BANGOR – In an effort to end a string of poor showings among Republican presidential candidates in Maine, the party’s top official made a swing through the state Tuesday, raising money, signing up members and taking his shots at President Bush’s Democratic rivals.

“We’ve expanded the playing field,” Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said in an interview before an afternoon fund-raiser at the Isaac Farrar Mansion in Bangor. “We feel we can compete in the Northeast the way we haven’t in some time.”

With three of the four top Democratic presidential contenders from New England, Gillespie said Maine would play a prominent role in the party’s effort to re-elect Bush, who lost the state’s four Electoral College delegates to Democrat Al Gore in 2000 by about 30,000 votes of 650,000 cast.

That year, Bush won just one New England state – Republican-leaning New Hampshire – but lost the region by more than 1 million votes.

In 2004, however, Gillespie said it would be the president’s “strong and principled leadership,” – a phrase repeated several times in the half-hour interview – and “positive agenda” that would win votes in the politically moderate state and set him apart from any of the potential Democratic nominees, whose collective rhetoric he dubbed “pessimistic and vitriolic.”

“It’s as though they’re competing to see who can protest the most and move their party furthest back in time,” said Gillespie, who criticized the Democratic candidates to varying degrees for supporting tax increases, costly government-run health care systems, and reactive national defense policies. “They’re all backward-looking, and American people want someone forward-looking who appeals to their best attributes.”

Maine Democrats reached Tuesday were quick to fire back.

“If going back in time means a time when Maine’s unemployment numbers weren’t constantly on the rise and the federal deficit wasn’t rising, maybe it’s time to learn from the past,” said Aymie Walshe, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party. “I’m sure George Bush is doing his own looking back … wistful for a time when his job performance numbers weren’t falling.”

A Zogby International poll released last week put Bush’s job approval rating at 52 percent, the lowest point since before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In that same nationwide poll, 48 percent of likely voters said it’s time for someone new in the White House while 45 percent favored Bush’s re-election.

Those numbers were similar to those in an August poll conducted in Maine by South Portland-based Market Decisions in which Bush’s approval rating dropped from 62 percent to 55 percent in the past two months, marked by a sagging economy and continued unrest in Iraq.

From the Bangor fund-raiser, which collected about $6,000 in donations of between $125 and $250, Gillespie was scheduled to travel to Windsor for a voter registration drive and on to Portland for an evening fund-raiser, expected to net another $8,000, according to Maine Republican Party officials.