Bush Building Resentment in Congress, Bentsen Says

Lloyd Bentsen said today that if Republican George Bush is elected President, his honeymoon with Congress would be “awfully short” because of resentments stemming from Bush’s negative campaign tactics.

“I don’t see how . . . a President has any kind of a mandate if he wins by the amount of negative advertising” used by Bush, the Democratic vice presidential candidate told reporters on a campaign bus tour of east Texas.

The Texas senator said he does not want a difficult relationship with any new Republican administration, but that the “concentration on negative advertising, that doesn’t become a mandate to the American people.”

“That makes it more difficult,” Bentsen said. “You don’t have any so-called honeymoon. It would be an awfully short one, if you had that.”

Bentsen, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said Bush as President might have particular trouble persuading Congress to accept his campaign promise of a reduction in the top-bracket capital gains tax rate from 33% to 15%.

Bentsen said the proposal would benefit mostly the wealthy and was regarded as a violation of the agreement behind the 1986 tax overhaul law.

“I’m fighting for middle-income America and I’m standing up for middle-income America,” Bentsen told several hundred supporters in Longview.

“When I’m vice president of the United States, and Michael Dukakis is President of the United States, we’ll meet with the press on a regular basis,” he said.

“And there’s something else we’ll do. We’ll meet with the folks, we’ll meet with middle-income America.

“That’s the kind of accountability you want from your elected representatives,” he said, stressing the Democrats’ accessibility to voters and the media.