that in close elections we come out on the right side on election day instead of the wrong side.

The second principle that we operate with is avoiding a lonely victory.  I think in 2002 you saw the effort of the President in targeted races in your states across this country.  He made an amazing commitment to make sure that the candidates had the media exposure they needed and the financial resources that were necessary to win on election day.  And he'll make a similar commitment in 2004.  From a campaign perspective that means working hand and glove with other targeted campaigns and with state parties so that we can build a winning team for election day, so that our victory will be up and down the ballot on November 2nd in 2004.

And the final principle that is important to the President is that we work to implement is leaving something behind.  And what does he want to leave behind?  He wants to leave behind a broader and more inclusive party to give everybody an opportunity to be a part of our team.  As you all know, the President has a deep level of support among many voters.  And we want to make sure that those people are transformed from just being supporters of the President to being activists and that they're engaged in the process on a daily basis working on our campaign and through our campaign supporting get out the vote efforts of each state party.

We translate those principles into some goals for our campaign.

And the first, and I think it's a very important one, is the best organized presidential campaign in modern American history through a strong and inclusive statewide leadership--a strong and inclusive leadership team at the statewide, county and precinct level.  We need to build our team at every level of the political process in order to make sure we have a vested program.

Second, we have active support for party get out the vote efforts and that's something that will begin this year which I'll talk about in a moment.

And third, we want a greater victory in 2004, not only for the president, but for the party at large and for candidates up and down the ballot.  We will have the best organized presidential campaign in modern American history and that will happen through a Bush Team Leader program which we'll very soon launch on our internet website.  This is a great resource.  The people of this country who support the President need to be activated and engaged in our campaign and in the get out the vote efforts of the state party.  These are the people who will actively execute the get out the vote efforts; they'll be the backbone of our efforts to promote the Presidents' message.  We'll set goals for precincts around the country and work to achieve those a a regular basis to make sure that we have a large cadre of Bush team leaders out there supporting our efforts.  We're going to ask them to engage in 6 different activities for us and activities that will support your efforts.

Number One.  We want them to recruit five other Bush Team leaders to help in these efforts.

Number Two, to promote the President's message, we'll ask them to identify 10 friends who would like to receive e-mails from the Bush campaign.

Three, we [ ] to ask them and encourage them and give them the tools to identify, register and turn out voters on behalf of the President and other Republican candidates on the ticket.

Four, to promote the President's message , we'll ask them to engage in a letters to the editor program, to be active on talk radio and to send e-mails to their friends.

Five, we want them to host event-driven block parties where they invite their neighbors in to hear the President speak or to listen to presentations at the convention, so that we can activate [inaud...] to activate their friends and neighbors to be a part    of the team.

And finally, we'll ask them to volunteer at local events so we can spread the President's message and engage even more people in the political process.

Our next goal is active support for party get-out-the-vote efforts.  We knew going into the 2002 election that the 72-hour program would be effective because we tested it.  But certainly the results of the election of 2002 were further demonstration that a strong grassroots effort will make a big difference in any election.  In 2002 turnout efforts improved GOP from final polling.  In the Senate the average increase was almost 3 percent.  Many of you may recall a slide similar to this after the 2000 election, when we began the initial assessment for the 72-hour program, which actually showed the exact opposite.  That the final polls going into election day were actually at higher results that the results on election day.  And we know that the big difference between 2000 and 2002 was an even grater focus on grassroots efforts.  That showed up in motivating our base.

Republicans increased as a percentage of the electorate from 36 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2002.  And amongst religious conservatives, a section of the electorate which had decreased since 1994, we seen an increase of 16 percent and 18 percent.  Ken mentioned the increase in voter registration in states that have party registration, where we decreased our deficit by 500,000 votes.  We saw better recruitment across the board in House races around the country.  And in redistricting we added 10 Bush voting districts, which will increase our electoral vote majority.

In 2004 our challenge and our goal is to build an even stronger ground game and it's really great to quote Donna Brazile, who is our competitor at making effective ground efforts on the Democrats' behalf, when she said in 2002, Republicans ran our type of campaign and beat us.

Well in 2004 we want to build on that effort.  We want to build on the effort where we can turn to a volunteer coordinator to get that extra phone in the field, rather than picking up the phone and calling a telemarketing firm.  We want to make sure that our campaigns are running effective and comprehensive efforts at the volunteer level and we're going to continue to work on that day in and day out in partnership with you at the local level.

Finally, we're going to achieve an even greater victory in 2004.  When we go back and look at results from 1996 to 2000, we see there were 9.1 [million] new voters in 2000 and 5.8 million voters who shifted from third parties.  Al Gore got 3.6 million more votes that Bill Clinton did in 1996, but George Bush got 11.3 million more voters than Bob Dole did.  For every one new Gore voter there were three new Bush voters.  One of the reasons for that was demonstrated in a Pew poll that was done after the 2000 election--it went to thousands of voters in targeted states and in that the results of that survey were telling.  Thirty four percent of the respondents reported being contacted by George W. Bush, the Bush campaign or the Republican party versus 30 percent by the Gore campaign and the Democrat party.  Our goal is to expand that margin in 2004 with an even more effective grassroots campaign.  That's how we're going to grow our effort.

The other way we're growing our effort is by focusing on the President's leadership and his accomplishments over the course of the last 2 1/2 years.  Ken mentioned the key swing voter groups for the President's message and the Republican party's overall message have been affected/effective and what he talked is repeated here.

Amongst suburban voters, we've had an incredible 23 1/2 point swing.  Catholic voters, we see a steady erosion--the conservative potential that this year we would find ourself winning the Catholic vote for the first time in many years.  Amongst seniors, we continue to perform very well and we see steady erosion amongst women and union households for their support of the Democrat party.  And finally young voters are now a swing voting group that we need to focus on.

Of course the key to the future of our party is our increasing support amongst Latino voters, and this is the chart that demonstrates that.  Amongst GOP congressional candidates--GOP congressional candidates nationwide received 39 percent of the Latino vote--a gain of 8 percentage points from 2000.  But I think that this chart demonstrates the tremendous growth we've had since 1996.  This is a real and lasting trend, one that we must continue to focus on and accelerate in the 2004 campaign.

In order to have an even greater victory in 2004, we need to work very carefully and closely with you all.  State parties are on the front lines working with the county parties to build our organizations, register voters, promote our message in the states.  We cannot win without strong and effective party support and we want to work with you each and every day to make sure that you get the kind of support that we can provide, that we use the President's popularity to turn Bush team leaders into helping your registration programs at the local level.

And the second step of our process is obviously to build up on the historic turnout efforts we saw in 2000 and 2002 and make sure that we have that best voter turnout effort that we've every had in 2004.  If we do that, if we generate the volunteers on the ground at the local level, we will propel the Bush-Cheney campaign to victory in 2004, despite the fact that we believe we face a very competitive and tough election in many states.  And this victory, if done right, will help the party up and down the ballot and with your help we hope that we can do that.  Thank you.

ema 7/30/03