Dole Ad Attacks Buchanan as ‘Too Extreme’

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole took point-blank aim Wednesday at Patrick J. Buchanan, his fast-rising rival in the GOP presidential race, unleashing a new television ad that assails his foe as a denigrator of women and a dangerous isolationist “too extreme” for the country.

As the GOP race turned increasingly vitriolic, Buchanan fired back with relish. Castigating Dole as “Mr. NAFTA, Mr. GATT, Mr. Mexican Bailout”--referring to foreign trade and aid agreements Dole has supported--the former commentator accused the Kansas senator of striking deals with big corporations and with Clinton.

“My friend Bob Dole . . . has put the interests of the big banks ahead of the interests of American workers,” said Buchanan.

The exchange came as the GOP field prepared for a televised debate today that will once again place their differences on display before a national audience. The 90-minute debate will be aired live by CNN at 5 p.m. PST.

In a further indication of his growing political strength, Buchanan also came under fire from Phil Gramm, as the Texas senator formally withdrew from the race, and from Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee governor who is hoping to nudge ahead of both Buchanan and Dole here.

Trade protectionism--a cornerstone of Buchanan’s campaign--”is a dagger aimed at the heart of everything we stand for in the world,” Gramm said in his valedictory speech to his presidential supporters in Washington. Buchanan’s themes, he said, appealed to a “recessive gene in the American character” that he would speak out against it “until I am lowered into the grave.”

Gramm’s pullout left Buchanan proclaiming himself the rightful heir to the Texan’s conservative supporters. “I’ve won the battle fair and square to be the conservative challenger to Bob Dole,” he told a crowd in the shoreline community of Dover.

As for Alexander, he attacked Buchanan for his protectionist ideas. He also took a swipe at Dole as a political relic.

“Pat Buchanan has wrong ideas and Sen. Dole doesn’t have very many ideas,” Alexander said at a news conference Wednesday.

An Alexander proxy, former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, questioned Buchanan’s political credentials. While endorsing Alexander at a rally at which they both appeared in Milford, N.H., Bennett, a prominent spokesman among social conservatives, said Buchanan was “not a true conservative” because of his protectionist stance.

But the day was not an unmixed blessing for Alexander, who likes to stress his “real world” experience. As his appearance with Bennett was ending, he ignored a reporter’s question about the price of milk and eggs. As he left the event, he was heard telling an aide: “I need to know the price of a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs--now.”

Wednesday night, Alexander said: “I confess I was stumped. I haven’t eaten eggs for years and I don’t know what milk costs in New Hampshire.”

The multiple attacks that marked much of the day indicated that the tone of the GOP race is likely to remain negative as New Hampshire’s Tuesday primary approaches. That appears to be true even though publishing magnate Steve Forbes withdrew his past ads that attacked his rivals and substituted a television campaign focused more on his own positions.

Forbes’ multimillion-dollar TV campaigns here and in Iowa have been widely blamed for lowering the tone of the GOP race.

His campaign manager, Bill Dal Col, said Forbes’ “contrast ads” would stop as of today and be replaced by a new series of ads featuring Forbes looking into the camera and talking about such issues as economic growth and educational choice.

Dole, still the front-runner in polls here despite his surprisingly narrow victory over Buchanan in Monday’s Iowa caucuses, had a limited campaign schedule Wednesday, in part to prepare for today’s debate.

Appearing here before about 250 local business leaders with former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, an outspoken advocate of America’s role as a global leader, Dole avoided mentioning Buchanan by name. But he pointedly remarked: “We have to understand that whether we like it or not, we’re the leader of the free world.”

He added, “If a crisis occurs maybe on the first day of someone’s watch as president of the United States . . . it’s good to have somebody around the White House who has some experience in foreign policy.”

Buchanan, however, did not let the experience argument go unanswered. “If it was Bob Dole’s experience that led him to capitulate to Bll Clinton to spend American lives in Bosnia, then we don’t need that experience.”

Dole reserved his most biting characterization of Buchanan for his newest television ad, unveiled Wednesday. In the ad, an announcer says the television commentator and political columnist is “too extreme and can’t beat Bill Clinton.”

Buchanan, the ad said, “advocates arming ‘South Korea, Japan and Taiwan . . . ‘ with nuclear weapons.” The reference was to a Buchanan column, written in 1994, in which he said that if U.S. officials helped those countries develop their own nuclear forces, as Israel has done, American troops would no longer be needed to protect Asian security.

The ad also recycles a 1983 column by Buchanan that was a target of George Bush’s aides when Buchanan challenged the incumbent in the 1992 GOP primaries. In the column, Buchanan wrote that most women are “simply not endowed by nature with the measure of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed” in the job market.

To Buchanan, however, belonged perhaps the most colorful invective of the day. He linked Dole to the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and other multinational compacts that he contends have hamstrung America’s ability to manage its trade policy to protect jobs.

Buchanan spoke in front of a Valentine’s Day floral backdrop at a flower-packaging firm in Dover whose future he said was threatened by the removal of tariffs on cut flowers coming from South America. Those tariffs were removed in return for South American pledges to crack down on the drug trade, but the net result, he said, was that 60% of roses and 73% of all cut flowers sold in the U.S. are imports.

“Grower after grower after grower has been sacrificed on the altar of American foreign policy.”

As for Alexander, Buchanan noted that he is, like Bennett, a former secretary of education. He said both are builders of an educational bureaucracy he intends to dismantle.

In withdrawing from the race, Gramm said he would turn his attention to retaining his Senate seat this November. He also expressed some mystification over his failure to appeal to voters in the presidential race.

“I believed . . . that I am the person who could have changed America,” he said. “My problem was an inability to convince voters that I was right.”

Some political observers suggested that part of the blame could be laid to the candidate’s abrasive personality.

“The problem with Phil Gramm is you have to meet the guy,” New Hampshire Gov. Steve Merrill, Dole’s national co-chairman, told The Times in a recent interview. Merrill and Gramm had clashed over Gramm’s attempts to manipulate primary schedules in Louisiana and Delaware at New Hampshire’s expense.

“He treated me like a county sheriff,” Merrill remarked.

Times staff writers Maria L. La Ganga, John M. Broder, Sam Fulwood III, Bob Sipchen and Robert Shogan contributed to this story.

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