D'Amato And Schumer Slug It Out

In their final debate, the two men locked in one of the nation's tightest campaigns for U.S. Senate yelled and squabbled and still managed to offer their opinions on taxes and abortion.

"All right, all right, this is getting out of hand!" moderator Gabe Pressman said Sunday in an effort to control the exchanges between Republican incumbent Alfonse D'Amato and Rep. Charles Schumer, a Brooklyn Democrat.

The exchanges at times degenerated into schoolboy taunts, as when Schumer told D'Amato: "We passed more mandatory-sentence laws than you did!"

Despite the sometimes confusing back-and-forth, there were a few strong exchanges.

D'Amato acknowledged that he does not support abortion on demand, but he said he voted 18 times to permit abortions in cases of rape or incest or to save the mother's life.

Schumer responded by saying that D'Amato voted against abortion in cases of rape and incest in 1983, and he called D'Amato an extremist.

"(Have) the decency and the honesty and courage to come clean and say that you are strongly pro-life and you believe in it," Schumer told the senator. "I have a 100 percent pro-choice voting record."

Schumer said that when his wife had a routine amniocentesis before the birth of their daughter Alison, now 9, and saw the fetus sucking its thumb, they decided she would not have an abortion if she became pregnant again.

"But that's how it should be determined by people talking among themselves, families talking with ministers, priests, rabbis and their doctor, and not by the government imposing a solution," he said.

Recent polls have shown the two in a dead heat. The campaign is one of the costliest and nastiest in the nation: Schumer has called D'Amato a liar. D'Amato has called Schumer a "putzhead," Yiddish for penis and a term used to deride someone as a fool.

As the debate turned to taxes, D'Amato said his challenger had "voted to tax everything that's alive and even people who had died."

"He hit farmers, he hit working middle-class families, people on Social Security, and, Chuck, you can't deny it yours was the deciding vote to have the greatest tax increase in the history of the country," D'Amato said.

"He's talking about President Clinton's bill in 1993 on the budget," Schumer interjected.

"I'm talking about your vote to increase taxes," D'Amato responded.

D'Amato, as he did in the first debate over the weekend, turned nearly every one of his answers into an attack on Schumer for having missed 110 votes in Congress this year.

"The people of America understand if you don't go to work, you don't get a promotion," said the three-term incumbent. "You get fired."

Schumer's rejoinder was that "when you run for office you sometimes miss votes."

"I have a 92 percent voting record. This year, Senator D'Amato is in th bottom third of his class as well," he said. "The real issue is effectiveness."