01:47 AM EDT on Sunday, August 29, 2004

BY SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writer

NEW YORK -- Forrester Adams went to Ground Zero yesterday afternoon for the first time. He left shaken, as does almost everyone who views the ghastly concrete scar in lower Manhattan and remembers the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

"At first I felt quiet and somber and all," said Adams, of Columbia, S.C., as he thought about the horrors that claimed the lives of 3,000 [people] when hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center towers. "Then I really started feeling ticked off, defiant.

"I hope they build it back bigger than it was before," said Adams. "I feel we need to make a statement. I think that is so important, to show that these people can't break our spirit."

Adams is voting for President Bush.

Minutes later, Susan Brennan of Stony Brook, N.Y., on nearby Long Island, walked away from Ground Zero. She saw the same barren construction site, the same cross of rusted steel girders, experienced the same eerie silence in the middle of one of the world's noiseiest cities. She remembered the televised images of the twin towers engulfed in smoke and flame.

Brennan is voting for John Kerry.

"I feel much less safe now than after 9/11 ," said Brennan, adding she had purposely stayed away from the scene until yesterday. "We are just creating more terrorists every day with this war in Iraq. Bush is a madman . . . he is just so belligerent."

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, the long shadow of the Sept. 11 attacks hangs over the confab and the 2004 presidential election. As go the people walking away from the site in yesterday's scorching New York heat, so goes the nation's voters.

Journal photo / John Freidah Security was heavy and very visible yesterday at New York's Penn Station, under Madison Square Garden -- the scene of this week's Rebulican National Convention.

Two people see precisely the same scene at ground zero and come to opposite conclusions. All of the public-opinion surveys released over the past few days show the Bush-Kerry race deadlocked. A Time Magazine poll done between Aug. 24 and 26 of 835 voters nationwide showed 46 percent for Mr. Bush, 46 percent for Kerry and 8 percent undecided. The poll carried an error margin of about 4 percentage points.

The Kerry campaign wants voters to ponder Ronald Reagan's question from his final TV debate with President Carter in 1980. "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

Voters agreed they weren't, and gave Carter the boot.

The Bush campaign wants the question to be "do you feel safer than you did four years ago?"

Polls show Mr. Bush besting Kerry on the terrorism issue; Republicans typically benefit from military and crime topics. Marc Racicot, the former Montana governor who is chairman of Mr. Bush's reelection campaign, told reporters yesterday that Mr. Bush will be portrayed at the convention as a man of conviction who has made tough choices in the war on terror.

"Leadership is rarely comfortable," said Racicot, meeting with reporters at a hotel in Times Square, where the police presence was ubiquitous but amity reigned. "You have to deny yourself universal affection."

While polls show U.S. voters are losing patience with Mr. Bush's military incursion in Iraq, Republicans hope to paint Kerry as wishy-washy on the terror and military issues. Kerry, the Bush camp asserts, cannot be trusted because he sends such mixed messages; a Vietnam War veteran who turned against that effort, then got elected senator from Massachusetts who voted against the first Gulf War and in favor of the second.

WITH 66 days to go before the election, terror itself has become a potent political fault line; memories of the deadly plumes of smoke and flame from the twin towers here and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. hang over this convention, which opens tomorrow at Madison Square Garden.

New York is the most Democratic of cities; registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 5 to 1 here. In 2000, New York was Democrat Al Gore's second-highest percentage state, after Rhode Island. The ancestral home of social liberalism, the city ironically has had two consecutive Republican mayors -- Rudy Giuliani, who led New York after the attacks, and Michael Bloomberg, narrowly elected in 2001 with Giuliani's blessing.

Yesterday, New York's streets were filled with red-state Republicans and deep blue-state liberals, many of them protesting Mr. Bush's stance on abortion rights, Iraq, or both.

Thousands of demonstrators streamed across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall Park in lower Manhattan for a colorful, noisy, and throughly law-abiding rally in support of abortion rights, which Mr. Bush opposes.

Police closed an 18-square block area near the arena known to New Yorkers simply as "The Garden."

LIFE HAS shifted gears in New York. The city that showed a face of grit, compassion and resilency after the attacks has moved on. Yet, the feeling that another attack could occur has not waned.

"The effect on the American psyche is different from the New York psyche," says John Mollenkopf, a political science professor at the graduate center of the City University of New York. "We feel much more vulnerable. New Yorkers have accepted a much higher level of inconvience, of a security presence in their daily lives than they would have tolerated before."

"What Bush has done is make the Islamic world angry at the U.S., make them more likely to attack us," said Mollenkopf.

The obvious symbolism of choosing New York -- for the first time in the party's history -- for its convention probaby won't make much of an impression on locals, Mollenkopf said.

Edward Koch, the combative former New York City mayor, disagrees. Koch, a Democrat, thinks Mr. Bush scored points with New Yorkers with a visit to ground zero days after the attack, where the president hugged firefighters and addressed rescue workers with a bullhorn.

"People were cheering when he stood on the rubble," said Koch in an interview last week. "I think he has a right to show it at the convention."

Koch predicts that Mr. Bush will win the election by about five percentage points nationwide.

Republicans are planning on emphasizing the Bush campaign message, that the president can be trusted to take bold action against terrorists.

"I think if we had another terrorist attack, that would cement it," said Utah State Sen. Carlene Walker, as she checked into her hotel yesterday. "People won't want to change horses in midstream if there was another 9/11."

THE ATTACKS are embedded in the public mind.

It showed yesterday on the grim faces of conventioneers and the merely curious who lined up inside the majestic hushed reverence of St. Paul's Chapel, across the street from the site. The chapel provided shelter and solace to rescue workers and police in the days after the cataclysm and is a shrine still to the memory of those who lost their lives.

Union Jack and Irish Tri-color coexist, each carrying messages of sorrow from Europe. A T-shirt from another American city singed by terror, reads "IBEW Local 1141, Oklahoma City."

Over the wooden pews hang hand-lettered posters from school children. "All the Ground Zero heroes. You live in our hearts," reads the sign submitted by the students of East Elementary School in Cullman, Alabama.

A scroll of poster paper that is changed daily gives new mourners a chance to leave their own crayoned thoughts. "God Bless the people of NYC," wrote Kimberly Gavel of Halifax, Nova Scotia. "Always in our prayers and thoughts," was the message of Toinette Weybrant of Bath, Maine.

Still they come. "It never realized how big it was. I felt it in the pit of my stomach, it just made me sick," said Andrea Rice of Fredricksburg, Va., walking up the long flight ot concrete stairs from the site. "To think that 3,000 died here . . . ."

The Rhode Island delegation is bunking at the Millenium Hilton, which was damaged and closed for 18 months after Sept. 11 and overlooks the site. Yesterday afternoon, a harried Patricia Morgan, the state Republican Party chairwoman, checked into the hotel and worried about the safety of the delegation's badges, which are needed to gain entrance to Madison Square Garden.

Morgan nervously watched over a shopping bag filled with the credentials. The hotel has no safes; she wanted to make sure the badges did not end up in the wrong hands.

She allowed that it is unlikely anything would happen. "But, you know, you don't want to be the one" responsible for allowing someone with violence on his or her mind to get inside the convention.

The Millenium Hotel told guests in a letter distributed to each room that one of its entrances will be closed this week, "due to the recent raising of the threat level alert by Tom Ridge, director of Homeland Security."

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