Bush, Clinton in Campaign Optimism Duel

President Bush and Bill Clinton each tried Saturday to claim a high road of hope for the nation’s future. But Bush also declared that statements by a top White House official about allegations that Clinton once had an affair should be permitted to “stand on their own.”

The issue arose in response to questions. Bush declined to say any more. He said he did not want to be accused of “cleverly injecting” the matter into the presidential race.

The President campaigned in Alabama and Louisiana on his second straight day in the South. His schedule reflected the apparent difficulty he has encountered gaining solid support in a region that has been firmly Republican for the last three presidential elections. Clinton appeared at a Wisconsin farm, where he sought to combine sounding folksy and looking presidential.

“I represent hope, Mr. Bush represents fear,” Clinton said. “. . . This is really a race of hope against fear.” Later, at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, the Democratic candidate added: “I am a proud, unabashed member of the things-could-be-better crowd. I’m tired of being told what we can’t do. I want to be told what we can do.”

Bush, for his part, accused Democrats of “doom and gloom” and offered hopeful reflection. “What I want to do,” he said in Montgomery, “is make life better and more challenging by creating more opportunity in employment or education for every young person . . . . That is why I want to be your President.”

Despite the high-minded tone of the exchange, Bush responded to questions about statements by William Kristol, the chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle, which had again raised Clinton’s alleged relationship with singer Gennifer Flowers, and in the most direct manner to date by the Bush campaign.

In a speech Friday in Virginia, Kristol read an excerpt from tape recordings Flowers said she made of conversations she had with Clinton, who has denied her assertion that they engaged in a protracted romance. Kristol said that Clinton’s private life and his public dishonesty disqualify him from being President.

When asked during a Saturday morning interview on CNN about Kristol’s comments, Bush said: “Let them stand on their own.”

He added: “I have said, ‘Stay out of the sleaze business,’ and I’ve done it.”

When CNN correspondent Charles Bierbauer interrupted his own follow-up question so Bush could add to his remarks, the President declared: “If I answered the question you asked me, then I would be accused of raising it some more.”

He said: “I am not going to talk about it.”

In the same interview, Bush was asked about an apparent attempt by the State Department to investigate the passport files of Clinton’s mother.

The President replied with two words: “Most reprehensible.”

The tone of campaigning also was diminished by Bush’s warm-up act at his appearance in Montgomery. Champion bass fisherman Ray Scott, with whom Bush fishes from time to time in nearby Pintlala, Ala., told a fanciful story questioning Clinton’s manhood and added: “He’s a sissy. You can tell by the way he walks, by the way his rear end swishes.”

Torie Clarke, the Bush campaign spokeswoman, declined comment on either Kristol’s remarks or those of Scott. But she said that “character flaws” were “very legitimate” issues to raise in a presidential campaign.

As the campaign moved toward its final full week, some polls among a flurry of new voter surveys seemed to show that the race for the White House was tightening. A survey for CNN-Time magazine had Clinton’s lead down to eight points--or three, according to a smaller sample of likely voters.

A survey for the Washington Post also said Clinton had an eight-point lead. A CBS-New York Times poll said Clinton’s advantage had dropped to five points.

A poll for Newsweek, however, showed the Democrat with a 12-point lead, and one for U.S. News & World Report showed Clinton with a 14-point lead.

Independent candidate Ross Perot continued to rise in all of the polls, as high as 22% in the Newsweek survey.

Clinton seemed concerned about the possibility of a Perot surge. “Every point he gets above 15 comes away from me,” he said in a brief interview. Perot, he said, had been “very smart” in dropping out of the race in July, then re-entering only a few weeks before the election. “He escaped all the scrutiny Bush and I got,” Clinton said. “No one remembers all the stuff that was written about him before. He outsmarted the media.”

Perot on Saturday night broadcast another half-hour TV program, the sixth of his campaign. The program was called “The Ross Perot Nobody Knows.” It featured people who have gotten to know Perot over the years and who offered glowing assessments of his character.

They included a woman who has been his special assistant for nearly 20 years, the man who takes care of his personal property and his boats and a Texas police officer whom Perot helped after a skiing accident.

