Tsongas Also Blasts Bush on Race Issue

President Bush “doesn’t give a damn about race relations,” Democratic presidential hopeful Paul E. Tsongas said Sunday.

In some of his strongest language yet against the President, Tsongas, the sole Democrat so far in the 1992 White House contest, accused Bush of using race to further his political agenda.

He criticized Bush’s 1988 campaign commercials featuring Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer who kidnaped, raped and tried to kill a Maryland woman while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis then was governor of Massachusetts.

Tsongas and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who is mulling a presidential bid, spoke to Democrats at a picnic and brunch Sunday in the state with the nation’s leadoff presidential primary.

Harkin seemed to borrow a line from Ronald Reagan, who asked Americans during his 1980 presidential campaign whether they thought they were better off than they were four years earlier, when Jimmy Carter took office.