Bush Warns Voters About Clinton’s Call for Change

“Change,” the President of the United States was saying, “change.”

Five times he spit out the word Friday, as if speaking a curse. Listen to the siren song of the Democratic presidential ticket, he said, and “change . . . is all you’re going to have left in your pocket, believe me.”

As the race for the White House gets down to its final days, President Bush is hammering away at the underlying theme of the 1992 campaign: the economy, and whether a change in the presidency will do anything about it.

Bush pressed his message that a change will only make things worse as he appeared before a friendly crowd in Laurel County, Ky.--a rock-ribbed Republican area that every GOP President since Dwight D. Eisenhower has visited--and among the politically loyal Cuban-American community of southern Florida.

Also Friday, in a sign that the White House has thought better of the plan to have Chief of Staff James A. Baker III deliver a major speech articulating how he would implement economic and domestic policy in a second Bush Administration, a senior Bush aide said the President would deliver the address himself, possibly Monday.

Bush had said in the first presidential debate earlier this month that Baker would be in charge of economic policy operations in a second term.

In the third debate, Democratic candidate Bill Clinton, seeking to embarrass Bush, said that in his Administration, he himself would be responsible for economic policy.

As Bush and his aides sought to stress the positive on the campaign trail, they downplayed poll results that have found the President trailing badly against Clinton, and touted those that show the race tightening.

“We’re gonna win this election,” Bush called out to a crowd that greeted him at the Lexington, Ky., airport. “Don’t let the sorry pollsters tell you what to think. It’s going fine.”

To back up that assertion, a senior Bush campaign official said a two-night survey conducted by the campaign showed Bush trailing Clinton by nine percentage points. “It’s closing everywhere,” the official insisted.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll of 1,078 likely voters taken Monday through Thursday reported the gap between Bush and Clinton narrowing to eight points, with 42% saying they would vote for the Democrat, 34% backing the President and 20% supporting independent Ross Perot.

But a competing poll--the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey--showed Bush trailing Clinton by 19 points.

Coming close to splitting the difference between these two surveys was a CNN tracking poll taken Wednesday and Thursday that showed Clinton ahead by 12 points--43% to 31%--with Perot’s support at 18%.

In one of the most important surveys--one measuring the likely results in each of the states and the District of Columbia--ABC News reported Friday night that Clinton was well ahead in 18 states with 261 electoral votes--nine short of the 270 needed for election--and that he is leading in eight others with 47 electoral votes. Bush was rated as strongly ahead in none, and leading in only three states, which have a total of 18 electoral votes. Twenty-two states, with 212 votes, were judged tossups.

As Bush campaigned amid this welter of polling data, his advance team has been taking precautions to avoid a repeat of the sort of outburst that occurred a week earlier in New Jersey, when the President responded to heckling from pro-Clinton demonstrators by calling them “draft dodgers” and telling them to “shut up.”

On Friday, Bush rally organizers barred all Clinton signs at entry gates before the President spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of roughly 10,000 people at a high school football field in London, Ky.

Noting that he was “10 miles away from where Col. Sanders started his first restaurant,” Bush said the man who started the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise “said something that Gov. Clinton ought to learn from--he said ‘the bucket stops here.’ ”

Continuing to score Clinton as one who tries to straddle the issues, Bush said: “You cannot waffle. You cannot equivocate when you’re President of the United States of America.”

To the persistent Democratic campaign theme that Bush has presided over a “trickle-down” economy that first helps the wealthy, the President said Clinton would preside over “trickle-down government: Give the government your wallet, man, and step back and let Washington solve the problem.”

“We cannot do that to the taxpayer,” the President said. “. . . If you drive a cab, work in a coal mine, whatever it is--watch out. Watch your wallet--he’s coming right after you. And I’m not going to let him do that to the American people.”

Bush kept the focus on Clinton throughout his campaign day. There was no mention of Perot until late in the evening when Bush addressed his candidacy briefly in response to a question. On Thursday, Bush said the Texan had offered the American people “some nutty ideas” and proposals “from the fringe.”

Before his audience in Miami, Bush signed the fiscal 1993 Pentagon spending bill, which includes the Cuban Democracy Act, a measure setting conditions for humanitarian aid to Cuba.

To a cheering group of several hundred people, Bush promised that in his second term, “I will be the first American President to set foot on the soil of a free and independent Cuba.”

Periodically, the Bush campaign has utilized the type of forum that served the candidate so well in his successful 1988 campaign. They call it “Ask George Bush,” and he perches on a stool, with the audience around him, and, for perhaps an hour, takes questions from citizens.

But now there is an edge to the questions--a directness and a challenge--that reflects more about the tenor of the election and the voters’ concerns than do the campaign crowds, manufactured or genuine.

At an hourlong program in New Jersey on Thursday evening and another one in Miami on Friday night, one questioner after another took aim at the President.

Health care, the recession, small business loans, a balanced budget--one after another the topics, many linked to the economy, came at him, with one underlying theme: They’re broken. Why haven’t you fixed them?

And, his answers did not go unchallenged.

At the Friday forum, one woman said that when Democratic President Jimmy Carter left office, her mortgage rate was 18.5%, but she had a good job and good health insurance. Now, neither her job nor health care were dependable, and, she wanted to know, how could Bush say she was better off today than she was when he took office.

“In some ways, you are worse off,” he conceded.

And, when a woman repeated a question--which she insisted had come from her 5-year-old daughter--about how he could accept full health care from the government, but not offer it to others, he said he had no apologies for accepting such care as commander in chief of the armed forces, but that his proposal of vouchers and tax credits would help the poor and others obtain health care too.

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl in Washington contributed to this story.