George W. Bush stared out the window of his limousine at the largest protest of his presidency. A thousand angry demonstrators -- maybe more -- were rampaging through the streets of Portland, Oregon, utterly overwhelming the meager contingent of police trying to restore order. The motorcade was headed directly into a melee so chaotic that the Secret Service could no longer guarantee the president's safety. Indeed, three minutes before Bush's limousine was supposed to make its final approach to the hotel, police lost control of Taylor Street altogether. They radioed the Secret Service, frantically directing the motorcade to a secondary route. Furious, the agents swung the president south and tried another approach. But the sophisticated protesters, using scouts with cell phones, got wind of Plan B. They rushed to head off Bush before he could penetrate the barricades surrounding the Hilton. Street cops joined in the footrace, hoping to prevent a calamity at Sixth Avenue. The president suddenly understood why his father had nicknamed this city "Little Beirut."

More than anything, the younger Bush was struck by the virulence of the demonstrators. Although he was accustomed to encountering protests in almost every city he visited, most were perfunctory, half-hearted affairs, largely overshadowed by crowds of exuberant supporters. One almost felt sorry for the protesters, as if they were committing some unfortunate social gaffe. But these Portland protesters were different. They were seething with, well, hatred -- there was no other word for it. Bush could see it in their contorted faces as they lunged toward the limousine, shrieking at the top of their lungs and extending their middle fingers. They jabbed placards that bore the most vulgar epithets imaginable. An attractive young woman with dark hair and sunglasses was brandishing a large sign that read BUSH: BASTARD CHILD OF THE SUPREME COURT. When she lifted it over her head with both arms, her sleeveless white T-shirt rode up to expose a swath of bare midriff above her low-slung jeans. The "belly shirt" was emblazoned with big black letters that spelled out the words F -- BUSH. The protestors seemed to take delight in such in-your-face vulgarity. One of them held a large photograph that had been doctored to depict a gun barrel pressed against the president's temple. Another waved a sign declaring, BUSH: WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE, with an X over the word "alive." It was hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some of the protesters would have welcomed an assassination attempt. So much for reasoned political discourse. Meanwhile, a man hoisted an enormous placard that bizarrely proclaimed: IMPEACH THE COURT-APPOINTED JUNTA AND THE FASCIST, EGOMANIACAL, BLOOD-SWILLING BEAST! Bush had seen signs in other cities calling him an idiot, a liar, even "commander in thief," but never "a blood-swilling beast." This was getting downright ugly.

The president began to have second thoughts about the venue for tonight's event, a fund-raiser for Oregon senator Gordon Smith. Why did it have to be held in the heart of the city, where the protesters were obviously harder to control? In fact, Portland police had warned the Secret Service and the White House advance team to expect trouble. They cautioned that the centrally located Hilton would be exceedingly difficult to defend against the hordes of protesters who were certain to descend on downtown. They recommended that the fund-raiser be moved a few blocks north, to the Benson Hotel, where access would be easier to control. When White House officials refused to budge from the Hilton, police asked them to at least reconsider their plans to keep the president there overnight. It would be much safer to get him out of the central city, perhaps to the outlying home of a wealthy supporter. Yet the president's handlers had dismissed the local cops as excitable yokels with overactive imaginations. They insisted on bringing Bush to the Hilton and keeping him there overnight. And now those same handlers were shocked by the size and severity of the protest. The unthinkable had happened -- the motorcade route had been lost!

The president's limousine was now on the secondary route, making its final approach to the Hilton. But protesters had already arrived from the original route and were spoiling for a fight. Worse yet, there were hardly any cops to hold them back.

"That's him!" shouted one of ringleaders.

Several hooligans rushed the line of security vehicles that preceded Bush's limousine -- two police motorcycles, a white police cruiser, and a black Chevy Suburban full of Secret Service agents. They brazenly darted across the street between these speeding vehicles. One man, dressed all in black, sprinted directly in front of the president's limousine, coming within a few feet of the leader of the free world. The rest of the mob pressed in from both sides of the street and let out a rolling "Boooooooooooo!" as the president passed. Although Sixth Avenue was a major bus thoroughfare, the local transit authority had closed it off with an abundance of orange traffic cones. Bush's limousine barreled right over the rubber cones, which thumped angrily against the undercarriage. Further slowing the motorcade were the protesters themselves, who continued to pour into the street and gesticulate with their vitriolic placards.

9/11, read one. YOU LET IT HAPPEN, SHRUB.

BUSH KNEW, shrieked another, quoting the infamous newspaper headline Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had brandished on the floor of the U.S. Senate three months earlier.

