Bush Vows to Seek Cut in Taxes : Economy Targeted in GOP Acceptance Speech : Convention: The all-bracket reductions are linked to a spending cap in his second-term strategy. He apologizes for breaking ‘read my lips’ pledge.

President Bush, in an often-biting speech that brought delegates to the Republican National Convention roaring to their feet with approval, accepted his party’s nomination Thursday night with a vow that, if reelected, he will seek an across-the-board tax cut from Congress next January.

Addressing the stubborn problems of economic stagnation and high unemployment that threaten to deny him a second term, Bush said lower taxes would have to be offset by “specific spending reductions that I consider appropriate, so that we do not increase the deficit.” He did not specify either the details of the tax reductions or what federal programs he would seek to cut.

Beyond the tax-cut pledge, he focused chiefly on broad themes rather than specific proposals in discussing how he would attack the nation’s pressing economic and other domestic problems in a second term. To deal with the deficit, which many economists and business leaders believe will have devastating consequences if it continues to soar unchecked, Bush renewed his call for a balanced budget amendment and the line-item veto.

He also pledged to veto spending bills that exceed his budget requests--a step he did not take in his first term.

Bush apologized for his decision to break his 1988 “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge when he supported a tax increase in 1990 as part of a deficit-reduction compromise with Congress. He expressed regret for the decision, saying “it was a mistake.” But he charged that his Democratic opponent, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, raised taxes and fees in his home state “128 times and enjoyed it every time.”

In a forcefully delivered speech that combined slashing partisan attacks on the Democrats with appeals to national pride and traditional virtues, Bush sounded the rhetorical notes of personal character, trust, family values and economic renewal he hopes will win back disenchanted voters and return him to the White House in November.

“The defining challenge of the ‘90s is to win the economic competition--to win the peace,” Bush said. “We must be a military superpower, an economic superpower and an export superpower.

“In this election, you’ll hear two visions of how to do this. Theirs is to look inward and protect what we already have. Ours is to look forward, to open new markets, prepare our people to compete, to restore the social fabric, to save and invest so we can win.”

Bush also sought to juxtapose his foreign policy achievements with his opponent’s lack of experience in that area. Portraying himself as a decisive leader who had played the critical role in ending the Cold War and confronting Saddam Hussein after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Bush asked: “What about the leader of the Arkansas National Guard, the man who hopes to be commander in chief? Well, while I bit the bullet, he bit his nails.”

And, in defending his record on domestic affairs, Bush blamed “the gridlocked Democratic Congress” for the continuing economic slump, saying: “Our policies haven’t failed. They haven’t been tried.”

He added: “I have ridden stationary bikes that could move faster than the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.”

Delegates, who interrupted him repeatedly with applause, erupted in wild cheering as the President finished his speech. Tens of thousands of red, white and blue balloons and a blizzard of silvery plastic confetti rained down from high above the podium. The vast arch of the Astrodome was filled with the smoke and flash of an extraordinary indoor fireworks display while “God Bless America” echoed through the hazy air.

As they had the night before, three generations of the Bush family--along with Vice President Dan Quayle and his family--crowded the stage to wave to the delegates. The scene projected powerful images of the traditional family for millions of Americans watching on television, images that GOP strategists hope will remind voters of Clinton’s past personal problems.

Set against such evocative images were repeated attacks by Bush and Quayle, who spoke before him, on Clinton and his running mate, Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee.

For his part, a defiant Quayle lashed out at his critics and cast the campaign in terms of a choice between traditional values and moral relativism. “The gap between us and our opponents is a cultural divide,” Quayle told the convention in a biting acceptance speech. “. . . a difference between fighting for what is right and refusing to see what is wrong.”

There were these other developments at the Republican National Convention:

* Several new opinion polls suggested Bush may finally be getting the lift his strategists had sought from the GOP convention. One of them, an ABC News poll taken Thursday, showed Bush just nine percentage points behind Clinton as a sudden surge of support for the President sent his standing with voters up six points and Clinton’s down 11 points since Tuesday, the network reported. “We’re looking at an extremely close race,” Republican pollster Ed Goeas said.

