Bush Takes Aim at Clinton Draft Status, Economic Plan

With a calculated one-two assault, President Bush and his aides on Thursday used language laden with images of duplicity and the welfare state in an intensified bid to convince Americans that they can neither trust nor afford to put Bill Clinton in the White House.

As Air Force One headed here as part of a daylong campaign trip, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater charged that the Democratic presidential nominee’s “deceitful” handling of questions about his military draft record “goes to the heart of why Bill Clinton should not be President of the United States.”

And Bush devoted much of a major address to rhetorically charged descriptions of Clinton and his economic advisers as unrepentant heirs to failed European-style policies of social engineering.

“No matter what you call” Clinton’s economic proposals, Bush told an audience packed into Enid’s sweltering municipal auditorium, “it’s still big-time government spending directed by Washington planners who want to reorder social and economic priorities.”

The back-to-back attacks reflected what are emerging as the central themes of a come-from-behind Bush strategy aimed at exploiting voters’ uncertainties about Clinton. In addition to suggesting that the Arkansas governor has been less than straightforward about his draft record, the Republican campaign also is seeking to convince Americans that he has been less than candid about his plans for the nation’s future.

In his speech, Bush sought to link the Clinton team’s moderate-sounding economic agenda to Harvard and Oxford universities, 1988 Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis and the failed economies of the former Communist bloc.

Bush suggested that Clinton and his advisers were “shrewd enough to know that the welfare state doesn’t sell in America.” But he charged that what Clinton describes as “investment” proposals were nothing more than a new label for government management of the economy.

In a speech carefully crafted to include references designed to alarm conservative and moderate voters, the President warned: “From Santa Monica to Cambridge, my opponents are cranking up their models--ready to test them on you.”

The attacks bore a close resemblance to those Bush used four years ago against Dukakis and his Harvard University-educated circle of advisers.

A top Clinton aide, George Stephanopoulos, dismissed the criticisms as “ludicrous.” He said Bush “can’t run against Bill Clinton, so he’s trying to turn him into something else.”

But the Democratic campaign remained on the defensive over the question of Clinton’s avoidance of the Vietnam-era draft. And Bush strategists clearly were hopeful that it could become the Arkansas governor’s Achilles’ heel.

Fitzwater, in comments to reporters, urged that a scathing written statement issued earlier this week by the man who would have been Clinton’s Reserve Officer Training Corps commander be given “wide scrutiny.”

“It shows that at a very young age, (Clinton) was trying to have it both ways and was avoiding personal responsibility,” Fitzwater said of the affidavit, the contents of which were reported in Thursday’s editions of The Times. “(Clinton) was deceitful and he still cannot tell America the facts” about avoiding the draft, which included signing up for but then not joining an Arkansas ROTC program.

The statement was drafted by retired Army Col. Eugene J. Holmes, whom Clinton thanked in a 1969 letter for “saving me from the draft.” Holmes accused Clinton of a “lack of veracity” for failing to reveal “his counterfeit intentions” concerning the ROTC program.

In his Oklahoma speech, Bush sought to reinforce the themes of his “agenda for an American renewal” by calling attention to what he described as six “defining differences” between himself and Clinton.

But the address also contained pointed criticisms of an academic-oriented circle of Clinton advisers that includes Robert Reich of Harvard University and Derek Shearer of Occidental College in Southern California.

“Where the market can be rough-edged, they prefer academic tidiness,” Bush said of Clinton’s team. Many of the Democratic nominee’s most influential advisers studied at Oxford, as Clinton did, and at other British universities.

“Where the market is often predictable, they prefer the false certitude of social engineering--fashioned by a new economic elite of the so-called ‘best and brightest,’ ” Bush said. He added: “The best and the brightest are right out here in middle America where you know what’s going on.”

And in another barb meant to warn of dire consequences under a Clinton Administration, Bush said: “From Warsaw to Prague to Moscow, government price controls have led to one thing--rationing of service.”

In seeking to cast Clinton as a would-be social engineer, Bush offered few examples from the Democrat’s economic plan, which evolved from a centrist tradition and calls for a less-active government role than his party’s past nominees have advocated.

Instead, he mentioned “writings” by Clinton and his advisers that refer to “European models and industrial policy.” And as he spoke of “interventionist liberals” and the “welfare state,” he suggested Clinton had been “drawn to” such ideals by his Oxford education.

On another front, Bush aides vowed to enforce an ultimatum they issued to the Clinton campaign over presidential debates. Having rejected a three-debate plan drafted by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, the Bush team demanded that the Democrats respond by today to an alternative proposal crafted by the White House.

Clinton aides made clear they had no intention of heeding the Bush deadline. “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Stephanopoulos said.

CLINTON DRAFT ISSUE: Questions about Clinton’s draft status have preoccupied his presidential campaign. A22

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in Albuquerque.

President Bush campaigns in Basking Ridge, N.J.

TELEVISION

First Lady Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton appear on C-SPAN’s “Road to The White House” at 2 p.m.