The President

BUSH CALLS FOR MORE MONEY FOR BORDER PATROLS

PORTLAND, Me. -- President Bush said today that he would propose spending
$11 billion next year to protect the United States' land, sea and air
borders from terrorist attacks.

The president's proposal, an increase of more than $2 billion from the
current budget for border security, is to pay for more customs inspectors,
more border patrol agents, technology that will more quickly inspect
shipments into the United States and a new system that will track the
arrival and departure of people who are not American citizens.

"None of us ever dreamt that we'd have a two-front war to fight, one
overseas and one at home, but we do," he said in a speech at Southern Maine
Technical College here.

Mr. Bush added that every morning he looked at a threat assessment, an
overview of the present dangers facing the United States. "The enemy still
wants to hit us," he said. "And therefore this nation must do everything in
our power to prevent it."

Although Mr. Bush did not mention it in his remarks, the Portland airport
was the departure point for Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, two of the
hijackers in the World Trade Center attacks. On the morning of Sept. 11,
Mr. Atta and Mr. Alomari flew from Portland to Logan Airport in Boston and
then boarded an American Airlines jet that the authorities believe Mr. Atta
later flew into the north tower of the trade center.

"The biggest chore I have, my biggest job, is to make sure our homeland is
secure," Mr. Bush told the crowd.

He added that his goal was to create seamless borders with Canada and
Mexico that would keep out terrorists, drugs and disease but more easily
let legitimate goods in.

Mr. Bush also said the Immigration and Naturalization Service would crack
down on visitors who had overstayed their visas.

"The I.N.S. estimates that 40 percent of the people who are here illegally
came because of the generosity of America, were given a period of time in
which they could stay, and then they didn't leave," he said. "And one of
the things we want to make sure of is we find the 40 percent to make sure
they're not part of some Al Qaeda network that wants to hit the United
States. And so we're looking, we're listening, we're following every single
lead."

Such a crackdown might not have affected the Sept. 11 hijackers, most of
whom were in the country legally.

Mr. Bush's speech was the fourth this week leading up to his State of the
Union address next Tuesday night, and like the others it served as both
preview and practice session for his themes of reviving the economy,
winning the war against terrorism and protecting the United States from attack.

He spoke on Tuesday in West Virginia about creating jobs and on Wednesday
and Thursday in Washington about increasing the Pentagon and domestic
security budgets.

The president spent part of his trip here touring the Coast Guard cutter
Tahoma, which was the command vessel in New York Harbor on Sept. 11. "They
stayed there for 40 days, on alert 24 hours a day, making sure that not
only the traffic flowed smoothly, but people were safe," he said of the
cutter's crew.

The president also appealed to a hometown crowd throughout his remarks,
recalling his summers spent at his parents' vacation home in Kennebunkport, Me.

"It's nice to be back in -- I guess my second home," said Mr. Bush, who
calls his real home his Crawford, Tex., ranch.

Mr. Bush also joked about his father, the 41st president, as "41," and the
kind of coastal security he has as president.

"Now, you probably think I've had a sweet spot in my heart for the Coast
Guard because when I spend the night at 41's house down the coast, I wake
up and see the cutter sitting out there," Mr. Bush said to laughter.

This morning, Mr. Bush left the White House carrying a copy of "Bias," a
book by Bernard Goldberg that describes a liberal bias by the news media.
Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said that he did not know
who had given the book to Mr. Bush, but that many staff members at the
White House were reading it.

Mr. Fleischer said that Mr. Bush had just begun the book and that he did
not know his reaction.