* GOP strategists see the South and industrial Midwest as the base for a Bush comeback, and he leaves Houston on Friday for a campaign swing designed to recapture his grip on those states. His first stop will be Gulfport, Miss., in the Deep South, and then visits to Missouri, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Illinois.

* Former President Gerald R. Ford, hammering another of the convention’s recurrent themes, reminded delegates that no Republican President has enjoyed GOP control of both houses of Congress since the Eisenhower years, saying: “We must give President Bush the kind of backup in Congress without which no President can turn his programs into real progress.”

Bush, in his acceptance speech, also hammered congressional Democrats, asserting that “a rubber-check Congress and a rubber-stamp President” would be a dangerous combination.

Clinton, Bush charged, has proposed a $150-billion tax increase in his economic plan, which the President said would represent the largest four-year tax hike in American history.

Clinton’s proposal calls for raising taxes on upper-income families and some businesses, but his aides note that the $150-billion increase would be substantially offset by $100 billion in tax reductions for middle-class and poor families and through tax incentives for investment.

Bush’s call for a tax cut followed days of internal debate among his advisers about what to do on taxes. Some aides--and the supply-side faction within the GOP led by Housing Secretary Jack Kemp--urged Bush to propose a tax cut immediately. Instead, he followed the advice of staff members who argued for a general pledge to seek action in a second term--and to emphasize he would not let a tax cut boost the deficit.

Senior aides feared voters would see any call for tax cuts by the current Congress--whose Democratic majorities have stood in the way of even modest tax reductions--as a cynical ploy to offset the political damage done when he broke his 1988 pledge of “read my lips, no new taxes” in 1990.

Bush, in his acceptance speech, said the basic elements in his approach to reviving the nation’s troubled economy, if granted a second term, would be: open markets, lower government spending, greater opportunities for small business, health care reform, job training and a push for his now-pending education program, in addition to tax cuts.

Bush called once more for “a cap on mandatory spending,” that is, a limit on the amount the government could spend on entitlement programs that now are a major share of all federal spending.

He offered no further details on that proposal in his speech, but he has indicated that only Social Security would be exempt from new restrictions. Curbs on such programs as Medicare, which covers the medical expenses of the elderly, have not been ruled out.

In one surprise proposal, he suggested an optional checkoff on individual income tax returns to reduce the national debt. Taxpayers could specify that up to 10% of their tax payment be used to cut the debt, which has reached a record $4 trillion. To ensure that Congress does not circumvent the plan by simply borrowing more money, he said that the debt payments would be matched dollar for dollar by mandatory spending cuts.

Bush vowed to veto any spending bills approved by Congress that exceed his own budget recommendations. Although Bush has vetoed 30 bills during his first term, he has not rejected any legislation because it appropriated more money than he had proposed.

Bush focused more on the future than on the nation’s prolonged economic slump. He alluded to it, however, saying that “nothing hurts me more” than to meet Desert Storm veterans who are unemployed. And he acknowledged that many Americans fear losing their jobs.

He seemed to blame such difficulties on the shifting global economy, saying: “The world is in transition, and we are feeling that transition in our homes. The defining challenge of the ‘90s is to win the economic competition, to win the peace.”

At another point, he declared: “We must be a military superpower, an economic superpower and an export superpower.”

For the United States to thrive in the global economy, Bush called for new job training programs, changes in education that would allow broader school choice and new opportunities for small business. In addition, he repeated a theme Quayle has raised--that costly legal fees have become a serious burden on the U.S economy.

Although most strategists in both parties believe the fall campaign will turn on domestic issues, Bush defended the importance of his record in foreign policy as a vital contribution to the nation and a precondition for true economic renewal.

Ticking off the dramatic changes that began with the throwing off of the communist yoke in Eastern Europe, continued through the pulling down of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Bush said:

“If I had stood before you four years ago and described this as a world we would help to build, you would have said: ‘George Bush, you must be smoking something, and you must have inhaled.’ ”

Bush’s remark was another barb directed at Clinton, reminding listeners that the Democrat has said he once experimented with marijuana but did not inhale it. Bush also said: “My opponents say I spend too much time on foreign policy. As if it didn’t matter that schoolchildren once hid under their desks in drills to prepare for nuclear war. I saw the chance to rid our children’s dreams of the nuclear nightmare, and I did.”

