Ads Shift to Impact of Foreign-Built Cars : GOP: Bush scores Buchanan for owning a Mercedes-Benz. The challenger says the President’s aides have ties to Japanese concerns.

The competing Republican campaigns of President Bush and Patrick J. Buchanan opened assaults over Michigan airwaves Thursday night with advertisements intended to exploit the devastating impact on the state’s economy of foreign-built automobile sales.

The Bush television ads note that Buchanan, who is running on a platform of “America first,” owns a German-made Mercedes-Benz. The Buchanan spots call attention to ties retained by senior Bush campaign officials with Japanese concerns, including the Japan Auto Parts Industry Assn.

“While our auto industry suffers, Pat Buchanan chooses to buy a foreign car,” the Bush ad says, showing a picture of a shut-down Detroit auto plant. Showing a Mercedes logo superimposed over a photograph of the challenger, it concludes: “Michigan has too much at stake to trust Pat Buchanan.”

The Buchanan ad says, “Senior advisers to the Bush campaign work for foreign auto concerns” as the names of Charles Black and James Lake--two of the highest ranking officials on the President’s reelection team--are typed across the screen. It concludes: “No wonder Michigan has lost 73,000 jobs.”

The exchange underscores the view of both Republican campaigns that Tuesday’s Michigan primary could be won or lost over the explosive tensions fueled by the state’s unemployment rate of 9%.

Buchanan has emphasized his America first message in campaign stops across the state in hopes it will attract support from voters embittered by the state’s economic problems and the ascendancy of foreign-made cars. He has suggested that the Bush campaign is “beginning to emerge as a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan Inc.”

Bush campaign officials said Thursday night they believe their new ad will persuade Michigan voters of the “hypocrisy” of Buchanan’s claims. “It’s America first in his political speeches, but a foreign-made car in his driveway,” the ad says.

The ad also claims that Buchanan called his American cars “lemons.”

Such is the disdain in Detroit for foreign-made cars that Buchanan was forced to defend owning a Mercedes as he began campaigning in the state. He told local reporters Wednesday that he bought the car three years ago at the request of his wife, Shelley. Buchanan himself drives a Cadillac.

The Buchanan ad expands upon disclosures this year that Lake, now Bush’s deputy campaign manager, and Black, a senior adviser to the campaign, have done public relations and lobbying work on behalf of Japanese clients.

Lake is a founding partner in the Washington firm of Robinson, Lake, Lerer & Montgomery, which is paid about $10,000 a month by the Japan Auto Parts Industry Assn. Black, who heads the Washington firm of Black, Manafort & Stone, is part of a lobbying team representing a Japanese-dominated part of a seafood processing business.

Buchanan, meanwhile, campaigned Thursday in Illinois--site of Tuesday’s other primary--and he repeatedly lashed out at Bush for exhibiting what he termed weak leadership in the face of a congressional check-writing scandal. He urged the President to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any lawmaker discovered to have criminally bounced checks drawn on the House bank.

He told a series of audiences in suburban Chicago and in the city’s white ethnic neighborhoods that Washington is engaged in a “cover-up of major proportions” as House leaders attempt to prevent the public from learning which representatives bounced checks and in what amount.

Jehl reported from Washington, Fulwood from Chicago.