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 strategy for a second term. Quayle points to a ‘cultural divide.’

President Bush, addressing the economic problems that threaten to deny him a second term, accepted the Republican nomination Thursday night with a vow that, if reelected, he will seek an across-the-board tax cut from Congress next January.

Such tax cuts would be offset by reductions in federal spending to prevent an increase in the already soaring federal deficit, Bush said. He did not specify either the details of the tax cuts or what federal programs he would seek to cut.

Bush called once more for what he called “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 exempted from new restrictions. Curbs on such programs as Medicare, which covers the medical expenses of the elderly, have not been ruled out.

Bush sounded the themes of character, national strength, trust, family values and economic renewal that he hopes will win back disenchanted voters and carry him to victory over Democrat Bill Clinton in November. He said the two parties this year offer voters two distinct visions for America’s future:

“Theirs is to look inward and protect what we already have. Ours is to look forward--and to open new markets, prepare our people to compete, to restore the social fabric, to save and invest so we can win.”

The challenge of the years just ahead, he declared, is “to win the economic competition--to win the peace.” Said Bush: “We must be a military superpower, an economic superpower and an export superpower.”

There were these other developments at the Republican National Convention:

* Vice President Dan Quayle, accepting his own renomination, vowed to join with Bush in “building an America more secure in the values of faith, family and freedom.” He also said: “The gap between us and our opponents is a cultural divide . . . a difference between fighting for what is right and refusing to see what is wrong.”

* New opinion polls suggested Bush may finally be getting the lift his strategists had sought from the GOP convention. A CBS poll showed the President moving within 11 percentage points of Clinton, and a survey by the Houston Chronicle and the Hotline, a political newsletter, also showed Bush narrowing the gap. “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.”

To help him achieve his goals in a second term, Bush appealed to voters to help “roll back the roadblock” he said was created by the Democrat-controlled Congress. And “a rubber-check Congress and a rubber-stamp President,” he said, would be a dangerous combination.

He accused Clinton of having enjoyed raising taxes as governor of Arkansas, while he himself regretted his decision to support a tax increase in 1990 as part of a compromise with Congress aimed at reducing the deficit. The compromise did not accomplish that goal.

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.

He also vowed to veto any appropriation bill that exceeds his budget request and to renew his quest for a line-item veto and a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

Bush also embraced a plan to allow taxpayers to specify that a portion of their taxes would go to reduce the deficit.

Dan Quayle

In his acceptance speech, Quayle struck back at those who have criticized him and questioned his qualifications to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. The vice president said: “I know my critics wish I were not standing here tonight. They don’t like our values. They look down on our beliefs. They’re afraid of our ideas. And they know the American people will stand on our side.

“That’s why, when someone confronts them and challenges them, they will stop at nothing to destroy him. To them I say: You have failed. I stand before you, and before the American people--unbowed, unbroken and ready to keep fighting for our beliefs.”

Hammering away at the “family values” theme that, according to the polls, apparently has increased Clinton’s negatives during the convention, Quayle said that too often parents struggle to instill character in their children “only to see their values belittled and their beliefs mocked by those who look down on America.”

Americans, he said, try to raise their children to understand right and wrong “only to be told that every so-called ‘lifestyle alternative’ is morally equivalent. That is wrong.”

A top Quayle aide said the vice president called attention to cultural issues in large part because they “divide the two parties,” and he sought to link Clinton and his running mate, Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee, to “Hollywood and the media elite.”

He acknowledged that neither Democrat had embraced all of the ideas that Quayle singled out as illustrative of “our cultural opponents.” But he said that the Democrats were “supported and sought the support of people who make that argument, and to some degree their platform embraces their argument.”

“Cultural issues do divide the two parties,” the aide said. “If you look at the Democratic platform and the Republican platform, if you look at their positions on certain public policy issues, it’s fair to say that there’s a cultural divide and that Clinton and Gore attached themselves to one side.”

The aide acknowledged that Quayle’s criticism of “so-called ‘lifestyle alternatives’ ” was aimed in part at homosexuality. He defended the attack by suggesting that gay rights advocates “care passionately about who wins the election, and those who disagree with the advocates of rights are entitled to care equally.”

But the aide portrayed the speech as less a traditional campaign speech than as an opportunity for Quayle to reintroduce himself to America after a disastrous debut four years ago--and to emphasize the cultural issues he has staked out as his own.

“This is our first opportunity in four years to speak directly to a large number of American people,” the aide said. He said the speech provided an opportunity for Quayle “to say who he is, where he comes from and what he stands for.”

The Polls

The new poll results provided the first clear-cut good news for Republicans in months. A national survey conducted Tuesday and Wednesday by CBS suggested that the convention had helped Bush close to within 11 points of Clinton after trailing by 18 points a week ago in that network’s poll.

And a separate, smaller survey conducted by the Tarrance Group over the same period showed the gap narrowing even further, with Clinton ahead by just 48% to 43%.

“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.”

Ford said Carter “tells us with some satisfaction” that the Democratic Party has finally returned to where it was when he left office in 1981.

“Does anyone remember the Carter economic record?” he continued. “Inflation, 13%. Interest rates, 21%. Is that the change Americans want for the next four years?”

Barbara Bush and Betty Ford, sitting in the presidential box, both were wearing red ribbons to indicate solidarity with those infected with the AIDS virus or those with the deadly disease itself. The ribbon has been only rarely in evidence at the GOP convention.

By contrast, almost all speakers at the Democratic Convention in New York wore the ribbons.

Other Speakers

Sen. John C. Danforth of Missouri, in introducing Quayle, lashed out at his critics, declaring, “the only thing more polluted than the campaign against Dan Quayle is the White River in Bill Clinton’s Arkansas.”

Danforth said politics turns the stomachs of decent Americans because it has become “so personal.”

“If you can’t win the contest of ideas, destroy a person. And the political left--the interest groups that control the Democratic Party--cannot win the contest of ideas.”

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a decorated naval pilot who spent almost six years as a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down in Vietnam, criticized Democrats in Congress for opposing sending the U.S. military to the Mideast last year to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. “Angered at being proven wrong, they now seek to rewrite the history of the President’s finest hour.”

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