FIFTEEN MILES WEST of Denver, halfway up the Rocky Mountain foothills, there is a place that once was called the Garden of Angels. Two red sandstone monoliths shoot up from the hillside at 45-degree angles, towering 300 feet overhead. Stand between them, and you stare into a valley, brown and green and unspoiled. A moment passes, and your eyes adjust, and you see grooves in the hillside below. The grooves are benches, and at the bottom of the hill is a stage.

Welcome to Red Rocks. Since 1906, when magazine publisher John Brisben Walker produced the first concert here, it's been a mecca for musicians. When Bruce Springsteen plays Red Rocks, though, the road to the amphitheater is not lined with protesters. Nor do three buses filled with members of the national press corps, accompanied by police escort, show up to watch. And chances are there aren't snipers in the stones, either, hiding in tiny caves a hundred feet in the air, training their rifles on the crowd below.

But then, even the Boss is not the president of the United States. One day last week, George W. Bush--with his daughter Jenna, former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks, Denver Broncos coach Mike Shanahan, and a host of statewide pols and press and demonstrators in tow--brought his own traveling road show to Red Rocks. The president's band played to a captivated audience: In all, over 10,000 supporters showed up. Many of them arrived hours early, and some stayed for hours afterward. And based on

It was the third stop on a campaign swing that began on October 11 in the isolated oil town of Hobbs, New Mexico, and ended--for me anyway--two days later in the city of Tempe, Arizona. There was a reassuring regularity to all the stops in between. At each rally, Bush was met by a throng of enthusiastic supporters, almost all of them white, young, married, and with small children. Sometimes the families I met had two kids; sometimes three; sometimes more. The children squirmed and made faces while the president spoke, but squealed and clapped hands whenever the audience burst into applause.

At each rally, as the audience waited patiently for the president's armored motorcade to arrive, they listened to the same country music, they said the same prayers, and they waved the same signs: BUSH CHENEY '04 or THIS IS BUSH COUNTRY or WE LOVE W. At each rally the national press watched attentively before scurrying back to the filing center, where they phoned and emailed their editors in New York and Washington. And at each rally, once he arrived, the president delivered the same stump speech, with the same inflections, the same gestures, and the same facial expressions, over and over and over again.

And audiences loved it. At Red Rocks, the Broncos' Shanahan introduced Gen. Franks, who introduced the president. Franks, looking oddly out of character in a dark suit and bright blue tie, explained why Bush should be reelected. "I have seen this president, this commander in chief, when the nights were long and the mornings were early and the decisions to be made were hard," Franks said slowly, his Texas drawl stretching out each word. "And you know what I saw? I saw character, I saw courage, and I saw consistency."