The Polls

The new poll results provided the first clear-cut good news for Republicans in months. Along with the ABC poll, a new CBS poll conducted Tuesday and Wednesday showed the President within 11 percentage points of Clinton. In a poll for the network last week, Clinton led by 18 points. And a CNN-USA Today poll take Wednesday and Thursday gave Clinton a 12 point lead, compared to a 21 point lead last week.

“The Republican vote has come home in a very big way--not only conservative Republicans but moderate-liberal Republicans as well,” pollster Goeas said.

The margin of error for each of the polls was estimated at plus or minus three percentage points.

Top Bush strategists sought to avoid any impression of overconfidence and stressed that the true impact of the convention would not become clear until a new round of polling is completed over the weekend.

But they were plainly satisfied at the signs that the Republicans had begun at last to loosen Clinton’s hold on the voters the party most needs to win back. “We’re fairly confident that the convention will give us some bump and help us start to close, and we’ll continue to close from there,” campaign chairman Robert M. Teeter said.

Perhaps most significant in the new polls were indications of increasingly negative sentiment toward Clinton. A CBS poll conducted a week ago showed that only 24% of voters held an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic nominee, as compared with 47% for Bush.

But the new poll, conducted Tuesday and Wednesday, showed 29% of voters unfavorably disposed to Clinton, with Bush’s unfavorable rating dropping to 42%.

In a luncheon interview, Teeter acknowledged that the results still left the Bush team with a long way to go if it hopes to overcome the Clinton lead. But he said the convention would serve to “get us back on track and in the game in a very competitive position.”

And Doug Bailey, publisher of the Hotline newsletter, for whom the Tarrance survey was conducted, said flatly: “The trend line says we’re heading for a dead-even race.”

The Campaign

However much he may have benefited from the convention, Bush was to depart Houston Friday morning with a heavy task. Advisers acknowledged that he still needed to devote considerable effort to shoring up support among conservative voters he had hoped to be able to take for granted at this stage of the race.

Indeed, he was to head first to Gulfport, Miss., for a joint rally with Quayle--a sign that the campaign remains unsure of its backing even in that solid Republican region. By contrast, Democratic nominee Bill Clinton used his post-convention trip for a bus-ride foray across the battleground states of the Midwest.

Playing his good ol’ boy role to the hilt, Bush was to travel on to a country music festival in Branson, Mo., later Friday. A weekend of campaigning was also to include appearances in Georgia, at an evangelical convention in Texas and at the Illinois State Fair.

The Bush team had once planned to go almost immediately to California after the convention on the theory that its momentum from the Houston conclave could help rally support in that crucial state. But its prospects there have dimmed so badly that Republican pollster Richard B. Wirthlin told reporters Friday that it would be all but impossible for Bush to overcome Clinton’s lead.

Teeter, Bush’s campaign manager, challenged that prediction, saying that California was likely to mirror a close national race. But strategists acknowledged that Bush intended first to focus his attention elsewhere in hopes that a rise in the polls would begin to buoy his prospects in the West.

After his Southern swing this weekend, Bush is to travel to New Jersey and Connecticut on Monday, and then to Illinois and Michigan Tuesday.

Gerald Ford

Urging Republicans to close ranks behind Bush, Ford reminded them of the close race he lost to Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia, in 1976--a race Ford described as very much like the one Bush faces against Clinton.

Ford noted Carter was a newcomer to the national scene with virtually no international experience and said that at this time in 1976, in his own bid for reelection, he was 29 to 33 points behind Carter in the polls.

Then, too, economists agreed the country was coming out of a recession, but not fast enough to help Ford in the election. Although the Republican Party “had torn itself apart and never put itself back together,” Ford said, he “closed the gap to 49.9%, and we almost made it.”

The Democrats, he said, have been saying “the Bush presidency is finished, done, kaput, the ballgame’s over. But I don’t believe it. You don’t believe it. And . . . the Democrats don’t believe it.”

“Haven’t we heard enough from the whiners, the wanters, the wasters and the wafflers?” he said. “The Democrats tell us every four years that they have repented and rejuvenated themselves. Now they proclaim a ‘new covenant’ that will lead us all to the land of promises, promises, promises.”

Times staff writers William J. Eaton and Douglas Jehl contributed to this report.