Clinton Taxes Victimize Families, Dole Charges

Still fine-tuning his condemnation of Bill Clinton as a tax-and-spend liberal, Bob Dole said Wednesday that the president’s big-government approach has created “a devil’s bargain in which high taxes force parents to spend more and more time at work and less time at home.”

Coming four days before the first presidential debate, Dole’s remarks at a college rally in this conservative central Pennsylvania community were his strongest yet in an attempt to link Clinton’s philosophy and record to what he regards as the deteriorating quality of family life in America.

Confronted by a string of upbeat economic indicators in recent months, Dole has been struggling to find a way to tap into Americans’ anxiety about their sense of well-being.

The Republican presidential nominee launched his latest line of attack on Clinton by calling attention to recent Labor Department statistics showing a 16% increase in the number of Americans working more than one job--mostly, Dole charged, to pay their taxes.

“The fact is, the ‘family-time tax’ levied by this administration is the cruelest tax of all,” he told an audience of about 2,000 people, mostly students, in the gymnasium of Elizabethtown College, near Harrisburg.

Dole also cited statistics that he claimed showed the number of women working two full-time jobs has risen “an incredible 21%” since 1994 and that, in the last year, 1 in 5 new jobs has “gone to people taking an extra job so they can get by.”

Parents could better spend such time, Dole said, with their children, acting as their “guardians,” “advisors” and “moral teachers.”

Middle-class families now pay more in taxes than on food, shelter and clothing combined, or 38.2% of their earnings, Dole said. “There’s something wrong when the family member who draws most of our hard-earned resources isn’t a son or daughter, husband or wife, but an uncle--Uncle Sam,” Dole said.

The former Kansas senator then repeated his promise to enact a 15% cut in income tax rates, the centerpiece of a wide-ranging “pro-growth” economic agenda.

Upon his arrival in Pennsylvania, marred by a damp drizzle, Dole was greeted with front-page headlines trumpeting a whopping Clinton lead in the state--a now-familiar experience for Dole in many parts of the country. But the latest polls here did not seem to affect his upbeat demeanor, and he vowed to carry the state in November.

With its 23 electoral votes, Pennsylvania has become a hotly contested battleground; Wednesday marked Dole’s fifth visit to the state since the Republican convention ended in mid-August.

But according to the Harrisburg Patriot-News, the latest statewide Keystone Poll had Clinton up by 16 points statewide, 49% to 33%.

The poll also showed that Dole has yet to nail down his natural base, according to Terry Madonna, a political science professor at Millersville University, who helped conduct the survey.

He said Dole has won the support of only 60% of GOP voters in Pennsylvania, while Clinton has nailed down the support of 72% of Democratic voters in the state.

Moreover, polls show that as many as 1 in 4 Republican women now back Clinton, Madonna said in a telephone interview.

Dole’s running mate, Jack Kemp, worked on trying to nail down another key state--Florida.

At a rally in the friendly territory of Jacksonville, Kemp attacked the administration for what he described as its Medicare scare tactics aimed at America’s millions of retirees.

While a Dole administration would “appeal to the highest aspirations of the American people,” Kemp told a largely elderly audience, “the only thing the Clinton administration has to offer is fear.”

Clinton is spending millions of dollars “to tell senior citizens that Medicare will be destroyed,” Kemp said. “This campaign to scare the wits out of senior citizens is outrageous, shameful, shameful.”

After threats of rain moved the rally inside, more than a thousand supporters in this northeastern Florida city were squeezed into the nearby convention center. There, a local radio personality warmed up the crowd, proclaiming: “I decided to be a Republican when I saw Clinton hugging [Palestinian leader] Yassir Arafat. I’d rather kiss my mother-in-law.”

Both Dole and Kemp seized on a recent news development to escalate denunciation of Clinton’s efforts to combat drug use--accusing the president of seeking to squash an internal administration memo in which top law enforcement officials reportedly complained in 1994 about the absence of “any true leadership” in the war on drugs.

The memo by FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and Drug Enforcement Administration head Thomas Constantine was sought by the House Government Reform and Oversight subcommittee on national security. But the White House rejected the request, citing executive privilege.

“Release the memo, Mr. President!” Dole shouted during the rally here.

Chen reported from Elizabethtown and La Ganga from Jacksonville.