Go to Polls, Bush Tells Republicans : Politics: President talks tough on the last day of campaigning. The election ‘is critical,’ he says in Texas in trying to use coattails to aid candidates.

President Bush returned to his transplanted roots in the heart of Texas’ flag-waving politics Monday, issuing a sharply worded appeal for the state Republican ticket and telling voters: “Don’t tell me what’s wrong about this country. Show us what’s right about it.

“Tomorrow’s vote is critical,” Bush said, in a last-minute effort to use his presidential coattails to draw Republican voters to the polls today. “You have a chance to make a difference.”

For Bush, who was born in Massachusetts but whose political life began after he moved to Texas in 1948, the final day of the 1990 congressional campaign provided an opportunity to return to the tough talk of his successful 1988 presidential campaign--laced with a strong dose of anti-Washington appeal.

“The cynics, these Washington pundits we see on these tiring (television) shows all the time--I don’t know if you’re like I am, maybe you enjoy those things, but I can only take so much self-flagellation. And I see all these great ‘inside-the-Beltway’ experts telling us everything that is wrong with the United States,” the President said to a fired-up crowd that filled the bleachers and basketball court of the Tyler Junior College gymnasium in Tyler, the rose-growing center of East Texas. “Tomorrow, you can go to the polls and say what’s right about it.”

At his side were Phil Gramm, the conservative Republican senator expected to coast to an easy reelection victory, and Clayton W. Williams Jr., the millionaire oilman completing a tough, gaffe-ridden campaign for governor against the Democratic state treasurer, Ann Richards.

“I’ve listened to some of the campaign rhetoric coming out of the other side, and it’s sad. It is pessimistic. It is downbeat. It is tired. And it’s liberal,” Bush said.

“Don’t listen to that tired, liberal, divide, class-warfare rhetoric about soaking the rich,” Bush continued, hoping to turn the divisive fight over the federal budget to Republican advantage with an attack on the Democrats. “Hold on to your wallets. They’re after you--every single one of you.”

With Gramm and Williams traveling with him aboard two mid-size Air Force jets--Bush’s new Boeing 747 Air Force One is too big for smaller runways--the President hopscotched from Houston to Tyler in northeast Texas and then to Waco, in central Texas. He then headed back home for a campaign-ending rally in a hotel ballroom near the well-heeled Galleria shopping mall close to the hotel suite that is his official residence in Houston.

In Tyler, the scene and the message were right out of Bush’s 1988 campaign against Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts: plenty of flags, a rendition of country and Western singer Lee Greenwood’s hymn, “I’m Proud to be an American,” and a dance routine by Tyler Junior College’s precision dance and drill team, the Apache Belles.

Williams, whom the President called “a Texas original,” needed no encouragement to repeat Bush’s message.

He called on his audience to stand up to the “pie-in-the-sky liberal rhetoric stirred up by Richards, Mike Dukakis and Walter Mondale, three peas in a liberal pod,” and to “liberal Hollywood values.”

In seeking to capitalize on what is believed to be a strong anti-politician mood not only in Texas but across the nation, Williams--whose most recent setback occurred just days ago when it was disclosed that he had paid no taxes in 1986 because, he said, he had no income that year--told his Tyler audience, “Any of you who have followed this race know I am not a professional politician. Well, I wear that as a badge of honor.”

Bush, of course, is very much a professional politician and, in his adopted home state of Texas, candidates have flocked to his side, showing none of the reservations that opposition to the compromise budget package engendered in late October as Bush campaigned in New England.

“Considering all that’s going on, I think he’s doing a good job,” said Jim Klinger, a chemist, who kept his two children, Robbie, 10, and Amanda, 8, out of school on Monday to hear Bush in Tyler.

But, given the President’s recent sag in public opinion polls as the budget fight flared into public attention and the Persian Gulf crisis dragged on without resolution, his impact, beyond stirring up already committed Republican voters, is questioned by some Democrats. “The coattail effect is limited,” said a Democratic political consultant, “if the the emperor has no clothes.”

Since Labor Day, Bush has campaigned in 18 states, and, during a final blitz, spoke at 11 rallies across the country in a five-day period.

When asked if the President would claim credit if Republicans do well in the elections, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater cracked: “I expect we will claim victory no matter what happens.”