Bush Condemns Backer’s Plan for Phone Attack Ad

President Bush issued a stern condemnation Friday of a political supporter who plans to advertise a phone service that targets Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, but he insisted his own campaign is powerless to halt the independent offensive.

The denunciation marked Bush’s first public response to ads that will urge viewers to place a $4.99 phone call to listen to tapes of “intimate conversations” between Clinton and Gennifer Flowers, who earlier this year claimed to have had a lengthy affair with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Clinton acknowledged he knew Flowers but has strongly denied her allegations.

In an interview broadcast on PBS television, Bush angrily said of the new attack gambit by supporter Floyd Brown: “I repudiate it now as the kind of sleaze that diminishes the political process.”

But he said his campaign can do nothing more than urge Brown--the architect of 1988’s controversial Willie Horton ads--to shut down the pay-per-call service.

Brown is waging the anti-Clinton effort on behalf of his Presidential Victory Fund, which has pledged to spend $10 million on Bush’s reelection. The ads promoting the phone service were to begin airing on CNN this weekend.

But later Friday, District Judge David Cave in Dallas, acting on a suit filed by Flowers, issued a temporary order blocking use of the tapes.

Cave ordered that Brown’s group be “immediately restrained from running any advertisement through any media form advertising the ‘Bill Clinton Fact Line,’ and from using the tapes or any part thereof, her name, her voice or her likeness for any commercial purpose.”

Cave set a July 23 hearing on whether to convert the temporary order into a temporary injunction pending trial.

Bush’s criticism of the assault on Clinton came as his campaign released a copy of a letter to Brown demanding that his committee cease activities waged in the President’s name. The letter labeled as “absolutely despicable” Brown’s attempt to resurrect Flowers’ allegations. Bush aides said Brown had not responded to the letter.

Neither Bush nor his campaign was so bluntly critical of Brown in 1988 when he used Horton--who raped a woman and brutalized her husband while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison--as the centerpiece for a devastating ad attack against Michael S. Dukakis, that year’s Democratic nominee.

Bush’s comments Friday underscored a determined public effort to distance himself from such controversial tactics this year. But even as he admonished aides to stay out of the “sleaze business,” his chief spokesman added his voice to orchestrated Republican efforts to tarnish the appeal of the Democratic ticket.

Noting that the 45-year-old Clinton and the man he chose Thursday as his running mate, 44-year-old Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee, “bill themselves as the new generation,” Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said: “It means the Democrats have got the Pepsi boys and we have the real thing.”

In other comments by Bush on the “MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour,” he also reasserted his confidence that an economic recovery has begun. He attributed persistent pessimism about the economy to a “disconnect” between public sentiment and reality.

“It happens to be that the economy is growing,” he said. “It happens to be that the statistics I’ve cited are true. The American people don’t feel that yet.”