The president's announcement last Thursday that alQaeda had considered attacking the tallest skyscraper in Los Angeles over three years ago certainly generated eye-catching headlines.

It may even have helped his support for a once-secret counter-terrorist wire-tapping programme that critics in both parties have denounced as unconstitutional.

But there are also signs that the political strategy that worked so well in the 2002 mid-term elections, helped sell the war in Iraq and got Bush re-elected in 2004 . . . appealing to the people to stand by the president as he strives to protect them from outside attack . . . may be wearing thin.

The president's announcement on Thursday was greeted with consternation in Los Angeles. Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of America's secondlargest city, said he felt "blindsided" to learn the details of the plan to attack the 73-storey Library Tower from the television instead of hearing it from the White House. Jim Hahn, who was mayor of LA at the time of the purported attack in 2002, said he too had never heard about it.

Bush claimed that the US, in concert with foreign governments, had "faced down a relentless and determined enemy" and "stopped a catastrophic attack on our homeland". The president's domestic security adviser, Frances Townsend, soon told reporters, however, that the attack was originally conceived as part of the 11 September attacks but was postponed because al-Qaeda did not have the resources to pull it off.

Security experts said the plot was disrupted at the conceptual stage by a series of arrests in Asia after 9/11. Asian experts said the man recruited to fly the plane into the LA tower pulled out after he saw the destruction at the World Trade Centre.

"Let's call this what it was, " said Jack Weiss chairman of the Los Angeles Public Safety Commission. "President Bush is digging out of an extraordinarily large political holef It's just part of his constant speechifying, to impress upon people what he's doing in the war on terror." The indignation soon spread beyond LA.

Hillary Clinton, gearing up to run for president in 2008, said the White House was "playing the fear card".

The standard White House response to such criticisms is to accuse Democrats of being soft on terrorism. But that line may be fraying because of what is seen as a highly political approach to national security. Much of the funding from the Department of Homeland Security is not distributed according to need or risk, but in proportion to the states' showing in the presidential electoral college. That means an abundance of funds for reliably Republican Wyoming, and complaints of shortages in target cities like New York and Los Angeles, which are staunchly Democrat.