Las Cruces, N.M. ? His August fund-raising nearly finished, President Bush turned Saturday to giving Republicans a policy record to win on in November and preparing the nation for an extended, expanded war on terror.

“Oh, the hill might be steep at times; it might be a rugged terrain like you’re used to out here in New Mexico,” Bush said at New Mexico State University.

President Bush and Sen. Peter Domenici, R-N.M., wave before making remarks at New Mexico State University. Bush was in Las Cruces on a Western swing to raise money for Republican candidates.

“But we’re going to cross that terrain to achieve peace not only peace for ourselves but, see, we value life all around the world.”

Bush collected campaign cash Saturday here and in Los Angeles, closing out a three-day Western swing marked by unusually large and aggressive protests that seemed to dramatize the obstacles he is likely to face.

Outside a Los Angeles breakfast benefiting California gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon, scores of shouting demonstrators against threatened U.S. military action in Iraq banged drums and held anti-war signs, one of which suggested Bush send his own twin daughters to war.

In Portland, where Bush had opened this trip on Thursday, the demonstrators hundreds of them hammered police cruisers.

Bush appeared unswayed and suggested he will make a clear and compelling case against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the coming weeks.

Protecting America, he said Saturday, is always on his mind because of the menacing threat reports he reviews every morning. “And it would be on your mind too if you saw what I saw on a daily basis,” he told his Los Angeles audience.

Reviving memories of the horror America experienced last September emerged as part of a strategy to reinvigorate popular support for his war aims.

“One of the challenges that I knew I would have is that the further we got away from Sept. 11, the more likely it would be people would forget, would forget the challenge, would not remember the pain and suffering,” he said.

Bush was returning Saturday night to his Crawford, Tex., ranch for the final week of his August getaway. Before returning to the White House at week’s end, he’ll make a dash up to Oklahoma and Arkansas on Thursday to raise money for GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidates there.

One of the candidates he aided Saturday with a $200,000 fund-raiser was New Mexico GOP gubernatorial nominee John Sanchez, who is running against former Clinton administration official Bill Richardson.

Bush previewed his fall stump speech and the issues he’ll try to turn to Republican advantage, many of them topics sprung from the past year’s headlines: homeland security, economic recovery, tough prosecution of corporate crooks, and a plan to combat Western wildfires.