Bush Recruits Governors and Women for Final Stretch

Beginning the final phase of the presidential campaign, Gov. George W. Bush plans to send the nation's Republican governors in a three-day fly-around to battleground states as well as deploy a phalanx of women and his onetime bitter primary rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, to woo swing voters. The Bush campaign said 28 of Mr. Bush's fellow Republican governors, including his brother Jeb, of Florida, plan to converge on Austin on Sunday for a rally. They then plan to split onto seven planes and crisscross the country for Mr. Bush, making 45 stops in 24 states. Altogether the states represent 316 electoral votes, and 22 of the states voted for President Clinton in 1996. The effort, in many ways, brings the Bush campaign back to its origins. The initial groundswell for Mr. Bush's candidacy began with the recognition inside the Republican Party that its governors were winning elections even as the Congressional branch of the party was falling into disfavor and losing seats. And from the moment Mr. Bush won re-election in 1998, he drew on his fellow governors as a mainstay of his candidacy and as his base of support in the Republican primaries. Ari Fleischer, a spokesman for Mr. Bush, said the governors would lend emphasis to Mr. Bush's campaign theme that he is not a creature of the nation's gridlocked capital. "It's a strong reminder that Governor Bush is cut from a different cloth from most of the Washington politicians," Mr.Fleischer said. "He's an outsider to Washington and comes from the more reformist, bipartisan wing of our party."