NASHVILLE — A day after warning the nation that U.S. involvement in Iraq would be longer and costlier than anticipated, President Bush on Monday turned his attention to his reelection campaign, collecting $1.2 million at a Tennessee fund-raising event.
He also stopped by a public school in a low-income area of Nashville to underscore his credentials as an education reformer.
After visiting with a small group of children and parents at Kirkpatrick Elementary School, the president gave his standard 18-minute education speech and then headed for a $2,000-a-plate reception at a downtown hotel.
Bush confined his remarks at the school entirely to education, leaving to other administration officials the task of answering questions about his request to Congress for $87 billion in new spending for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bush is scheduled to travel to Florida today to attend fund-raising events in Jacksonville and Fort Lauderdale and deliver another education speech.
In Florida, the president is expected to pick up an additional $2.5 million, boosting his campaign war chest to about $50 million, by most estimates.
For the second quarter, which ended June 30, the Bush campaign reported $34.4 million in contributions. Campaign officials would not provide a running total, referring reporters to the next reporting period in October when all campaigns are to report their third-quarter collections.
But there is little doubt that Bush is well on the way to breaking his own record for collecting contributions to presidential campaigns. His strategists expect to raise at least $170 million for use in the primary season -- even though Bush faces no opposition for the Republican Party nomination. In 2000, Bush set a fund-raising record by collecting more than $100 million.
By appearing at official events here and in Jacksonville, the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign can shift a significant portion of the travel costs to the taxpayer-funded White House budget -- a practice that hardly originated with the current administration.
But by speaking about education in both states, Bush also invited a new round of attacks on his education bona fides from Democratic lawmakers, led on Monday by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of Martinez, Calif. The pair worked closely with the president to secure congressional passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, but now part company with Bush on the issue.
