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Subject: Candidates Pinpointing Key States; Bush, Clinton Trade 'Crazy' Charges as
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 92 08:47:18 EST
Message-ID: <2.1992Oct31.084718@AmeriCast.com>

Candidates Pinpointing Key States; Bush, Clinton Trade 'Crazy'
Charges as Perot Plans TV Blitz<By Edward Walsh and Ann
Devroy=Washington Post Staff Writers=

President Bush and Gov. Bill Clinton touched down yesterday in
states their campaigns theorize could bring them victory Tuesday
as Ross Perot planned a four-stop weekend of in-person campaign-
ing and an unprecedented blitz of television advertising.

As the countdown to Election Day began to be measured in hours,
Bush, in stops in Tennessee, Missouri and Wisconsin, continued
his relentless portrayal of Clinton as lacking the character to
lead the nation while Clinton took aim at about a dozen key
battleground states where his long quest for the presidency will
finally be decided.

Promising to "press harder, work longer and get stronger," the
Arkansas governor yesterday moved through four of those states -
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan - firing back at
Bush's description of him and his running mate, Sen. Albert Gore
Jr. (Tenn.), as "two bozos" and "crazy."

"I'll tell you what crazy is," Clinton said to a crowd standing
in a light drizzle in downtown Pittsburgh at noon. "I think crazy
is unemployment going up and incomes going down. It's 100,000
Americans a month losing their health insurance. It's one in 10
Americans on food stamps. It's America going from first to 13th
in wages under trickle-down economics. Crazy is 'read my lips'
and then signing the second biggest tax increase in history."

"I don't want to spend the next four days calling names and di-
viding people," he added. "Let Mr. Bush talk about clowns and bo-
zos and crazies."

But Bush, undaunted either by an FBI raid on the home of the U.S.
treasurer he appointed and a criminal investigation into her con-
duct or by another Iran-contra indictment that punched new holes
in his assertions that he was "out of the loop" on trading arms
for hostages, accused Clinton of a "pattern of deceit."

"I don't believe you can have a person in the White House who's
going to try to be on all sides of every issue, flip-flopping.
This pattern of deceit is wrong for America," Bush said.
Presidents cannot lead, he added, "through a pattern of decep-
tion. And you don't do it through waffling."

This is the twilight zone of a presidential campaign, where time
and space meld into a single blur, and Clinton's rhetoric has be-
gun to reflect the realization that the long march he began more
than a year ago is almost at an end. "I need Pennsylvania, I need
western Pennsylvania, I need Pittsburgh," he told the noon rally.
"I can't win without you."

But Bush, by weaving trust and taxes, told voters that change for
change's sake is risky.

"Change, change, change. Well, here's what they want to change,"
he told a crowd of a few thousand in Town and Country, Mo. "They
want to bring in . . . $150 billion in new taxes and $220 billion
in new spending. . . . So when they say we're going after the
rich guys - you cab drivers, you nurses, you reachers - watch
your wallet.  They're coming right after you."

With such major states as California, Illinois and New York seen
by both campaigns as safely in Clinton's column, his campaign
planned an almost nonstop drive before Tuesday into a handful of
states in the South and West and through the industrial belt that
runs from New Jersey to Wisconsin. He will return to Pennsyl-
vania, Ohio and Michigan, and he may make two visits to Milwaukee
because Wisconsin, which Michael S.  Dukakis carried in 1988, has
proved to be a surprisingly stubborn battleground for Clinton
this year.

His tentative schedule Monday, which resembles Dukakis's madcap,
closing dash back and forth across the country four years ago,
could take Clinton to as many as nine states, beginning in Phi-
ladelphia and ending early on Election Day in Colorado or New
Mexico.

"I don't always know where I am, but I know who I am," Clinton
remarked Thursday night in New Jersey.<

Clinton continued to exude confidence, and his campaign received
an unexpected boost with the disclosure of new evidence linking
Bush, when he was vice president, with the Iran-contra scandal of
the Reagan administration.  In a sober policy speech on domestic
issues at a Kentucky Fried Chicken convention in Tennessee, Bush
dropped the one-liners and harsher attacks on Clinton and Gore to
more broadly portray the choice Tuesday not as one between activ-
ism by Clinton and passivity by Bush but between a Democratic ad-
ministration that would impose new taxes and bureaucracies and a
"conservative activist" government trying to help people help
themselves.  Bush and his campaign say he has finally hit his
stride and that the movement is with him, not Clinton.

Before this campaign is over, Bush will hit at least 15 states
with the distilled trust-and-taxes message, taking it to all the
battlegrounds where his campaign believes the president is in
striking distance of victory. Bush's schedule too looks much like
that of Dukakis four years ago - a whirl of airport stops, as
many as a dozen of them Monday, before settling in Houston at
sunrise Tuesday.

