MERRIMACK, N.H.–President Bush stopped here Thursday, presumably to provide a counteroffensive to all of the Democratic attacks leveled against him in the week leading up to the New Hampshire primary. If the event was indicative of how Bush plans to campaign in this election year, practice saying “President Kerry.”

After a week in which the entire state of New Hampshire had been crawling with Democrats who lobbed every insult, canard, harangue, lie, and accusation that they could against the president, the appropriate White House response would have been to hold a major media event open to the public and involving specific parries of Democratic thrusts. What we got instead was a guest-list-only “Conversation on the Economy” held at the offices of Fidelity Investments, a major Bush campaign contributor, on the same day as N.H. Gov. Craig Benson’s State of the State address and the South Carolina Democratic primary debate.

The president sat on a stage with three Fidelity employees and three New Hampshire entrepreneurs, each of whom explained how the tax cuts of the past three years helped him. One Fidelity employee said he was using his tax cut to add a much-needed bathroom to his home. Another said hers was helping with raising the kids, and the third said she was investing some of hers into her retirement account. The entrepreneurs all said they were using the money their companies saved because of Bush’s tax cuts to reinvest in their businesses, including hiring more people. The message was a good one: The Bush tax cuts have helped middle-class Americans. Bush made sure everyone in the room knew that each of the people on the stage–and in the audience–would receive a tax increase in 2005 if Congress did not make his tax cuts permanent. He even had each person’s individual tax increase calculated.

“If the tax increase isn’t made permanent, he’ll have a $1,000 tax increase,” Bush said about the Fidelity employee who was expanding his house to accommodate a new baby.

Because the event was held on Fidelity’s secluded, wooded campus and open to just over 700 people, Bush had to rely on reporters to bring his message to the rest of the state. Had the event been larger, and had it contained some newsworthy words from the president, reporters would have been a better vehicle for getting the president’s message across.

But the small, conspicuously friendly crowd, and the fact that Bush said nothing new or notable, left reporters wondering what to write about after the event. Television, clearly Bush’s target medium, played the event decently. In print it fared less well. Predictably, the Associated Press mentioned Bush’s fundraiser in Connecticut, scheduled for immediately after the New Hampshire stop, in the third graph of its story, noted that disgraced Connecticut Gov. John Rowland was Bush’s Connecticut campaign chairman in the fourth graph, and didn’t get to the bulk of Bush’s message until later in the article.

The president did not address the massive spending increases that the federal government has undertaken on his watch, or the report released the same day which noted that the federal deficit will top a half-trillion dollars thanks to those increases. Laying out a plan to address those problems–one that angers his base and the other that aids the opposition–would have been newsworthy and politically smarter. (Democrats were giving great sound bites about the deficit report (“The president wants to go to Mars, and he’s got deficits going to the moon,” said North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad) while Bush was schmoozing with people whose votes are in his pocket.

Talking tax cuts with a handful of people who already support him was not the best use of the president’s time two days after New Hampshire voters propelled John Kerry to an almost certain presidential nomination.

–Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News in Manchester, N.H.