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If you had the time and money to trot around the country to attend all of President Bush's recent fundraising speeches, you'd find him both scaring and reassuring his listeners about terrorists.

Next week, GOP donors in Ohio and Texas who are scheduled to see Bush on the day before Halloween will hear a little fright-and-we're-right from the president. Not since the run-up to the first missile attacks on Baghdad has Bush's rhetoric sounded so pointedly fierce about the threat posed by global terrorism. A campaign for war has eased into the president's campaign for re-election.

With the Taliban and Saddam Hussein out of commission and democracy under construction in Afghanistan and Iraq, the president is also inserting a victory bow into his domestic remarks. In one breath, he describes how terrorists have been striking since 9/11; in the next, Bush reassures his audiences that he has made America safer.

Sounding a warning on Oct. 16 that seemed to undercut the definition of success, Bush reminded his audience, "Since September the 11, the terrorists have taken lives in Casablanca, Mombasa, Jerusalem, Amman, Riyadh, Baghdad, Karachi, New Delhi, Bali, Jakarta, and most recently, American lives were lost by terrorist attack in the Gaza."

Yet America is safer, the president said in a similar fundraising speech on Oct. 8, because he is a leader who "was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman" like Saddam. In an unequivocal linkage between might and right, Bush declared, "Iraq is free, America is more secure."

Can the president rhetorically have it both ways? Can he declare America safer and simultaneously warn that terrorists make the world just as vulnerable as ever?

Sure, replied Michael Waldman, the chief speechwriter for President Clinton and now a New York trial attorney: "As a political matter, and partly because of what's going on in the world, Bush has benefited enormously from the sense of emergency. It can be a complex message, but it's not impossible for presidents to make an argument like that. His problem is that there's often a lack of logical connective tissue between his stern pronouncements of peril and his stern declarations of victory."

Waldman - whose latest book, "My Fellow Americans: The Most Important Speeches of American Presidents From George Washington to George W. Bush," came out in September - noted that many presidents have tapped international policy in speeches to evince leadership much more easily than they could with most domestic issues: "It is more dramatic; there is more at stake; it is easy to draw a sharp contrast. You can speak about American values and their application around the world in compelling ways that you wouldn't do with, for example, the patients' bill of rights."

The White House considers Bush's leadership in foreign policy, Americans' trust in Bush, and his personal likability to be among his core strengths over any eventual Democratic rival; thus those three ingredients find their way into most speeches. Asked on Oct. 9 about Bush's then-plummeting job-approval poll numbers, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett told two inquiring reporters that majorities of Americans continue to trust Bush and like him as a leader. That reservoir of support is key, Bartlett said, even if Americans occasionally lower their assessment of the overall job the president is doing.

Since early October, Bush's job-approval rating has inched back up to 56 percent, according to the most recent Gallup Organization Poll. While six in 10 Americans believe it was the right decision to go to war in Iraq, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducted from October 15 to 19, that support has been steadily slipping since April, when 74 percent of Americans embraced the war shortly after U.S. troops took control of Baghdad. A majority of Americans wants to keep U.S. troops in Iraq until a stable government is established, Pew reported, but that support has ebbed.

In reprising his warnings about terrorism in speech after speech, and by asserting that America is safer because he took the U.S. to war against Iraq, the president may be playing to his perceived strengths, but only if "Bush's war" achieves the outcomes he promised. The president, for instance, is not using his domestic speeches to assert that he made America safer through the new Homeland Security Department or through changes in airline security. "The compelling words get you only so far - there has to be reality underneath," said Waldman, who has advised Democratic candidate Wesley Clark. "I wouldn't give speeches about homeland security, either."

In little more than a year, the economy may turn out to be more relevant to voters' decisions about their security than terrorism and Iraq. But this fall, Bush is touting his own report card. "Presidents get graded very often on exams that they themselves write," Waldman said. "Nobody would have judged Bill Clinton on whether he passed universal health insurance, except that he himself made that the test of success. Nobody would have graded George W. Bush on whether Iraq was pacified, except that he himself has made that the test, by mounting an invasion without the support of the rest of the world. In a lot of ways, Bush will pass or fail a test that he himself has written."

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