Wilder’s Back in Spotlight, Assails Democrats

Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder emerged Saturday from a month deliberately out of the spotlight to deliver a fiery attack on President Bush and fellow Democrats and to lay out the rationale for his likely 1992 presidential campaign.

Wilder took to task not only Bush but also many “fiscal pretenders on the campaign trail” in his own party, including a jab that appeared directed at a potential foe in the Democratic race--New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.

“The American people have had their fill of conventional rhetoric and I’m not just speaking of that which flows from the mouth of the other party but equally that which emanates from Democratic pretenders to the throne,” Wilder said. “ . . . Those who travel to Washington to deliver blistering speeches on fiscal responsibility but then return to their home states where they have blistered their own citizens with deficit spending and other fiscal torture.

“Why should the American people believe a political preacher whose fiscal practices bear no resemblance to his sermons?”

Wilder, 60, plans to announce around Labor Day whether he will seek the Democratic nomination. He chose Saturday’s speech to a Young Democrats meeting in Miami to deliver the clearest signal yet that he plans to seek the Democratic nomination, and to offer a three-pronged rationale that aides say would be the centerpiece of a Wilder campaign.

“I believe the fundamental concerns of the American people include, but are not limited to, three broad categories: economic opportunity, fiscal responsibility and individual liberty,” Wilder said in his prepared remarks. “In 1992, we Democrats must offer the American people a candidate who can restore fiscal discipline and common sense to this nation.”

The governor also told his audience: “You are the generation of Democrats who can ensure that we indeed have a new kind of President and federal government in the coming years and--for the record--I’m willing to help out in any way that I can.”