BUSH ENDORSES McCAIN AT WHITE HOUSE

President Bush officially endorsed Senator McCain at the White House yesterday, symbolically designating the Arizona Republican as his heir apparent and the party’s standard-bearer for the general election. “He’s a president, and he’s going to be the president,” Mr. Bush said as he stood next to Mr. McCain in a joint Rose Garden appearance. The president, who defeated Mr. McCain in a bitter battle for the Republican nomination in 2000, appeared relaxed and joked his way through a number of awkward questions that centered on his unpopularity nationwide and whether his support would help or hinder Mr. McCain. “If my showing up and endorsing him helps him, or if I’m against him and it helps him, either way, I want him to win,” Mr. Bush said, adding that “if he wants my pretty face standing by his side at one of these rallies, I’ll be glad to show up.” Mr. McCain said he’d love to have Mr. Bush campaign for him as often as his “busy schedule” would allow. Asked for advice on picking a vice president, Mr. Bush also quipped that Mr. McCain should “be careful” about the person he selects to head the search committee — a reference to his own experience with Vice President Cheney.

OBAMA CAMPAIGN CRITICIZES CLINTON OVER MISS. COMMENTS

With the Mississippi primary coming up next week, the Obama campaign is dredging up comments that Senator Clinton made nearly six months ago that some state Democrats considered derogatory. Campaigning for the Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Clinton said she was “shocked” to learn that Iowa had the same negligible record in electing blacks and women to office as Mississippi. “How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi?” she asked in October, according to the Chicago Tribune. “That’s not the quality. That’s not the communitarianism, that’s not the openness I see in Iowa.” Yesterday, the Obama campaign in Mississippi held a press conference asking that Mrs. Clinton explain her remarks. “Throughout this campaign, Senator Clinton has shown a disturbing pattern of writing off and criticizing states that she’s lost or that she doesn’t expect to do well in, including small states and Southern states,” a former Mississippi governor, Ray Mabus, said. “We want to work to grow our party so we can get more excellent women into office. But Senator Clinton’s derogatory comments are exactly the wrong way to go about that.” Advisers to Mrs. Clinton have said the Mississippi primary, scheduled for March 11, would be “challenging” for her and that Mr. Obama is favored there.

PRO-CLINTON GROUP HEAVILY SUPPORTED BY LABOR UNION

An independent group supporting Senator Clinton spent $864,000 on television ads on her behalf in Texas and Ohio, with much of its funding coming from the AFSCME union. Federal disclosure documents, first reported yesterday by Politico, indicate that AFSCME contributed $1 million of the $1.2 million raised by the “527” committee, American Leadership Project. The group is expected to continue running ads praising Mrs. Clinton in Pennsylvania, which holds the next major primary on April 22.

POLICE INQUIRY URGED IN CANADA OVER OBAMA-NAFTA FLAP

The flap over a meeting between a senior economic adviser to Senator Obama and Canadian officials could be subject to a criminal investigation if Canadian opposition parties have their way. The leader of the New Democratic Party, Jack Layton, said the leak of the meeting may have affected the results of the March 4 election in Ohio and called on Prime Minister Harper to open an inquiry, Bloomberg News reported. The Obama campaign struggled in the closing days of the race to explain the meeting, which it had initially denied took place. According to a memo the Canadian government later disavowed, the Obama adviser, Austan Goolsbee, had told officials that the senator’s criticism of NAFTA on the campaign trail was just “political rhetoric.”