NEW YORK -- A genial, smiling Karl Rove dismissed his image as the calculating puppet master of Republican politics yesterday while contending that President Bush's values and leadership will be the key to winning Pennsylvania and a second term for Bush.

	Joe Cavaretta, Associated Press Chief Bush strategist Karl Rove tours the convention floor yesterday. Click photo for larger image. Related coverage See more coverage of the Republican National Convention

Asked whether he has been fairly characterized as the hidden hand behind negative GOP tactics and whether a nasty campaign was a good campaign, Rove's answer was a simple: "No and No."

"There's nothing I can do about the myth" Rove said, as he shrugged off reports and speculation about his role in orchestrating attacks that range from derogatory phone calls in 2000 about Arizona Sen. John McCain, who was challenging Bush for presidential nomination at the time, to the current anti-John Kerry campaign by an unaffiliated political group known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In a small roundtable with Pennsylvania reporters moments after the opening gavel fell at the Republican convention, Rove gave an upbeat assessment of the president's position two months before the election and said he wasn't concerned that polls show a majority of Americans think the country is on the wrong track.

Rove said the wrong track/right track direction measure -- frequently cited by Democrats as a sign that Bush's re-election bid is in trouble -- was no longer as "predictive" of elections.

He said voters who say the country is on the wrong track are not expressing disapproval of the president's policies, but merely saying they don't like the fact that the country is at war or flipping on the TV and being exposed to "coarseness and vulgarity."

Rove described the president's job approval ratings as "good" and said he pays more attention to those figures.

According to a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll conducted last week, 49 percent of voters surveyed said they approved of the way the president is handling his job and 48 percent disapproved.

"[Former President Bill] Clinton's in October of 1996 was 51 and [former President Ronald ] Reagan's in October of 1984 was 54," Rove said. "We're at 49 to 51, depending on whose poll you look at. Would we like to get it higher? You bet. Is it good? Yes."

Rove said he believes the race has tightened because voters are reassessing Kerry and deciding that Bush is more decisive -- a message Republicans will try to drive home throughout the GOP convention.

"What I think has really played out over the last several weeks," Rove said, "is that people have said, 'Look, this is war. We're in a war. And we want a commander in chief who is steady, resolved and consistent. Somebody who knows what the goal is -- defeat the enemy -- and has a path to get there. Not somebody who is going to be nuanced and sophisticated, and going back and forth so it's unpredictable."

Kerry's Pennsylvania spokesman Mark Nevins responded, "I think that Pennsylvanians wish that we were fortunate enough to have a president who was steady, resolved and consistent when it comes to creating jobs, improving the Pennsylvania economy and making health care more accessible. If only the president would focus on those issues in the way Karl Rove described, George Bush might have a better approval rating in this state."

Yesterday's roundtable was Rove's first informal gathering with reporters in selected swing states, and Bush's chief political adviser maintained that the president was making gains among key Pennsylvania constituencies, including military families. He lost the state to Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000.

With recent polls showing a dead heat between Bush and Kerry in Pennsylvania, Rove noted that Bush would make his 33rd, 34th and 35th visits to the state as president before the weekend was out. Bush will be campaigning in central Pennsylvania tomorrow and plans to make Scranton his first post-convention stop on Friday, the day after accepting the Republican nomination. On Saturday, the president will campaign in Erie.

Rove said the Bush campaign was doing well in southwestern Pennsylvania, and expressed optimism that it could reverse recent electoral trends in which the vote-rich suburbs of Philadelphia strayed from their traditional GOP roots to produce majorities for Democrats Gore and Gov. Ed Rendell.

Rove acknowledged that Republicans in the southeast corner of the state tended to be more moderate than many Republicans on social issues, but he insisted that they would still find themselves closer to Bush's position on issues such as parental notification on abortion and banning certain late-term abortions.

In a separate interview, Tony Podesta, Kerry's Pennsylvania campaign chief, disputed that analysis, asserting that Kerry would hold onto the counties that border Philadelphia while doing better than most recent Democratic candidates in the Southwest.

"The Republican suburbs will be very much a battleground," he said. "That's where we have to follow the lead of Clinton, Gore and Rendell."

Noting the volume of presidential visits to Pennsylvania, Podesta said, "If he'd created one job for each time he's been to the state, we'd be better off."

Rove said that one potentially crucial source of source of new GOP voters was in fast-growing communities beyond the rings of traditional suburbs. Republican research showed that 88 percent of the Republican-leaning residents of older traditional suburbs were registered to vote, while only 81 percent were registered in the newer exurbs, he said.

A chief priority of GOP volunteers in the state, a group that Rove said now numbers more than 57,000, is to boost those registration numbers. He said the campaign hopes to turn such previously apolitical conservatives, including but not limited to evangelical Christians, into Bush voters.

"They basically are not tied into the political system. Lots of things are more important to them -- family, faith..." he said. "One of the [Bush campaign's] jobs is to get them interested to participate."

While the difference between Bush and Kerry in national polls has bounced around within the margin of error for weeks, Bush has made gains in most recent survey, edging ahead of Kerry after weeks in which the Democrat held a narrow lead.

In a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll of Pennsylvania voters released yesterday, Bush and Kerry were tied at 49 percent, with 2 percent of voters saying they would support independent candidate Ralph Nader. Yesterday, a Commonwealth Court panel in Harrisburg ruled that Nader did not qualify for the Pennsylvania ballot.

The shift in polls has coincided with the assault on Kerry's record in Vietnam by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Podesta, echoing many Democrats, said the group's tactics came right out of Karl Rove's playbook -- a suggestion that Rove yesterday dismissed.