Buoyed by Polls, President Roars Back Into Fight

Emboldened by signs that his campaign has at last begun its ascent, President Bush emerged from the Republican Convention to sound a blunt call Friday for voters to “send Bill Clinton back to Arkansas.”

Appearing at a joint rally with Vice President Dan Quayle in Gulfport, Bush mocked pundits he said had prematurely “written off” his reelection prospects and gave a throaty welcome to new polls showing a sharp narrowing in Clinton’s lead.

“Get ready,” he shouted to a cheering crowd of 15,000 gathered along the steamy Gulf Coast, “ ‘cause here I come!”

Surrounding himself throughout the day with country music stars and other trappings of down-home America, Bush campaigned in shirt sleeves and cast his come-from-behind drive as a patriotic crusade.

The President redoubled his effort to describe Clinton and his agenda as ill-suited for national leadership. Beginning where he had stopped during his Thursday night prime-time speech, Bush used his new tax-cutting proposal less as a plan than a weapon, painting Clinton as a tax-hiking big-spender whose economic plan was “clear, present and dangerous.”

Quayle, who introduced Bush at the Gulfport rally, made the case in an equally pointed way. “The American people will have a clear-cut choice,” he told reporters after the event. “If they want higher taxes, vote for Bill Clinton, and if they want lower taxes, vote for us.”

Of the opposition, Quayle said, “they’re the ones that want to protect the Democratic dictatorship that has ruled on Capitol Hill for 40 years. We’re the ones that want to reform Congress and limit the terms that Democratic Congress can serve.”

Shedding his suit jacket and tie in the stifling Mississippi heat, the vice president predicted that in November, “the American people will once again reject the ideas of Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, and, this time, Clinton.”

At a rally in the turn-of-the-century theme park in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks later in the day, Bush told Loretta Lynn, Glen Campbell and a crowd of about 10,000, “I will take on the governor of Arkansas, I will define him and we will win.” He donned Western-style clothes later in the evening to attend a country music festival in the “new Nashville” of Branson, Mo.

The post-convention assault was clearly designed to add to any doubts about Clinton that speakers at this week’s GOP gathering may have succeeded in planting in voters’ minds. While Bush used the rallies here and in Missouri to repeat his pledge to challenge Congress next January to cut taxes across the board, his advisers made clear that he intends to provide no further details of that plan.

Campaign chairman Robert M. Teeter suggested that Bush intended to use the proposal for the most part to compare himself with Clinton, whose economic plan calls for a $150-billion tax increase.

“It’s just another example of how sharp the differences are between what the President thinks ought to be done for the next four or five years in this country economically and what the Democrats do,” Teeter told reporters aboard Air Force One as Bush left Houston to begin a three-day campaign trip.

After a convention in which Republicans painted those differences in the starkest of terms, the narrowing of the gap between Clinton and Bush in a series of new polls seemed to indicate that the strategy was enjoying some success.

After polls conducted before Bush’s prime-time address showed him closing within about 10 percentage points of Clinton, an overnight New York Times/CBS News tracking survey conducted by CBS Thursday night showed the gap at just two-to-three points. One-night polls, however, are considered less reliable than those conducted over two or more days.

A Los Angeles Times Poll conducted Thursday and Friday showed Clinton with an 8-point lead, 49% to 41%.

Teeter and other strategists were cautious in noting that the true impact of the convention and Bush’s prime-time address could not be measured until this weekend at the earliest. But they voiced encouragement at the preliminary statistics, and Bush himself proclaimed that “if the overnight polls are any barometer, the American people are with me.”

At Gulfport, the first full-fledged Bush rally of the autumn campaign presented a vivid tableau of Americans who appeared at first glance to be solidly Republican voters.

But campaign strategists acknowledged that the choice of the conservative community as the setting for the Bush-Quayle rally reflected their uneasiness about the still-shaky support for Bush even within his conservative base.

And an informal survey of voters who stood in the hot summer sun for more than an hour to await Bush’s arrival found that many remained far from committed to Bush.

“I think he’s struggling,” said 31-year-old Gary Blackmon, a bank accountant who has always voted Republican in presidential elections.

As he began his bid to win back such voters, Bush on Friday employed some of his harshest rhetoric of the campaign. He derided what he called Clinton’s “wishy-washy indecision” on foreign policy matters and vowed to remind voters of the “umbilical cord” linking Clinton and Gore to the gridlocked Congress.

And Bush once again invoked the memory of Harry S. Truman’s upset victory over Gov. Thomas Dewey in 1948 to pledge to Missouri voters, ‘Here’s the way it’s going to be, from now on out.”

“He was a big underdog,” Bush said of Truman. “And he fought back. And he wrapped another governor challenging him right around that do-nothing Congress. I’m going to do the same thing with the governor of Arkansas--wrap him to the gridlocked Congress, take my message of peace and a stronger America to the American people, and win this election.”

Times staff writer Paul Richter contributed to this story.

BUSH TAX PLAN: Some budget experts greeted it with derision and others with cautious optimism. A14