Of all the insults hurled at Bush that day, he considered these the most profane. To suggest that he, the commander in chief, was somehow responsible for the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania -- the biggest mass murder in the history of the United States -- was nothing short of monstrous. Everyone knew the attacks were perpetrated by Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network. Virtually the entire civilized world had united behind America's swift and righteous routing of Afghanistan's repressive Taliban regime, which sheltered al Qaeda. And yet these protesters were now blaming the whole thing on Bush.

The president could see that not all the placards were ad hominem attacks. Some, like the sign that admonished CREATE JOBS, NOT BOMBS, addressed the lackluster performance of the economy. Fair enough. The unemployment rate had risen from 4.1 to 5.8 percent since Bush took office. The federal budget had gone from a surplus of $124 billion to a deficit of at least $165 billion. And the stock market had recently sunk even lower than it had in the immediate aftermath of September 11. During a dozen business days in July alone, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost a staggering 1,677 points -- more than a sixth of its value. Although 1,255 of those points had been recovered in the ensuing month, the market remained deeply shaken. Not that these protesters were exactly rooting for the stock market. For crying out loud, some were carrying banners that counseled: COMPOST CAPITALISM.

The Secret Service was really sweating bullets now. There weren't enough police along the secondary route to cordon off the crowd. Wild-eyed protesters were approaching the motorcade from all directions; some coming within a few feet of the leader of the free world. F -- YOU, MOTHERF -- ER! declared one sign, with a picture of Bush's face. Another read CHRISTIAN FASCISM, with a swastika in place of the letter "S" in each word. A third urged motorists to HONK IF YOU HATE BUSH. Such extravagant mean-spiritedness! Such gleeful derision! All raining down on the commander in chief as his limousine clumped awkwardly over the orange traffic cones.

Although most of the protesters looked too young to remember much about politics from a decade earlier, they seemed determined to remind Bush of his father's presidency. One man had duct-taped a sign to his chest with the salutation, WELCOME TO LITTLE BEIRUT. A woman in frizzy pigtails and a black tank top waved a bright yellow sign that said: HEY! AVENGE YOUR FATHER ON YOUR OWN TIME! It was a reference, of course, to Iraq. Eleven years earlier, President George H.W. Bush had driven the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, only to stop short of ousting Saddam Hussein from Baghdad. "He cut and run early," his son told me in a series of interviews in the Oval Office. That act of presidential restraint was not, alas, reciprocated. In 1993, Saddam tried to have the elder Bush assassinated during a visit to Kuwait.

Now the younger Bush was mulling whether to rid the world of this brutal dictator once and for all. The thought had been growing for nearly a year.

"The world changed for me on September 11, to the point where every threat then had to be reexamined," Bush told me. "My presidency changed. I went from a peace president to a war president."

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, some of Bush's advisers, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, had urged him to strike both Osama bin Laden and Saddam simultaneously.

"I said no, let's do something well first. Let's first focus on achieving our objective in Afghanistan. We must destroy the al Qaeda bases and remove the Taliban," Bush told me. "My theory is that in order to do hard jobs, you must stay focused. You don't want to try to do too many things at one time."

But after destroying the Taliban, the president didn't want to lose momentum. As far as he was concerned, Afghanistan was merely one battle in an epic war that had begun on September 11. He viewed Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the next batch of threats, branding them as an "axis of evil" during his State of the Union address in January 2002.

"Eventually, obviously, Afghanistan settled down," he said. "Iraq started getting into focus as we began to think about other theaters in the world. Where were we vulnerable? Where could we be hurt?"

Bush was particularly worried about Saddam's well-documented efforts to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. He fretted that terrorists would obtain such weapons from "this madman who hated America." But the old Cold War strategies of containment and deterrence seemed of little use in confronting this new threat.

"Deterrence -- the promise of massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend," Bush had said in a seminal speech at West Point on June 1. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies." He added: "The war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act."

This muscular new foreign policy, dubbed "preemption," was spelled out in the National Security Strategy drafted that summer by the president's most trusted foreign policy aide, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. By articulating this profound change in U.S. foreign policy at West Point, Bush was laying the foundation for war against Iraq.

"Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives," he told the cheering cadets.

The president's preparations for war didn't end at West Point. By late summer, he had quietly given tentative approval to a preliminary battle plan that included such specifics as deploying troops to Turkey for a northern front against Iraq.

Speaking of battlefields, that's exactly what Portland looked like from the window of Bush's limousine. One of the protesters actually hurled a rock that bounced off the windshield of a car in the presidential motorcade. The vehicle, which was behind Bush's limousine, was packed with his most trusted advisers -- counselor Karen Hughes, chief political strategist Karl Rove, and White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. The aides were startled by the noise and stunned by the security breach. None of them had experienced anything like this. As the motorcade struggled down the home stretch, one particularly audacious protester lunged forward and pounded his fist on the "package" -- White House parlance for the presidential limousine. The Secret Service couldn't believe it. This was an even more grievous breach of security than a rock striking the presidential motorcade. Granted, the limousine was heavily armored. But if protesters managed to somehow stop and surround the package, all bets were off. Agents would have no choice but to use lethal force in order to protect the president. And to think the Portland police had warned them about just such a meltdown.

