Cuts by Bush Aimed at Sick, Elderly, Clinton Charges : Politics: Republicans immediately cry foul as Democratic challenger intensifies his attack.

Opening a sharpened line of attack against President Bush that Republicans immediately decried as foul, Democratic nominee Bill Clinton on Tuesday accused his opponent of planning to balance the federal budget on the backs of the sick and the elderly.

With senior citizens in Georgia and North Carolina providing a visual backdrop for his claims, Clinton charged that the President intends to strip $127 billion from the Medicare budget over the next five years. Cuts in the program that provides health care to the elderly will be an immense chunk of the $294 billion Bush has pledged to cut from the budget by 1997, Clinton declared.

“George Bush’s new budget hits hardest at the older Americans who worked their way out of the Great Depression, saved the world from Nazism and Fascism and gave my generation opportunities they never dreamed of,” Clinton told elderly residents gathered in a park in sweltering Macon, Ga.

“Before he asks the wealthy Americans to pay a penny more in taxes, before he asks foreign companies simply to pay the taxes they now owe, before he gives up his dream of more tax cuts for the wealthy, he’s going to make life a lot less kind and a lot less gentle for you,” he added a few hours later in a Greensboro seniors center.

The numbers cited by Clinton were immediately disavowed by officials from the Administration and the President’s campaign, who said Bush has never advocated such steep cuts in Medicare.

“He is now resorting to the lowest of the lows--scaring American senior citizens,” said Bush’s campaign press secretary, Torie Clarke.

Indeed, although the cuts are included in a mid-session review of the budget compiled by the Bush Administration, they were listed as options. Budget director Richard G. Darman, under stiff questioning by Congress, said that the President had not endorsed the cuts.

Clarke said that Bush has guaranteed the existing levels of Medicare and has promised cost-of-living increases in the payment levels. “Clinton should cut out the fear-mongering,” she said.

Clinton’s issues director, Bruce Reed, said the figures represent not a worst-case scenario but a “likely” result of Bush’s budget-cutback proposals.

Speaking to the senior citizens in two states he is trying hard to capture in November, Clinton presented the options as though they were accomplished fact.

In the near future, issues director Reed said, Clinton will broaden his attacks on Bush to encompass the Administration’s proposals on families, student loans and child support, among others. On Tuesday, he chided Bush as well for cutbacks Clinton said the Republican would make in federally funded veterans’ programs.

The sharper, issues-based definition by Clinton followed a few weeks in which the Democratic nominee took a fuzzier, feel-good approach and as a result was kept on the defensive by relentless criticism from Bush and his partisans.

Unveiling his new strategy by focusing on senior citizens was meant not only to attract those voters but to highlight Clinton’s contention that he alone will protect the poor and middle class.

The backdrop of Tuesday’s argument is the looming cost of “entitlement” programs, whose annual growth is controlled by a formula and is out of the hands of Congress or the President. Athough entitlements like Social Security and Medicare provide a safety net for the nation’s elderly, economists believe that the ever-increasing size of those programs is a huge threat to the nation’s ability to solve its deficit problems.

Neither candidate has won high marks from economists for a deficit-reduction plan or a program for funding health care reform.

The Bush Administration, as part of its deficit-reduction plan, has proposed a cap on future growth of all entitlement programs except Social Security. By 1997, the Administration said, the caps would reduce entitlement spending by $115 billion a year.

But Bush has not proposed enough cuts to meet his own spending caps. His latest proposal includes cuts that would reduce mandatory spending by $10 billion by 1997. If options for further cuts, including cutbacks in Medicare, were approved, only another $65 billion in savings would be made.

Clinton has said that he would lower the cost of entitlement programs by reforming the nation’s health care system, whose burgeoning growth has contributed to the spiraling costs of Medicare.

But the Democratic nominee has refused to say exactly how he would pay for the health care reforms. Although economists have said that the plan would require billions in either payroll taxes or other fees, the Clinton campaign maintains that there would be no net cost attached to it.

As part of his attack on Bush’s spending priorities, Clinton relied heavily on a University of North Carolina study that said the cutbacks suggested in the mid-session budget review would force the average Medicare beneficiary to pay $2,000 more over five years.

And the Bush budget, he said, “helps the average millionaire pay $100,000 less in taxes.”