Clinton Implies Bush Lied in Remarks on Tax Record

Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton, bridling--and worried--about President Bush’s continued assertions that he repeatedly raised taxes in Arkansas, angrily denounced the President on Friday for what he termed “a desperate attempt to cover up his own economic failures.”

While specifically refusing to call Bush a liar, Clinton edged close to that description in referring to accusations by Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle that he had raised taxes 128 times during his 12 years as governor.

“I’m saying you ought to go ask him how he can avoid having that characterization put on these remarks, given the fact that his own campaign aides know it’s not true,” Clinton told reporters during a hastily arranged press conference at a power station outside Waco.

“Now we know the truth about George Bush,” the Arkansas governor said before embarking on the second day of a Texas bus tour. “The only taxes he really wants to cut are on the rich, and the only job he really wants to save is his own. The repeated use of a statement that even campaign aides admit is not true calls into question the character of this campaign.”

The governor’s new denunciation was apparently set off by a Boston Globe story published Friday that quoted an unnamed Bush campaign official as saying that the Republicans know the tax-raising assertions are wrong but are making them because they serve a political purpose.

Bush aides on Friday said the campaign would continue to use the figure of 128 tax hikes, and accused Clinton of dishonesty.

“This fellow’s regard for honesty and veracity is so low that he has no business calling anybody else a liar,” said presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater.

“The facts are facts,” said Bush campaign press secretary Torie Clarke. “The 128 tax and fee increases . . . comes verbatim from the Arkansas Legislative Handbook,” a biannual publication of the Arkansas Bureau of Legislative Research.

The calculations that led to the 128 tax hikes figure have been questioned by several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal.

In one case, for example, Arkansas’ fuel tax hike was counted as two tax increases--one on diesel fuel, another on gasoline. Another “increase” was a bill extending the state’s dog-track racing season, apparently on the grounds that a longer season led to increased state revenue. Another was a law imposing a $1-per-conviction fee on criminals to cover court costs.

Using the same method of counting each individual tax separately, the Congressional Research Service estimated that Bush has increased 78 taxes in his term.

“In a desperate attempt to cover up his own economic failures, he’s saying things to the American people that his own aides admit they know are untrue,” said Clinton. “I don’t think we should let him get away with it.”

Clinton grew agitated and cut off the press conference, however, when asked to quantify how many times he has raised taxes.

Later, his campaign acknowledged that Clinton increased taxes 59 times during his 12 years as governor. During the same time frame, he reduced or repealed taxes 69 times, the campaign said. An earlier estimate by the campaign said Clinton had lowered or repealed taxes 48 times.

The Arkansas governor also took pains Friday to tell reporters that a tax cut invoked last year had lowered taxes on 42% of Arkansans.

For Clinton, the tax issue represents a double opportunity. If he can repudiate Bush’s claims, Clinton can strike at the heart of the President’s current contention that he alone has the character to hold the office. The tax issue also serves as a reminder of one of Bush’s greatest political liabilities--his change of heart on his 1988 “read my lips--no new taxes” pledge.

But it also is freighted with risks, for Clinton too cannot claim to have never raised taxes, and he is fighting historic voter perceptions that Democrats are more likely to embrace big-spending government programs.

Indeed, Bush and his supporters have taken to criticizing Clinton’s proposed $150-billion “investment” program as a crafty way of raising taxes. Clinton counters that the money, which he intends to raise by taxing corporations and those making more than $200,000 a year, would reinvigorate the economy.

Mindful of that criticism, Clinton tried to steer reporters away from the tax-raising angle, contending that the real problem of the Bush campaign was the deliberateness of their misrepresentation.

“We need to be having a very serious discussion in this election about what we’re going to do in the post-Cold War era to revive America, not saying the things that anybody knows are false just because they work,” he said.

The criticism of Bush struck a discordant note on the second day of Clinton’s bus tour of Central and East Texas, which like earlier tours of the upper Midwest and the East was chock-full of images of small towns and enthusiastic crowds.

Clinton began the day in Waco, where he toured a natural gas-fired power plant, then meandered toward Corsicana--”the Fruitcake Capital of the World”--before heading to Athens, “the Black-eyed Pea Capital of the World.”

The bus tour ended late Friday in Tyler, which bills itself as the “Rose Capital of the World” and from which Clinton traveled home to Little Rock, Ark., where he will spend the weekend.

Throughout the tour Thursday and Friday, Clinton and his running mate, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore--and their wives, Hillary and Mary Elizabeth (Tipper)--bounded out of their bus at the sight of hundreds--sometimes even at the sight of dozens--of supporters.

They shook hands, held babies, endured the high-pitched shrieks of teen-agers and otherwise celebrated the popularity that they have earned by venturing into the small towns that are normally ignored in the race for President.

And they sought, over and over, to make the case that Bush’s economic policies have failed and that the President has lost touch with the dreams and fears of the average American.

Clinton is making that case with particular derision in Texas, which Bush claims as his adopted home. The President’s official residence is a hotel suite in Houston, and he also owns a vacant lot in the city.

While born and raised in next-door Arkansas, Clinton tells people all through Texas that his father was born in Sherman, Tex., and that he has cousins spread across the region.

“Bush says that he’s from Texas,” Clinton told several thousand supporters gathered after nightfall Thursday in Waco. “Well, I want to tell you something, folks. I do not have a hotel room in Houston. And I don’t have a plot of land . . . that I’m claiming I’m gonna build a retirement home on.

“But I’ll tell you what,” he added. “My daddy was born here, I got kinfolks here and I’m a whole lot more like you than he is.”

On Friday, however, such appeals to the heart took a back seat to Clinton’s appeal to the pocketbook. Before several thousand people gathered in the wilting heat of tiny Corsicana, Clinton topped off his speech with a few more insults directed at Bush’s handling of the economy.

“Old Bush looked like Pinocchio at the Republican Convention, talking about taxes,” Clinton said, drawing hoots from the crowd. “I’m surprised his nose didn’t grow and chuck him right over into the orchestra pit when he was talking about it, saying oh, how much I raised taxes and how little he did.

“These people can’t run on their record,” he added. “All that ‘four more years’ chant--they got the worst economy performance in 50 years.”