Instead of reproaching themselves for not heeding that warning, though, the Secret Service officials turned their wrath against the cops. As soon as the motorcade finally limped inside the bicycle-rack barricades and disgorged the president into the Hilton, the agents vented their anger at Assistant Portland Police Chief Greg Clark, who was in charge of security for the fund-raiser. How could you lose the motorcade route? How could you let a protester get close enough to lay a hand on the package? What if he had been carrying a plastic explosive like C4?

"The Secret Service agents got pretty upset with me," said Clark, who rode in the presidential motorcade. "But they were warned. Oh, they were warned in spades. We knew things were gonna go south and we told everybody, including the Secret Service and the White House staff, that this was gonna be a bad deal. We had previous interaction with the protesters, so we knew we were gonna go to war with them. But I just don't think the White House handlers chose to take us seriously. I'll bet they'll believe it in the future."

Bush was escorted to the twenty-second floor of the Hilton to freshen up before his meetings. Stepping from the elevator, he entered a hallway with a door at either end. One was labeled "Governor's Suite" and the other "Presidential Suite." Bush headed for the latter, unaware that the signs had been switched just before his arrival. The White House advance team had scouted both rooms and chosen the Governor's Suite for security reasons. But they didn't want the president to think he would be staying in the hotel's second-best room. So they arranged for a maintenance worker to unscrew the signs and reverse them, perpetrating a small fraud on the most powerful person in the world.

At length, the president emerged from his fraudulent suite and headed down to a first-floor banquet room to meet with a handful of business leaders. He went around the table, asking each person for ideas on how best to stimulate the economy, which was particularly sluggish in the Pacific Northwest. Bush listened politely as each leader responded, although it was obvious that everyone was distracted by the persistent noise of the protesters. The police had erected the barricades just 100 feet from the hotel in hopes that the demonstrators would be less disruptive if they could at least see the building where Bush was staying. But the strategy was backfiring. Emboldened by their proximity to such power, the protesters turned up the volume accordingly. They chanted, sang, and hollered at the top of their lungs. There was even an organized drum line. Half a dozen skilled drummers were outfitted with snare and bass drums of the sort used by college marching bands. In the center of each drum skin was a picture of the president's face, surrounded by the words BEAT BACK BUSH'S WAR. The drummers slammed their mallets directly into the presidential visage, thwacking away in perfect unison and sending up a terrific racket. The drumbeat could be clearly heard through the windows of the conference room, although neither Bush nor any of the business leaders mentioned it during their meeting.

Afterward, the president retreated to the relative serenity of his suite to prepare for the upcoming fund-raiser. And yet even from the twenty-second floor he could see the protesters on the streets below. There were now perhaps 1,500 of them, and they seemed even angrier than when Bush had first arrived. Indeed, the sight of the president slipping into the hotel had energized the demonstrators, who ended up taking out their frustration on anyone who happened to have the singular misfortune of venturing too close to the Portland Hilton on August 22, 2002. Some poor commuter trying to drive home after work suddenly found his sport utility vehicle surrounded by the raging mob. Appalled by this bystander's mode of transportation -- a gas-guzzling SUV, the very symbol of America's wretched excess -- the protesters began rocking it from side to side. Fearful that he would be tipped over, the terrified motorist threw it in reverse and began backing up through the crowd.

Meanwhile, the same police officers who had failed to secure the primary and secondary motorcade routes were now needed inside the perimeter to help bolster the barricades. But in order to hold back the crowd from the inside, they first had to wade through it from the outside. Demonstrators interpreted this movement as retreat, which only excited them more. They began hurling bottles, boards, and crumpled traffic cones at the cops. Some officers had to endure the indignity of being pelted by vegetables. What kind of protesters packed their own produce? The police tried to move through the crowd in a methodical fashion, hoping this would convey authoritativeness. But it was no use. Far from being intimidated, the protesters began taunting and even shoving the cops. Suddenly the only thing that mattered to the officers was to reach the safety of the barricades. To hell with dignity; they could nurse their wounded pride later. Right now their all-consuming imperative could be summed up in one word: Retreat!

