Group Will Air TV Spots About Clinton, Flowers

The Republican operative who brought you the Willie Horton ad is back, and this time his subject is Gennifer Flowers.

Floyd G. Brown, who heads an independent group promoting President Bush’s reelection, plans to air ads next week about Flowers’ allegation that she had a 12-year affair with Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton--which Clinton has denied. The ad urges viewers to call a Nevada number, set up by Brown, “to hear Flowers’ tapes of their intimate conversations.”

The 30- and 60-second television spots combine two of the most noteworthy features of the 1992 campaign: new technology (a phone service that the ad says will cost $4.99 per call) and tabloid sleaze (Flowers first sold her allegations to the supermarket magazine Star).

Bush campaign spokeswoman Torie Clarke said Wednesday that “we have absolutely nothing to do with Floyd Brown. . . . We are not interested in the sleazy stuff at all.”

Clinton adviser Betsey Wright called it “despicable” that Brown “is trying to make money from Gennifer Flowers’ lies,” noting that experts hired by two news organizations found the tapes had been selectively edited.

Bush’s 1988 campaign disavowed the Horton ad but was widely seen as benefiting from its racial overtones. The ad pictured Horton, a black convict who raped a white woman while on a furlough program under then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee.