Clinton TV Ad ‘Misleading,’ GOP Charges

The way the Bush campaign sees it, the new television ad being broadcast by Bill Clinton’s campaign is more than fuzzy and warm pictures of small-town America and beaming children. It is, rather, rife with misleading accounts of Clinton’s governorship.

The $1-million ad campaign, unveiled Sunday and aired Monday in an effort to regain the momentum Clinton had in the weeks after the Democratic Convention, says that Arkansas leads the nation in job growth and that state incomes are rising at twice the national rate.

It pledges to create 8 million jobs in four years, and says that “people” have “had enough--enough of seeing their incomes fall behind and their jobs on the line.”

Robert M. Teeter, President Bush’s campaign chairman, challenged the ad’s claims Monday, saying: “Gov. Clinton has been a master at picking out individual numbers” covering “short periods of time and . . . small sectors of the economy” and using them “to make his argument.”

“Gov. Clinton’s record is one of taking a state, when he became governor in the late 1970s, with some very difficult problems and leading it nowhere,” Teeter said at a news conference.

In a rebuttal intended to undercut the impact of the advertisement before it is aired in selected regions--including several states in the Midwest, Northeast and South, but not in California--the Bush campaign labeled as “false and misleading” the suggestion that Americans’ incomes have fallen behind.

The Bush campaign said that, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the United States led the world in worker compensation every year since 1985, and that “income per person adjusted for inflation and taxes is higher now than it was four years ago.”

Similarly, it said it was “false and misleading” for Clinton to say that only those making more than $200,000 would pay higher taxes under his economic plan.

The ad said that under Clinton’s governorship, 17,000 people “have moved from welfare to work.” The Bush campaign said that under Clinton, welfare roles in the state increased, and the administrative costs of the welfare program grew 3,000% from 1983 to 1991.

The Bush campaign also said that Clinton’s economic plan would not create 8 million jobs over four years, as the ad says.