Things only got worse, however, when the reinforcements finally straggled through the perimeter. Officers were getting intelligence reports that agitators were attempting to rally hardcore groups of protesters to break through the barricades. Sure enough, pockets of demonstrators were probing for weak spots in the 360-degree perimeter. They prowled in a counterclockwise direction, forcing police to match their movements from inside the barricades. The most concerted foray came at Fifth and Taylor, where the Secret Service had erected a checkpoint. The crowd was defiantly pushing against the bicycle racks, despite police orders to back away. While the frontline protesters were going toe-to-toe with police in riot gear, backbenchers were taking advantage of the confusion by chucking projectiles overhead. An orange cone sailed deep inside the barricades and landed on a cop. The Secret Service became increasingly alarmed. If the protesters managed to breach the perimeter, the situation would become grave. It was only 100 feet to the Hilton, where the president himself was staying. If even a small number of protesters made a desperate dash for the hotel entrance, Secret Service agents and police would almost certainly be forced to draw their weapons and fire.

The barricades were little more than a fragile line of demarcation between two starkly contrasting worlds. On one side stood the police, decked out in ominous black riot gear from head to toe. They had the unmistakable aura of futuristic storm-troopers. On the other side were the protesters, trying hard to look like hippies from the 1960s. They were a colorful mass of T-shirts and jeans, do-rags and dreadlocks.

The storm troopers used bullhorns to bark dispersal orders at the hippies. But after fifteen minutes, no one had budged an inch. The cops tried pushing the protesters back from the barricades. Instead of retreating, the demonstrators locked arms and advanced. A female police officer was knocked to the street, badly injuring her wrist. Her colleagues responded by donning rubber gloves and breaking out the pepper spray. The stuff came in red canisters shaped like miniature fire extinguishers. Police pointed the canisters at the crowd and pushed down on the black plastic levers, unleashing great streams of the burning, noxious fluid. The canisters were only about the size of one-liter bottles, but they packed a tremendous punch. The liquid stayed in a narrow trajectory for six or eight feet, then fanned out gradually into a spray that found its way directly into the eyes and noses of protesters. Journalists who were too close to the action also got a snootful of the stuff. The afflicted clawed at their eyes or belatedly pulled bandannas over their noses as they fell back, temporarily blinded by the overpowering chemical.

Meanwhile, wealthy Republicans were beginning to show up for the Smith fund-raiser, only to find that police had failed to clear a corridor for them. The impeccably dressed guests were forced to run a gauntlet of jostling, jeering, spitting protesters. Kevin Mannix, the Republican candidate for governor in Oregon, tried to lead his wife, Susanna, through the roiling crowd. Since the streets were jammed, the candidate and his wife had snake their way single-file through a narrow opening on the sidewalk as protesters along the curb screamed obscenities at them. Suddenly, a bearded demonstrator with dark hair stepped directly in front of Mannix, blocking his path. Mannix moved to the right in an attempt to skirt the man, who merely shifted to block him again. Mannix went left, but the man mirrored his movement like a bully in a schoolyard taunt. The protester remained silent, an expression of pure menace plastered across his face.

"Look," Mannix warned, "I am coming through here."

He headed to his right again, but the man shifted once more. Exasperated, Mannix -- a widely recognizable gubernatorial candidate -- grabbed hold of the protester and shoved him aside, leading his wife deeper into the scrum.

In fact, all over downtown Portland tiny groups of Republicans were bunching together for protection as they waded fearfully into the mob for the perilous trek to the hotel. Frank Dulcich, the president and CEO of Pacific Seafood Group, was worried about the safety of his seventy-five-year-old father, Dominic, as well as an acquaintance's wife. The woman's red dress, though tasteful, seemed to incite the crowd even more than the men's business suits.

"Slut!" shrieked on protester.

"Whore!" wailed another.

"Fascists!" hollered a third.

Dulcich, who had lived in Portland most of his life, suddenly experienced an emotion that was utterly foreign to him -- civic embarrassment. Upstanding citizens -- including many who had no connection to the GOP fund-raiser -- were being cursed, spat upon, and jostled simply for wearing business clothes. It was appalling.

Suddenly Dulcich noticed that his face was wet. An unidentifiable liquid was dripping off his cheeks onto his collar and suit coat. In an instant he turned and saw the culprit -- a man with an empty cup and mocking grin, standing between two masked figures. Reflexively, Dulcich flew at his tormentor, shoving him hard.

"This is bullshit," Dulcich seethed. "If you want to debate politics, let's debate politics. But what you're doing is just totally uncalled for."

The two masked men stepped forward, as four or five more encircled Dulcich from behind. They had no way of knowing that this CEO was also a black belt.

"If you guys wanna get physical, I don't mind," Dulcich allowed. "I can handle myself. But let's take this incident and move it away from everything, 'cause I don't wanna get arrested."

"Hey, that's cool," mumbled one of the protesters from behind his mask.

