President Surrounds Arkansas, Opens Fire : Campaign: From Missouri to Louisiana to Tennessee, he attacks Clinton’s record on crime, spending, environment.

President Bush traced a campaign-trail circle around Arkansas on Tuesday with a daylong attack denouncing Gov. Bill Clinton as a tax-and-spend, criminal-coddling polluter and civil-rights foe who would do for the nation what he has done to his home state.

Bush said he felt compelled to “lay it on the line” in responding to the “gall” of a Democratic rival who was “promising the moon, when on issue after issue the sky has fallen in his own back yard.”

In a 16-hour tour of the six states that border Arkansas, Bush unabashedly embraced negative campaign tactics, devoting each appearance to warnings that Clinton’s stewardship in Arkansas--where he has served as governor 12 of the last 14 years--had left the state mired near the bottom in nearly every national measurement of progress.

“Think of civil rights and taxes in the state he’s left behind,” Bush said in Springfield, Mo., as he opened his assaults on Clinton’s record. “Think of crime and child abuse and education. . . . Think of the environment he’s neglected, the health care problems he’s ignored. Think about all this the next time candidate Clinton says he will do for America what he’s done for Arkansas.”

In setting a combative tone for the marathon day, Bush insisted that he was merely rebutting the “half-truths” and relentless criticisms that Clinton has directed at the Republican Administration. But Bush’s decision to set his sights on Clinton’s Arkansas record opened harsh new lines of attack in what already has become a hard-hitting campaign.

Under Clinton, the President warned bluntly at one point, criminals in Arkansas so rarely serve full prison terms that the state’s citizens might well fear “that some crazy convict is going to ruin their lives--some guy let out of jail far too early.”

Bush added later: “When it comes to keeping criminals behind bars, Gov. Clinton has the worst record in the country. Do not let him do that to the United States of America.”

Although it remained faceless, the attack unmistakably echoed the GOP efforts in 1988 to link that year’s Democratic nominee, Michael S. Dukakis, to the case of Willie Horton, who raped a woman while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison.

Bush also borrowed from those 1988 tactics in comparing Arkansas’ chicken-manure-polluted rivers to Boston Harbor.

Clinton, campaigning in East Lansing, Mich., responded by accusing the President of running a campaign based on “diversion, division and denial.” He suggested that Bush’s attacks were intended to obscure what he termed “the worst record of any President in 50 years.”

Part of Bush’s aim on Tuesday clearly was to distract from the continued scorn that the Clinton camp heaped on him for his refusal to accept a bipartisan commission’s proposal for debates. Greeted at nearly every stop by Clinton supporters who labeled him a “debate dodger,” Bush repeatedly said that the Democrat’s posture as a candidate has been so at variance with his record as governor that he simply ought to debate himself.

After his first stop in Missouri, Bush rushed on to Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee. In each state, he unveiled new charges concerning what he once called Clinton’s “sorry” record.

Somewhat implausibly, Bush claimed that Tuesday’s speeches marked his first use of negative tactics. And he said he was opening fire on Clinton only because the governor attacked him first--in a paid television advertisement broadcast in some states this week.

But the very vigor of the Bush attack, issued in states previously regarded as providing solid support for the GOP, seemed to reflect his strategists’ views that the path to victory in November requires that Bush go to new lengths to cast doubt on his Democratic rival.

“You need to know whether you can trust Bill Clinton to take America where it needs to go in the next four years,” Bush said in Springfield. “Because once you buy what he’s selling, there’s no refund.”

Perhaps his most bruising attacks came as he spotlighted an Arkansas crime rate that increased during the 1980s at the fastest rate in the nation, with violent crime alone increasing by 58%.

Bush noted that law officers in Clinton’s hometown of Little Rock had last week given their endorsement to him rather than their own governor. He also cited statistics showing that most Arkansas inmates serve less than one-fifth of their sentence behind bars, a lower ratio than in any other state.

“In Arkansas,” Bush warned, “when the prison door slams shut on a convicted criminal, he knows it won’t be long before it opens up again.”

With similarly forceful language, Bush questioned Clinton’s commitment to environmentalism, based on the Democrat’s gubernatorial record. Noting that the Institute for Southern Studies had ranked Arkansas’ environmental policies as the worst in the nation, he charged that Clinton had permitted the “powerful chicken industry” to leave “hundreds of miles” of Arkansas rivers polluted with fecal coliform bacteria.

He joked that the chicken-manure pollution had become so bad that Arkansas fish “glow in the dark,” and said of Clinton’s environmental record: “Some things do run thicker than water.”

He did not acknowledge that the authors of the environmental study critical of Clinton have since said they regard Bush’s record on the issue as equally unimpressive.

Bush noted that state spending in Arkansas had more than doubled since 1983 and that taxes also sharply increased during that period.

He did not note that about two-thirds of the growth in state spending resulted from inflation.

Bush drew a pointed contrast between Clinton’s avowed support for civil rights and the fact that Arkansas is one of only two states in the nation without a civil rights statute.

But the President did not mention that he had opposed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In questioning Clinton’s educational credentials, Bush noted that Arkansas’ standing during the 1980s fell from 47th to 48th in the nation in the percentage of adults with a high school diploma. And he noted that 75% of Arkansas high school students require remedial education when they go to college.

In a written response, the Clinton campaign accused Bush of “skirting around Arkansas today, just the way he skirts around the real issues of the campaign.” But communications director George Stephanopoulos took direct issue only with Bush’s criticisms on the educational front, releasing a copy of a handwritten letter the President sent to Clinton in 1989 that praised the governor for his “great job” on the issue.

Clinton aides acknowledged that Bush was accurate in casting Arkansas as a state that is near the bottom in most national rankings, but said the President had overlooked the state’s sharp recent improvements in personal income, which have elevated Arkansas to a 47th ranking. Bush merely told crowds that Arkansas’ average personal income ranked 48th at the end of the 1980s.

“They like to talk about status--Arkansas ranks 48th on this, 49th on that,” said Mike Gauldin, Clinton’s Statehouse press secretary. “What they don’t like to talk about is growth. We may still be near the bottom, but we’re growing better than the rest of the country is under George Bush.”

Times staff writer David Lauter contributed to this story from Washington.

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in Columbus, Albany, Tifton and Valdosta, Ga.

President Bush campaigns in Greensboro, N.C., and State College, Pa.