With time before his remarks at the Republican National Convention dwindling, President Bush is hitting the campaign trail hard, with a visit to the Farm Progress Show in Alleman.

The visit will be the first of two stops in Iowa this week, and his sixth in fewer than two months.

The president will make an appearance at a rally in Cedar Rapids on Friday.

Accompanying the president to Alleman will be newfound campaigner and former challenger Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Louis Kishkunas, ISU College Republicans president, said it was pretty obvious that Iowa is an important state in the election this year. The president lost the state by little more than two votes per precinct, Kishkunas said, and was looking to make them up.

He said he expects the president to tailor his message to the issues Iowans feel are important, such as agriculture, but still expects a standard stump speech.

Previous visits to Iowa included Cedar Rapids, Sioux City and Davenport, where Bush was only a few blocks away from Democratic challenger John Kerry.

Iowa has been identified as one of the 16 key battleground states in this election.

According to a recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, the Kerry-Edwards ticket was leading the Bush-Cheney ticket 51 to 46 points, with a 5 percent margin of error.

Bush came under attack on Monday after he commented that the war on terrorism was “not winnable.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan defended the remarks at a press briefing later that day, and said the president was speaking about conventional warfare.

“That’s the kind of war he was talking about,” McClellan said. “I mean, this — you’ve often heard him talk about how this is a different kind of war. We face an unconventional enemy.”

Despite McClellan’s defense, Democratic running mate John Edwards still offered input on the president’s comments.

“After months of listening to the Republicans base their campaign on their singular ability to win the war on terror, the president now says we can’t win the war on terrorism,” Edwards said.

“This is no time to declare defeat.”

— The Associated Press contributed to this article.