Suddenly the entire crowd surged forward, pushing Dulcich to within twenty feet of the barricades. The next thing he knew, the masked men were gone. But so were his father and the Republican woman. Dulcich frantically searched the crowd, even climbing a light post for a glimpse of his dad's white hair or the woman's red dress. But they were nowhere to be found. Gripped by fear and panic, the CEO of the fifth largest seafood company in the nation leapt to the sidewalk and began zigzagging through the mob, desperately trying to find the people he was supposed to be protecting.

Dulcich's father was not the only seventy-five-year-old Republican who became separated from a loved one in the confusion. Donald Tykeson, a balding grandfather with multiple sclerosis, was trying to make his way to the Hilton in a motorized wheelchair when he realized his wife was no longer behind him. Clad in a light gray suit, the mild-mannered millionaire headed directly into the heart of the melee. He was stopped by a man wearing a baseball cap and a cloth mask over his face. Only the eyes and nose of the protester were visible.

"Where you goin'?" demanded the thirtyish man.

"I'm going to the reception," Tykeson replied. "To see the president."

"Well," the man taunted, "I'm not gonna let you pass."

Tykeson couldn't very well get into a fistfight with this swaggering six-footer. "I really need to go," Tykeson said in the most reasonable voice he could muster. "It shouldn't be a bother to you."

He started forward with his wheelchair, but the protester quickly moved to block him. Tykeson again tried to reason with the thug.

"You know, if you were in my shoes and I were in yours, I'd let you pass," the old-timer offered.

But this oaf was a monolith, utterly immovable. Tykeson tried in vain to appeal to his sense of fairness. He pointed out that many of the demonstrators were accusing Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft of curbing civil rights. Surely the protester didn't want to take away Tykeson's right to free assembly.

"If you believe in these ideas," he pleaded, "then I should be allowed to pass."

It was like talking to a wall. Tykeson was beginning to worry whether his wife was being similarly harassed. Ultimately, it took the intervention of another demonstrator to convince the bully to stop tormenting the crippled grandfather in the wheelchair.

Trying not to appear rattled, Tykeson pushed deeper into the crowd. He puttered through the perilous streets between police and protesters as streams of obscenities and pepper spray arced directly above his balding head. He breathed in some of the pepper spray, which seemed to drop like a rock straight to the bottom of his lungs. Suddenly he understood the chemical's debilitating effectiveness. To think he was shelling out $2,000 for the privilege of being bullied and pepper-sprayed on the teeming streets of Little Beirut!

At least Tykeson made it through the barricades on his own; that was more than some donors could claim. A number of them simply became stranded in the mob.

"How in the world am I supposed to get over there?" said one donor, pointing helplessly across the mob toward the Hilton. A cop in riot gear shrugged. He already had his hands full.

Some donors frantically called the Hilton on their cell phones. The hotel's director of security, positioned inside the barricades, searched the crowd for frightened faces and then directed police to go out and rescue these disheveled and deeply shaken Republicans.

By the time the president came back downstairs to give his speech at the fund-raiser, a full-fledged riot was going on outside. In addition to the incessant drumming, people were pounding lustily on the plate glass windows of downtown businesses that had been forced to close early because of the mayhem. The din could be heard in the ballroom as Bush stood backstage, preparing to address the shell-shocked donors. The noise evidently rattled one of the president's aides, who prematurely pushed the button on a sound system that began blaring "Hail to the Chief." Bush shot a disapproving look at the aide, who fumbled with the machine for a moment before cutting off the music. When the proper moment finally arrived, the anthem was restarted and the president emerged to take the lectern.

"It's great to be back in this beautiful state," he managed, as if unable to think of anything nice to say about Portland itself. "I am honored to end my day here in Oregon by urging the people of this state -- the good people of this state -- to send this good man, Gordon Smith, back to the United States Senate."

After all, that's why Bush was here, wasn't it? To try and get Republicans like Smith elected in November. The midterm election was less than eleven weeks away and by all historical precedents, Bush's party was supposed to take a shellacking. The last president in this position -- Bill Clinton -- lost both the House and Senate to the opposition in his first midterm. It was the most devastating wipeout in half a century. Nine Senate seats! Fifty-four House seats! The GOP's gains were so spectacular that they called it the Republican Revolution of 1994. The ascension of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House had made it infinitely more difficult for Clinton to enact his agenda.

Bush could only imagine what his first midterm would come to be called. The Republican Rollback? The Democratic Comeback? He was already being blamed for losing control of the Senate in May 2001, when Senator James Jeffords of Vermont deserted the GOP. That had given control to Democrats just four months into the Bush presidency. If history was any yardstick, the GOP would lose even more Senate seats in 2002 and fail to stop Democrats from gaining the six seats they needed to retake the House. Ever since World War II, presidents had lost an average of two to three Senate seats and a whopping twenty-four House seats in their first midterms. No president during that period had actually gained seats in the House. The last president to actually pick up seats in both houses of Congress during a midterm was Franklin Roosevelt, way back in 1934. Political pros weren't exactly counting on George W. Bush to become the first president in sixty-eight years to pull off that feat.

