Bush Goes Negative
As the struggle for battleground states continues, George W. Bush is taking the opportunity to lash out at rival Al Gore, who has yet to return the attacks.
Gore has stuck to hammering at the Texas governor's tax proposals and playing a little defense, while Bush has taken to assailing the vice president's credibility.
Both were stumping in Michigan on Thursday after making separate campaign forays into Ohio on Wednesday.
Democrat Gore is hanging on to his insistence that Republican Bush would fritter away the budget surplus on tax breaks for the rich at the same time he touts his own care tax credit proposal.
Bush was set to talk about children's issues in Michigan as he continues to underscore what he called Gore's "exaggerations and embellishments" from Tuesday night's debate.
"This is a man - he's got a record, you know, of sometimes exaggerating to make a point," said Bush.
The governor pointed to two of Gore's debate comments - one about a disaster inspection trip to Texas, the other about a Florida schoolgirl forced to stand in a crowded classroom.
The girl did have to stand - but only for the first day of class when there were not enough desks in the room, not longer as Gore implied. And the vice president did not actually accompany Federal Emergency Management Agency head James Lee Witt on that 1998 inspection trip to Texas, as Gore claimed, but did make his own trip to view wildfire damage.
"It's another in a disturbing pattern of the vice president simply making things up," said Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes.
GOP running mate Dick Cheney weighed in that he was "puzzled and saddened" by what he saw as the latest Gore "misrepresentations."
"During a fund-raising visit to Houston in June 1998 he attended a hastily arranged airport briefing on the fires and then drove off to a political fund-raiser," Cheney said of Gore.
Gore's reaction, given to reporters on Air Force Two late Wednesday night, was essentially that he made plenty of trips to inspect disasters with Witt, but that in the case cited by the Bush campaign, he must have gone to Texas with a deputy.
"Evidently James Lee was not on the trip. He was on 16 other trips with me, and I guess one of his deputies was on that trip," Gore said.
But Bush's debate night rhetoric was not entirely free of exaggeration, either. At one point during their first face-to-face encounter in Boston, Bush accused Gore of outspending him, even though Federal Elections Commission (FEC) records show Bush has spent $121 million to Gore's $60 million.
As Bush sought to focus on character following the debate, Gore tried to shrug off charges of exaggerating his record lodged by his GOP rival and said the key campaign issue is who would benefit most from campaign proposals.
"Will we use our prosperity to enrich not just the few, not just in some areas, but all of our families and all of the country?" Gor asked. "We need an all-out, concerted effort to make sure that the prosperity endures and spreads and takes in all of our people."
Both Ohio and Michigan are huge industrial states in a region likely to decide next month's election. Polls show both states are competitive - and the similar intineraries of the two campaigns leaves little doubt about how each side views their stakes in the Rust Belt. The mirror schedules continue when both Bush and Gore are slated to stump in Florida before a weekend of preparation for their next debate.