Democrats Denounce Dole’s TV Ad Assailing Clinton

The Clinton campaign Friday denounced Republican rival Bob Dole for a new TV ad attacking the president’s personal attitude toward drugs, and accused Dole of a habit of turning “nasty” when his campaigns are in trouble.

“We’re entering a period where personal, negative politics is going to rule the day for the campaign,” Clinton campaign spokesman Joe Lockhart said at a news conference called to criticize the new ad.

The TV spot uses an MTV segment from 1992 in which Clinton jokingly tells a young man in the audience at a question-and-answer session that if he smoked marijuana again he would inhale: “Sure, if I could; I tried before.”

Dole’s ad uses the response as the centerpiece for the campaign argument that Clinton has failed to take the drug problem seriously, thus contributing to a recent increase in teenage drug use.

Dole was in Washington, taking a few days off from the campaign trail, but his campaign is spending heavily on the new ad--buying as much as $5 million in TV time over the next 10 nights, including between $500,000 and $600,000 in California.

Ross Perot on Friday filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission protesting the Commission on Presidential Debates’ plan to exclude him from the debates. Perot said he plans to file suit on the subject next week.

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Meanwhile, White House officials said Clinton intends to sign the recently passed “Defense of Marriage Act” in the wee hours when he returns to Washington this morning. The law would allow states to refuse to recognize marriages between homosexual couples. Asked why Clinton was signing the bill in the middle of the night, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said “the president believes the motives behind this bill are dubious” and was hoping to “get this over with.”

Democrats have invested considerable effort in convincing voters that Dole is running a “negative campaign,” but in fact, both sides have run ads critical of the opposition, and none of the ads so far has been nearly as negative as those in some past campaigns.

The Democratic effort appears to have had some success. A new CBS poll released Friday shows that by 57% to 27%, those surveyed believe Clinton has spent more of his campaigning time explaining what he would do if reelected rather than attacking Dole. But by 54% to 21%, they said Dole was spending more of his time attacking Clinton than saying what he might do if elected.

Meanwhile, Clinton made a visible show of his commitment to congressional Democrats with a stop Friday evening in Sioux Falls, S.D., a state of chill winds, Republican majorities and a paltry three electoral votes that he had not visited once as president.

The unlikely journey was explained as an effort to help a moderate Democrat, Rep. Tim Johnson, against a conservative Republican, Sen. Larry Pressler. Democrats contend Pressler, who has high personal negatives, holds perhaps the most vulnerable Republican seat in the Senate.

Closing a four-day, six-state campaign trip, the Clinton campaign used a visit to Portland, Ore., to release a new book credited to Al Gore that claims $118 billion of savings from the administration’s effort to streamline the federal government. Critics have questioned the extent of real savings; their efficiency and how much of the savings are actually due to the post-Cold War defense cutbacks.

Administration officials acknowledged that 110,000 of the 185,000 in federal head-count reductions between January 1993 and September 1995 were from the Defense Department cutbacks.

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Referring to the title of Gore’s book, “The Best Kept Secrets in Government,” Clinton said: “I must hand it to the vice president. Al Gore cut a book deal on a book full of secrets. Now he’s telling all. And he wrote the book under his own name.”

“This is a book the public ought to read,” Clinton added.

Times staff writer Eleanor Randolph in New York contributed to this story.