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Bush gives McCain `full-throated support`

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US President George W. Bush has anointed one-time bitter rival John McCain as his preferred successor and heir to the vastly unpopular Iraq war and deepening economic fears.

"He`s going to win," said Mr Bush, who shook Mr McCain`s hand, clapped him on the shoulder, and kissed his wife Cindy as the presumptive Republican party nominee arrived at the White House on a chilly, windy day.

It was not clear how Mr Bush, whose approval ratings lie at near record-lows with 10 months left in his term, would help the man he defeated for the Republican party`s nomination in 2000 as the November 2008 elections draw nigh.

"The president will give his full-throated endorsement to Senator McCain," said Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino, but "I don`t think there`s any one thing that we can point to that is the number one thing that President Bush can do".

The president was expected to try to rally skeptical Republicans behind McCain, raise some of the millions of dollars that are the lifeblood of US campaigns, and work to help the party recapture the US Congress, aides said.

Mr Bush gave the senator and celebrated Vietnam War veteran a red-carpet welcome worthy of a head of state: a formal welcome by the columned entrance to the White House, a lunch, and a joint appearance in the Rose Garden.

"It`s an important and significant day, and the location of the arrival will symbolise that," said Ms Perino, who underscored that "no one thought of it in terms of a head-of-state arrival".

Indeed, Mr Bush waited about four minutes in the finger-numbing cold outside the mansion, ducking reporters` questions, pretending to dance to keep warm, and at one point asking one of his aides where Mr McCain was.

Ms Perino brushed off questions about the president`s unpopularity and his past disagreements with Mr McCain on issues including Mr Bush`s tax cuts and "war on terrorism" interrogation tactics that some call torture - which he has all-but reversed as he runs for the White House.

The two agree on "the two major things" at stake in November, she said, "one, keeping the country safe and, two, making sure that we have pro-growth economic policies, especially when it comes to keeping taxes low".

But with Democrats painting a McCain victory as a "third Bush term," Ms Perino underlined that "the point of these elections is for the candidate to run as their own person. Elections are about change and about going forward".

Mr McCain "has been his own person. He has blazed his own trail, and he will have to make the case for why voters should vote for him," said the spokeswoman.

But the senator himself said in late February that his political fortunes are inextricably tied to President Bush`s war in Iraq, saying at one point that if he cannot convince voters that a US victory is coming: "Then I lose. I lose."

Observers have also suggested that there is lingering bad blood between Mr Bush and Mr McCain.

As the two campaigned in race-conscious South Carolina in 2000, the Arizona senator faced false allegations that he had fathered an illegitimate black child. Mr McCain has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh.

Mr McCain went on to endorse Bush`s 2004 re-election campaign, famously hugging him at rally in a sign that they had put their quarrels behind, and later became one of the staunchest support of the US troop "surge" in Iraq.

Democrats, locked in a tight race between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have made it clear that they would use the McCain-Bush alliance as a rallying point against the Republican nominee.

The New York Times reported last month that Mr McCain`s campaign advisers hoped Mr Bush would raise money but that they do not want too many joint public appearances.

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