Nonetheless, Bush had resolved months earlier to campaign ferociously for the GOP. He was in the midst of visiting dozens of states and raising over $100 million for House and Senate candidates, not to mention gubernatorial hopefuls. He even inserted himself directly into Republican primaries, a dicey move for any sitting president. Bush's go-for-broke strategy was called "arrogant at best, foolhardy at worst," by Time magazine, which expressed astonishment that the president would put all his political capital "on the line like a Vegas gambler." The New York Times warned: "Bush has now irrevocably tied his prestige to the outcome of these elections and runs the risk of a bad outcome being interpreted as a judgment by voters on his policies." The Washington Post summed up the conventional wisdom by noting that there was "nothing smart about a president going into several dozen extremely close House, Senate, and gubernatorial races to campaign with potential losers. A sophisticated politician would know better than to risk it. He could be blamed for bad outcomes." Indeed, Bush was well aware that he would look foolish if he squandered his prestige on losing candidates. The press would have a field day. But he figured the alternative was even worse. A Democratic Congress would be all too eager to kill the Republican president's agenda. Better to avoid that fate, regardless of risk. So Bush barnstormed the nation like a man possessed.

"Turn out the vote," he implored the Smith supporters. "Go to your places of worship, go to your community centers, and remind the people of this state that you've got a good, honorable, decent man in Gordon Smith.

"And I want the message to go to friend and foe alike: We're in this deal for the long haul," Bush added, transitioning unapologetically to the war on terror. "See, this is our freedom at stake. History has called this nation into action. History has put the spotlight on the great beacon of freedom. And we're not going to blink. We're going to be a steady, patient, determined nation."

Bush was indeed determined to make this election about the war. That's why he went from talking about a "good, honorable, decent" candidate in one breath to a "steady, patient, determined" nation in the next. Instead of letting the disparate races around the country devolve into the sort of local politics that usually determined winners and losers, the president was striving to nationalize the election. In the process, he was making the contest into a referendum on himself. But there was a potential down side. If the Republicans took a trouncing in the midterms, Bush would get the blame.

"We cannot let terrorists get the upper hand, and we won't," he thundered, warming to his theme of moral clarity. He vowed -- in his fractured but forceful stump syntax -- that America would achieve peace only by making clear "the difference between good and the difference between evil."

The donors applauded, evidently beginning to forget the trauma they had endured to get there. Outside, though, the protesters were still trying mightily to break through the barricades. The badly outnumbered police were struggling to hold them back. Reinforcements arrived periodically, careful to enter the barricades at places where the crowd was relatively thin. But one group of eager patrolmen -- a dozen cops in three cruisers -- made the mistake of driving directly into the thick of things. Worse yet, they came in "code three," which meant they had their lights flashing and sirens wailing. This agitated the protesters, who surrounded the little caravan, slowing it to a crawl. As the lead car inched forward, demonstrators crowded in from all sides, including the front. There was an entire wall of bearded, dreadlocked protesters who actually refused to get out of the way of a moving police car. One carried a drum and drumsticks. Another wore goggles to protect his eyes from pepper spray. Several of them bent down and grasped the protective steel tubing that had been fitted around the cruiser's front grill. They leaned forward until their torsos were splayed across the hood, grunting as they tried to stop the car's glacial movement. The man in the goggles kept slamming a water bottle on the hood, making a loud noise as he inched backward before the advancing cruiser. THWOCK! THWOCK! THWOCK!

At the same time, a woman in a red shirt approached the driver's side and laid her protest placard across the windshield. The large white square of cardboard, mounted on a stick, completely blocked the driver's view. The cop behind the wheel tried to peer out the center of the windshield. But just then, a bearded man ran up from the passenger's side, slapped his hands on the fender and catapulted himself directly onto the center of the hood with a tremendous thud. He crouched down and hooked one hand into the space between the windshield and the hood. The startled cops found themselves eyeball-to-eyeball with a lunatic. He wore a big baggy cap, a white T-shirt, and a backpack. His face was blocking the center of the windshield, leaving the passenger side with the only unobstructed view. But in the next instant a woman hurried over and laid a section of brown cardboard across that part of the glass. It wasn't large enough to completely obscure the cops' vision, so she pressed her bangled wrist on the glass as well. All the while, the man in the goggles kept slamming that infernal water bottle onto the hood. THWOCK! THWOCK! THWOCK!

"DON'T HIT IT!" yelled one of the cops. Although the cruiser's windows were rolled up tight, the livid officer's voice could be heard above the din of the sirens and the roar of the crowd.