In Dallas, Perot taped more "infomercials" for broadcast Sunday
and Monday nights and prepared for weekend campaign stops in Tam-
pa; Kansas City; Los Angeles, and Santa Clara, Calif., followed
by a rally in Dallas Monday.

Sharon Holman, Perot's spokeswoman, said the four states Perot
will visit before the election are places where he has strong
support and, she said, "can make a difference."

But Holman and top campaign aide Orson Swindle sought to dispel
some new polls showing Perot's support eroding. Holman said the
polls should not be believed because they are based on assess-
ments of "likely voters" - a calculation she said could not be
made this year because of an influx of newly registered voters
the Perot camp believes will go their way.

"This is the silent majority that has never been tapped before,"
Holman said of the campaign's effort to recruit tens of thousands
of new voters nationally. "You're going to hear from them in
record numbers. . . . "<

In Denver, Vice President Quayle raised the character issue
against Clinton by reviving "the Tower Test," used in 1989 by
Democrats to oppose the confirmation of former Texas senator John
G. Tower as defense secretary.

At an airport news conference, Quayle quoted Colorado Sen.
Timothy E. Wirth, who is now national co-chairman of the Clinton
campaign, as having said of Tower: " 'While I believe that an in-
dividual has the right to conduct his personal life as he sees
fit, the office of the secretary of defense demands a higher
standard of discretion and judgment.' " Quayle said, "Well, the
office of president demands an even higher standard of discretion
and judgment. And I ask you this question: Does Bill Clinton . .
.  pass the Tower Test?"

At breakneck pace, Quayle has been tracing a great circle around
sparsely populated states of the West and Midwest that campaign
officials believe could make a critical difference, despite their
low number of electoral votes.

Asked why Quayle was making two stops in Montana, which has three
electoral votes, spokesman David Beckwith said the campaign be-
lieves that, with many states up for grabs based in recent polls,
just a few electoral votes could make the crucial difference.

Gore's campaign too has moved into a frenetic sprint, adding
last-minute stops in Georgia and Tennessee in an attempt to shore
up what polls say is slipping support there for the Democratic
ticket. But Gore stuck with what seemed a peculiar decision to
spend time in the final days in New Hampshire and Maine - states
with only four electoral votes each.

Gore's explanation paralleled Beckwith's: "There are four more
days, and we need four more votes, and New Hampshire can deliver
them."

At every stop, Gore reveled in Bush's pasting of him Thursday as
"Mr.  Ozone" who is "crazy" on environmental issues.

"If I had George Bush's enviromental record, I might be tempted
to stoop to name-calling, too," Gore told a crowd at St. Anselm's
College in Manchester, N.H. "But it wouldn't be right to refer to
him as 'Lips', and I'm just not going to do it."

Clinton began the day at a diner in East Rutherford, N.J., where
he took questions from patrons during an hour-long session broad-
cast on ABC's "Good Morning America." He fielded queries on
health care, education, small business and other policy issues,
as well as one that implicitly raised the allegation of marital
infidelity made against him by Gennifer Flowers during the New
Hampshire primary.

Asked by a man whether he thought "somebody that is not faithful
to his wife can be faithful as a president to the people he
serves," Clinton replied, "Yes. I think we've seen that in
presidents in the past. But if you're implying that I'm not
(faithful in marriage), you're wrong."

In Pittsburgh, the major hub for USAir, Clinton told employees of
the airline, which is negotiating the sale of a large interest
and access to its routes to British Airways for badly needed
cash, that he supported the sale provided there were assurances
that a foreign company did not gain indirect control of a U.S.
airline, that U.S. companies have the same right to invest in
foreign carriers and have the same access to foreign airline
markets.

On the airwaves, the campaign radio wars continued as the Bush
campaign launched a new ad accusing Clinton of several flip-
flops, including on offshore oil drilling and higher fuel effi-
ciency standards.

A second Bush ad airing on black-oriented stations charges inac-
curately that "there is no Martin Luther King holiday in Arkan-
sas." In fact, Clinton signed legislation in 1985 making King's
birthday an official state holiday. A Bush aide maintained it is
not a real King holiday because it also honors Robert E. Lee.

Clinton responded with a counterattack spot noting that CBS has
called the Bush ads "make believe," adding: "What are the Repub-
licans trying to do? Scare us away from the voting booth? Well,
it won't work."<

Walsh was with Clinton, Devroy with Bush. Staff writers John F.
Harris in Maine, Michael Isikoff in Texas, Howard Kurtz in Wash-
ington and Kathy Sawyer in Colorado contributed to this re-
port.<02:02 10-31C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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