While the program aired, Perot prepared for his first appearance on the campaign trail since he rejoined the race on Oct. 1. He was scheduled to appear at rallies today near Flemington, N.J., and in downtown Pittsburgh.

At their appearances in the Midwest and South, Clinton and Bush seemed to heed political history, which argues that the candidates who win presidential elections--from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan--are those who do best at connecting with the natural optimism that forms a major part of the American character.

Clinton adjusted his standard speech, emphasizing optimistic notes and soft-pedaling the litany of American problems that earlier in the year he had used to argue that Bush did not deserve reelection.

During his appearance at a dairy farm outside the small Wisconsin village of Greenleaf, Clinton stood on a platform outside a barn surrounded by more than a thousand supporters who had gathered on short notice to hear him speak and share a breakfast of slightly greenish scrambled eggs, bacon, coffee and rolls.

Earlier in the campaign, he probably would have showed up in jeans and a jacket. But in keeping with a more recent effort to make voters feel comfortable with him in the Oval Office, he mounted the platform, surrounded by harvested corn fields, wearing a dark suit and a conservative red-striped tie.

In some of his remarks, however, he was at his most down-home and folksy. Bush and Perot have been criticizing him for being from a small state, he said, but “I think it’s a pretty good thing to be from a small, rural place.”

At the end of his speech, Clinton picked up a saxophone and accompanied farm owner Bill Clancy in a rendition of “Danny Boy”--so out of tune that Secret Service police dogs yelped during the high notes.

Later in the day, at an AFL-CIO rally in Des Moines, Clinton echoed his theme of hope. “The whole argument of the Bush crowd is that things could be worse,” he said, speaking to satellite TV cameras that linked the event to 31 similar labor rallies nationwide. “My whole argument is things could be better.”

AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland told the rally: “Anyone who trusts George Bush and Dan Quayle deserves what they get. But I have a feeling that in 10 days it will be Bush and Quayle who deserve what they get.”

Clinton seemed a little less certain. “What always happens in a race like this is that people begin to give in to their fears,” Clinton warned the crowd. “And this is really a race of hope against fear.” If the line reflected anxiety on Clinton’s part over the polls, it was the only moment he let it show.

Bush’s bid for optimism came during a sun-warmed rally at Montgomery’s Atlanta Crossing shopping mall, where he had already dished out his standard, red-meat lines criticizing Clinton’s draft record, his participation in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in London and his “flip-flopping” on the issues.

“Life has been good to the Bush family,” the President said. “There’s no question about that. We’re very, very lucky with our grandkids and wonderful four sons and a great daughter. And so I have no complaints on the personal side at all.

“People say, well, why do you want to do this? It’s ugly out there. You’re getting clobbered by the national media over and over again. Can’t be any fun. The answer is, something transcends your own well-being. And what transcends it for me is we have literally changed the world.”

Bush’s swipe at the media has become standard fare, as it has in the past for other candidates who have found themselves in tough races. On Saturday, he gleefully pointed to a banner that hung nearby. The banner said: “Annoy the Media. Reelect George Bush.”

“They (the media) wouldn’t know good news if it hit them in the face,” the President said, adding: “Have you heard this on the television at night, that unemployment claims have gone down to the lowest in two years?

“Have you heard that inflation is down, that interest rates are down, that total employment is 93%, inflation 2.5% to 3%, home mortgages are 8%? Now, ask yourself this: Can Bill Clinton do better than this? Or will he make things worse?

“I think he’ll make things worse.”

Also Saturday, Vice President Quayle, campaigning on Florida’s Gulf Coast, put a new twist on Bush’s efforts to brand Clinton as a tax-and-spend candidate. He told retirees that the Democratic nominee would raise inheritance taxes and tamper with Social Security if he were elected.

Clinton has not proposed either measure. Quayle staffers said he was alluding to proposals by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) and House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) to reduce the amount of inheritance that is tax-free to $200,000, from $500,000.

Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, campaigned in Covington, Ky., where he accused the Bush-Quayle Administration of “turning their backs on the average working families.”

Times staff writers Edwin Chen and Art Pine contributed to this story.