"Don't hit it!" echoed a second cop in a much calmer tone.

Unfazed, the goggled protester kept assaulting the hood, which was still occupied by the maniac with the baggy cap. THWOCK! THWOCK! THWOCK!

"DON'T HIT THE CAR!" hollered the first officer, astonished by the sheer insolence of these protesters.

By now the caravan had inched to within sight of the barricades. A line of riot police in the street was stunned to observe fellow officers being overrun by protesters. They knew that if the mob succeeded in stopping the cruisers, all hell would break loose. The cars would be tipped over, and the lives of the officers inside would be in danger. Demonstrators had already slashed the tires of several state troopers' cruisers. The riot police cocked their big black shotguns, took careful aim, and blew the protesters clean off the hood with nonlethal "sting balls." In addition to inflicting painful red welts, the balls broke apart on impact, releasing a potent chili pepper extract that inflamed the skin and burned the eyes, nose, mouth, and any other mucous membrane with which it came in contact. The sound of a woman hysterically screaming cut through the din of the melee as the protesters scrambled away from the cruisers. To make sure they kept moving, police fired a volley of rubber bullets after them.

"God damn it!" wailed one man, doubled over from the pain of being hit by a projectile.

"Serves ya right!" hollered a cop.

"You f -- ing assholes!" the injured protester spat.

As the three cruisers finally pierced the perimeter, the demonstrators took up a chant that belied their actions: "PEACEFUL PROTEST! PEACEFUL PROTEST! PEACEFUL PROTEST!" After awhile they took up a second chant: "BUSH IS A TERRORIST! BUSH IS A TERRORIST! BUSH IS A TERRORIST!"

The chants could be heard inside the Hilton, where the president and his entourage were not the only guests. Also staying at the hotel were hundreds of homosexual men who were in Portland for the Gay Softball World Series. Returning from the day's games, these members of the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance (NAGAA) were mortified to encounter violent protesters encircling the Hilton. One group of players made the mistake of trying to drive a car into the hotel's parking garage. The protesters swarmed the vehicle and rocked it from side to side. The players were terrified. Other team members -- some of whom were wearing red satin shorts -- tried to enter on foot, only to be manhandled like the Republican donors. Some made it through safely, but only after taking a circuitous, time-consuming detour. Gay columnist Marc Acito and his partner almost missed the gay talent show.

"Pretty Boy Floyd and I had to wander four blocks out of our way to get into the hotel," Acito explained. "But we just followed the crowds of tough-looking women and well-groomed men through the barricades."

The irony of gay softball players spending the night in the same hotel as a conservative president who considered homosexuality a sin was not lost on Acito, who said it proved "that the gods indeed have a sense of humor." Another gay writer, Byron Beck, agreed.

"Instead of spending the night in the White House curled up with First Lady Laura and a bowl of pretzels, Bush was stuck in a building with a battalion of 2,500 bat-wielding homos in the mood for love and other games," Beck observed. "This bizarre twist of timing essentially turned our very own Hilton Hotel into the most well-guarded gay bar on the entire planet. While I don't know about the hot and hunky Secret Service dudes (who seemed to be oh-so 'comfortable' in this sexed-up environment), the home-run homos who got stuck in this building weren't about to let the most queer-unfriendly of presidents spoil any of their fun. They were here to party!"

Some NAGAA members noticed that in addition to giving a speech at the $2,000-a-plate Smith fund-raiser, Bush was posing for photos with high rollers who were willing to part with much larger sums.

"Those who paid $25,000 a couple to have their picture taken with George W. got even more for their money when some of the players from Manhattan made a point of sucking face in the lobby," Acito observed.

Also in the lobby was a large canvas banner welcoming the gay players. Before Bush walked in, his underlings rolled the banner up, refurling it only after he was safely out of sight. Soon the gay softball players filed into the Grand Ballroom, which NAGAA had booked months in advance. When White House officials subsequently chose the Hilton for the Bush visit, they asked NAGAA to relinquish the Grand Ballroom for the Smith fund-raiser. But the players refused, relegating Bush -- who was already staying in the second-best suite -- to the second-best ballroom.

"The 'Twisted Talent Night' has always been a highlight of the annual Gay Softball World Series," explained Beck. "Basically an alcohol-fueled drag show, it's a chance for queer ball players to take off their gloves and pick up a few drinks."

Acito described the mood at the show as "cheerfully subversive." The emcee, dressed in drag, twice called out Bush's room number. At one point a woman known as Brownie took the stage while carrying what appeared to be tubes of caulk.

"Those lesbians, always ready to remodel," cracked Tim Bias, a softball official who was evicted by the Secret Service from the Mount St. Helen's Suite because it was directly beneath Bush's room.

