Bush Cites ‘Uphill Fight’; Chides Liberals

Vice President George Bush, acknowledging that he faces “an uphill fight” in his campaign for the presidency, said Thursday that liberals are “champing at the bit to raise taxes again” with an eye toward reviving the Great Society domestic programs.

Speaking to approximately 700 Republican Party donors at a luncheon that an organizer said raised $2.5 million for the party’s presidential effort, Bush kicked aside his conventional low-key campaign style to attack congressional Democrats.

The fund-raising event, for which some in the audience paid $10,000 a couple, was part of a national effort by the party to supplement the approximately $46 million Bush and the apparent Democratic presidential nominee, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, will each receive for their campaigns from the federal government.

“It’s an uphill fight, an uphill fight, for our Republican team this year, and I’m talking team, from top to bottom,” the vice president said. “After eight years of one party in the White House, no matter how successful, some good people yearn for change--hoping that ‘change’ will mean ‘improvement.’ ”

Cites Experience

“It’s our job to let them know that this time, in this case, change and improvement come from the Republican Party and from experience,” he said.

In the highly partisan address, Bush said that liberals hoped “to recreate and expand every Great Society dream, every program and scheme, that they’ve had in the last eight years.” The Great Society was the name given to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s extensive program of social welfare and other elements of poverty assistance.

“The trouble with the Democrats in Congress is that they haven’t learned to ‘just say no,’ ” the vice president said. “They rush to enact--you see it today, they’re trying to ram it down the track to affect the elections this fall--every soft-hearted idea that crosses their desks, eyes closed to the social and economic consequences.”

Bush is in the midst of a rare week of expensive cross-country campaigning during a period when his cash-short campaign is trying to hold down spending until the federal election funds arrive for the general election campaign.

After events Wednesday in San Francisco and Wisconsin, he returned to Washington that evening, flew to New York Thursday morning after meeting with Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and then returned to Washington for a fund-raising dinner before heading for a three-day holiday at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Me.

Rich Bond, the vice president’s deputy campaign manager, said that the cost of the New York trip Thursday was being shared by the Republican National Committee and the vice president’s office, rather than the Bush campaign organization, because the first event Bush attended was sponsored by the party and the second--an address to the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives--was considered part of his official duties.

Drug Death Penalty

In the speech to the law enforcement group, Bush called for the death penalty “for the drug kingpins who are poisoning our kids.

“These people are dealing in death, and that’s what they should get,” he said.

He also suggested that federal jail space should be offered to states, to encourage them to lock up habitual offenders of drug laws.

And, in a poignant exploration of the social costs of drug abuse, the vice president recalled a visit his wife, Barbara, made to a Harlem hospital where she “held in her arms a child dying of AIDS, one of about 30 ‘boarder babies’ who live at the hospital.

“They don’t have parents any more. Their parents literally threw them away,” he said of the tiny patients. “The parents are drug addicts. That’s how they got AIDS. And that’s why they’re going to die, alone, in a little white crib in a big city hospital. And drugs did that.”