This Time, Bush Gladly Eats Words : GOP: The President has breakfast at a Waffle House to make a point about what he charges is Clinton’s indecision.

As he began a daylong assault upon Bill Clinton with a syrupy breakfast, President Bush said he intended “just a little symbolism” in his visit to a nearby Waffle House.

But after months in which he has sought to draw attention to his rival’s record of indecision, the ubiquitous Southern chain-diner offered the kind of metaphor the President and his aides seemed no longer able to resist.

His campaign spokeswoman, Torie Clarke, was standing by to make sure no one missed the point as Bush and his son Marvin sampled the restaurant’s specialties under harsh fluorescent lights. “This is not the White House,” she said. “It’s the Waffle House, and it’s exactly where waffles should stay.”

As Bush probed with new intensity at his rival’s alleged inconsistency, the breakfast added a new riff to a late-campaign drumbeat that the President is sounding with increasing insistence, hoping to drive voters toward a reassessment of the Democratic presidential contender.

As his campaign train paused in Thomasville on a trans-North Carolina journey to Raleigh, he shouted time and again the cry that is emerging as his comeback-bid refrain. “Character counts!” he yelled. “Character matters! You cannot be all things to all people, and yes, character matters!”

At each of half a dozen stops across the state, supporters carried pre-printed banners, balloons and placards proclaiming Bush as the candidate worthy of voters’ trust. And at a sprawling final rally here at this state’s thriving fair, thousands were led to chant in unison: “We trust Bush.”

In Raleigh, as at every stop, Bush ticked off a long list of Arkansan ills that he said belie Clinton’s claims to gubernatorial success. All along the route, speaking from the rear platform of his wood-paneled rail car, he used the word character as if it were a stick, once uttering the syllables five times in a single minute to drive home the impression that the trait is one that Clinton lacks.

Republican Sen. Jesse Helms added to the patter as he bluntly told the state fair audience that Clinton “demonstrably has no character.” He labeled the Democrat “the Wizard of Ooze.”

Throughout the day, Bush aimed his attack most squarely at Clinton’s equivocation on right-to-work, free-trade and Gulf War issues regarded as important to North Carolina voters.

Most disdainful of Clinton’s qualified support for the congressional resolution that gave the go-ahead for Operation Desert Storm, Bush suggested that, had Congress heeded the Democrat’s advice, Saddam Hussein might now be in “downtown Saudi Arabia.”

“We didn’t listen to that kind of waffle,” he said. “We went ahead and made a tough decision.” The state’s outgoing Republican governor, James G. Martin, suggested for his part that Clinton had sided with “the wimps.”

For a second day, Bush’s train journey brought him face to face with eager voters who thronged to the small-town rallies and lined the railway right of ways as he rumbled across much of North Carolina. He seemed to draw energy and a new combativeness from the wall-to-wall crowds of several thousand who waited at each stop.

For long minutes after each address, he would remain on the rear platform of his train, shouting, waving and posing for photographs, appearing somehow carefree despite his current woes.

He joined in with glee as young people at an early morning rally in Gastonia, N.C., pantomimed the Atlanta Braves’ famous tomahawk chop. “Chop ‘em up, kids,” he said. And at day’s end he took inspiration in Raleigh from stock-car driver Richard Petty, who warmed up the crowd with recollections of snatching victory from defeat.

“I heard what he had to say: 14 laps behind, and moving, and ended up four ahead,” Bush said. “I like that!”

At a Kannapolis, N.C., rally earlier in the day, however, as a band struck up “This Is My Country,” Bush was quick to lash out at his rivals as “pessimists--liberal Democrats posing as a friend of America.”

And at virtually every stop, he mocked Arkansas’ low standing in most national rankings, equating Clinton’s aspirations for the White House to those of a Little League manager aiming for the World Series.

“I’ve got to tell you a little bit about it,” he said in Raleigh, reeling off statistics showing Arkansas placing 50th in categories ranging from the quality of environmental initiatives to the percentage of adults with college degrees, and no better than 45th even on “the overall well-being of children.”

“Now, Gov. Clinton said in the debates, ‘I want him to do for the country what I’ve done for Arkansas.’ ” he continued. “We cannot let him do that. You cannot do that.”

But among those missing from his procession were North Carolina’s top Republican statewide candidate, gubernatorial hopeful Jim Gardner, who chose to continue with a bus trip of his own.

Martin blamed Bush’s difficulties in large part on “soft dulcet tones” with which the Arkansan and the Tennessean have appealed to North Carolina voters. “The reason he’s having trouble and the reason the Democrats have a chance to win,” the governor acknowledged, “is that they nominated two Southerners.”

For his part, Bush may have learned why coffee shops are so rarely appropriated as campaign props. After gobbling his breakfast at the Spartanburg, S.C., Waffle House, he found himself approached by a man and two young ladies who had finally worked up the courage.

A.C. Wilson, a mid-40s man wearing jeans and a plaid lumberjack-style shirt, showed Bush a frayed, brown scrapbook displaying photographs of the man’s trick horse, which he said was adept at licking his young friends’ heads.

The two ladies, who were in their teens or early 20s and whose relationship to Wilson was unclear, then engaged the President in a lengthy swap of riddles that was interrupted only by another woman who briefly conversed with Bush in French.

The Bush advance team eventually succeeded in rescuing the photo opportunity from its unexpected spontaneity.