"While Brownie proceeded to sing the paint off the walls, her team filled the room and, on cue, confetti shot out of the tubes, showering us all," Acito observed. "The effect was magical."

Beck added: "My fondest memory of the night will be that I was in the same building as the president when a drag queen from Los Angeles pretended to shove a plunger up her ass. How can you top that?"

The emcee decided to have a little fun at the expense of the president's daughters, Barbara and Jenna, who had been cited previously for underaged drinking.

"Are the Bush twins here?" the drag queen shouted. "No? Good. Otherwise we'd run out of booze."

The crowd roared its approval, although not everyone was having a good time. Some NAGAA members were still traumatized from their encounter with the mob, which continued to clash with police just outside. A few of the players who had been attacked by the protesters ended up commiserating with Fleischer, whose car in the presidential motorcade had been struck by a rock.

"People who say they're for peace and engage in violence are hard to understand," Fleischer told the White House press corps, which was also staying in the Hilton. He decried the protesters as "a left-wing fringe group," blaming them for "violence not only directed at the president and his traveling party, but others who were staying at the hotel who had absolutely nothing to do with politics. There was a softball team there who got attacked. And I talked to one of the people there whose car was attacked."

Fleischer's complaint left the press deeply conflicted. On one hand, reporters were always on the lookout for stories about gays being victimized. On the other, these attackers were left-wing Bush haters, not right-wing homophobes. Even more perplexing to the press was the fact that the person speaking out in defense of the gay victims was not some fashionable liberal icon. It was the buttoned-down spokesman for President Bush, a conservative Republican who opposed gay marriage. The image of Ari Fleischer commiserating with gay softball players about the violence of anti-Bush protesters simply did not fit the well-established media template for this sort of thing. To be sure, if a right-wing group had attacked a gaggle of gay softball players at an appearance by a Democratic president, the media would have immediately turned it into a cause célèbre about hate crimes. Journalists would have seized the story with all the gusto of the Rodney King coverage. The New York Times, in particular, would have had a field day. As Times reporter Richard Berke, who is gay, explained: "Literally three-quarters of the people deciding what's on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals." But because the assailants in this particular case were liberals, the Times and the rest of the press decided to pooh-pooh the antigay violence as a forgettable anomaly that did not merit coverage. The only media outlet in the traveling White House press corps to bother writing about this mistreatment of homosexuals was the Washington Times.

By this point Bush had gone to bed. Even during times of turmoil, the president liked to fall asleep by ten o'clock each evening so that he could get up by five the next morning. By contrast, the protesters preferred to party through the night and sleep late into the day. They were nowhere to be found when Bush departed the Hilton early Friday morning. Still, as he gazed through the window of his unmolested limousine on the way to the airport, the president could not forget the hatred on the faces of the protesters. The sheer intensity of their rage was something brand new to him.

Up until now, criticism of Bush had been divided into two distinct phases. There was the pre-September 11 phase, when liberal Democrats dismissed Bush as a weak one-termer, an illegitimate pretender who had stolen the election from Al Gore. In fact, they were so confident they would be able to vanquish the hapless president that they sometimes had trouble taking him seriously.

Then came the post-September 11 phase, when even Bush's most ardent critics lauded his decisive leadership and swift retaliation against the Taliban. Understandably, this rally-around-the-president effect faded over time. After a few months, liberal Democrats in Washington were once again routinely challenging Bush -- if for no other reason than to chip away at his immense popularity and alarming reelectability. Still, such criticism remained mostly respectful as the nation prepared to mark the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

There was nothing respectful, however, about the Portland protesters. Their vituperative chants and poisonous placards went well beyond the bounds of civilized political debate. These people had brandished signs advocating the assassination of the sitting president of the United States. They had labeled him a terrorist and blamed him for September 11. They had stalked his motorcade, assailed his limousine, and stoned a car containing his advisers. Wild-eyed and ranting, these thugs had bullied innocent commuters, unsuspecting hotel guests, and a wheelchair-bound grandfather with multiple sclerosis. Their violent fervor had caught the Portland police flat-footed and even blindsided the Secret Service.

No, this harrowing spectacle was unlike anything Bush had witnessed in his nineteen months as president. It marked the beginning of a new phase of virulent dissent, one that would have been impossible to imagine in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Like many trends that started on the West Coast before gradually rolling across the rest of the country, this alien strain of acid partisanship would soon spread from the fringes of Portland's protest community to the highest levels of respectable Democratic politics in the nation's capital. It would color the looming debate over whether to wage war against Iraq. It would dominate the midterm elections, and perhaps even Bush's own bid for a second term.

The president didn't know it as he gazed out the window of his limousine, but he had just caught a glimpse of the Next Big Thing in politics: the rise of the Bush haters.

Copyright © 2004 by Bill Sammon