Bush Stakes Claim to Moral High Ground : Politics: He tells a Knights of Columbus convention of his rigid opposition to abortion rights and his fight for a school prayer amendment.

Declaring that basic values are at stake in the November election, President Bush on Wednesday reasserted his strong opposition to abortion rights and contended he is the candidate best equipped to set the nation’s moral tone.

In a swipe at Democratic challenger Bill Clinton, Bush told the annual Knights of Columbus convention here: “If you’re looking to restore America’s moral fiber, why buy synthetic when you get real cotton?”

Bush focused on issues important to his audience, pledging to keep pressing for a prayer-in-school amendment to the Constitution and legislation to give vouchers to parents who send their children to parochial and other private schools. He ventured most deeply into the politics of abortion, an issue on which he and Clinton are sharply divided.

He vowed to continue to veto abortion-rights legislation, “no matter the political price.”

While Bush’s specific references stuck to matters of public policy, they carried an unmistakable subtext. Only two days after reprimanding a campaign aide, Mary Matalin, for raising questions about Clinton’s personal conduct, Bush chose language that served to reinforce that attack.

“A fundamental issue of this election should be, who do you trust to renew America’s moral purpose?” Bush said. “Now that our moral values are victorious around the globe, we cannot and will not abandon them at home.”

Bush aides insisted that the President did not intend to cast aspersions on Clinton, whom he did not mention by name in his New York speech. They said that in challenging the Arkansas governor’s credentials on the issue of moral leadership, the President meant simply to call attention to the gap between Clinton’s rhetoric and his positions on key family values issue.

But as Bush proclaimed that the President should “set the moral tone for this nation,” his rhetoric left little doubt that his campaign would take every opportunity to raise questions about Clinton’s character.

Well-placed GOP sources said Bush’s stance showed that he was nowhere near as agitated as has been suggested about the controversy that swirled around Matalin.

While White House Chief of Staff Samuel K. Skinner was said to have been deeply disturbed, Bush was reported to have “taken it in stride.” One source said that Bush remained “fully supportive” of efforts to question Clinton’s character.

Campaign press secretary Torie Clarke opened a new front in that attack in questioning why the Democrats made no overt mention of religious faith in the platform they adopted at their July convention. “Why don’t they have the word God in their platform?” Clarke asked. “Are they afraid of it?”

On the abortion issue, Bush won a sustained standing ovation from the audience of nearly 1,000 delegates at the Knights of Columbus convention when he declared: “I am going to stand on my conscience and let my conscience be my guide when it comes to matters of life.”

Since 1980, when Ronald Reagan picked him as his running mate on the Republican presidential ticket, Bush has opposed abortion except in cases on rape, incest or when a mother’s life is in danger.

Clinton favors abortion rights, and various national polls have shown that most Americans agree with that position. Bush portrayed his position as evidence of his recognition that “fundamental moral standards are established by the almighty God.”

Still, Bush stopped short of spelling out his view that Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a woman’s right to an abortion, should be overturned.

Campaign aides have said privately that Bush intends to avoid such precise language out of concern that it might alienate voters favoring abortion rights. He needs the support of some of those voters to win reelection.

Before leaving New York, Bush visited with firefighters and police who responded to a jetliner fire last week at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Instead of taking his limousine to Air Force One, he hopped into a lime-green fire engine and was driven away with a blast of the horn.

Later Wednesday, Bush broke his own proscription against referring to Clinton or his running mate, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, by name. At an airport rally in Reno, he warned that the “the Clinton-Gore ticket has two more weeks of leave, and then, after the (Republican) Convention, we’re going to go after them.”

To the cheers of several hundred supporters, he added: “We’re going to show them what you can do when you go out and fight for American values.”

In a speech to a convention of disabled veterans in Reno, Bush pledged to resist a congressional effort to close down some Veterans Administration hospitals. “I’ll whip out my veto pen and dismantle that Scud missile that’s aimed at your very being,” he said.

As Bush campaigned, a new ABC News-Washington Post poll showed his approval rating dropping to an all-time low, as measured by the survey. Only 33% of those surveyed said they approved of the job Bush was doing as President. No President with such low approval ratings has won reelection since political polling began in the 1940s.

But as he set forth on his two-day campaign trip, Bush seemed to have begun to settle in to his new role as underdog. After months of typically sounding jittery and peevish on the stump, the President has begun to resort to a touch of self deprecation. He has found an unlikely hero in Harry S. Truman, the Democratic President who was written off in most polls but won an upset victory in 1948.

His favorite 1992 Olympic heroes, he now tells audiences, are American swimmers Pablo Morales and Summer Sanders--one because he defeated younger and less-experienced rivals, the other because she came from far behind to win a gold medal.

And he risked skepticism but won laughter in his comments to the Knights of Columbus when he told that audience that he identified with the discoverer for whom the group is named.

“Think about it,” he said. “The guy was faced with questions at about whether his global efforts were worth a darn. Some critics wanted him to cut his voyage short.

“He even faced the threat of mutiny,” Bush continued. “And yet Columbus persevered and won. Not a bad analogy in my view.”