Bush Argues Case Against Edwards

President Bush on Friday took his most pointed jab yet at the Democrats’ new candidate for vice president, chiding Sen. John Edwards for his career as a trial lawyer.

The president drew boisterous cheers and laughter when he included his dig at Edwards as he talked of the need to control frivolous lawsuits.

“You cannot be pro-small business and pro-trial lawyer at the same time,” Bush said. “You have to choose. My opponent has made his choice, and he put him on the ticket.”

Bush also took aim at Edwards’ image as an optimist, which Democrats have said offers a rejoinder to GOP claims that Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumed Democratic nominee, preaches negativity. “Whether their message is delivered with a frown or a smile,” Bush said, “it’s the same old pessimism.”

Edwards, 51, a senator from North Carolina named to the ticket Tuesday, promotes his record of having won millions of dollars for injured consumers as evidence that he fights for average people.

Bush’s comments came at the end of a daylong bus tour through some of Pennsylvania’s most culturally conservative regions -- towns in the center of the state, where GOP strategists believe turnout will be crucial to their hopes of carrying the state. Bush lost Pennsylvania in 2000 by 4 percentage points.

As he tended to his base, Bush acknowledged in an interview with Pennsylvania newspapers that he had had difficulty with a core Democratic group he has tried at times to court: African Americans. He said he declined an invitation to address the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People annual conference that starts today in Philadelphia because he was upset at that group’s criticisms of him. The president said he was largely estranged from the civil rights organization.

“I would describe my relationship with the current leadership as basically nonexistent,” Bush said, according to a Knight Ridder News Service report. “You’ve heard the rhetoric and the names they’ve called me.”

Bush addressed the group during the 2000 campaign, pledging to find commonalities with it. But during his term, NAACP leaders have frequently assailed his administration. Three years ago, Julian Bond, the group’s chairman, accused Bush of selecting Cabinet members “whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection.”

As Bush visited Pennsylvania, his campaign started new TV, radio and newspaper advertisements designed to paint Kerry as out of step on issues such as abortion and gun control. “Kerry has priorities. Are they yours?” asks a narrator in the TV spot.

The Democratic candidates defended their character Friday, stressing Edwards’ small-town roots and Kerry’s military service. “I grew up like most of you ... in a little town out in rural North Carolina,” Edwards told a crowd in Beaver, W. Va. population 1,378. “I know what the values of real America are: faith, family, responsibility, opportunity for everybody.”

Bush drew laughs as he quoted Kerry saying last week that he held conservative values. “It’s hard to square that statement with his previous statement when he said, ‘I’m a liberal and proud of it,’ ” Bush said.

Jenna Bush, a new graduate of the University of Texas, joined her father on the campaign trail for the first time.

*

Times staff writer Matea Gold contributed to this report.