Gore Pounces on Treaty Vote in TV Ad

Acting swiftly, Vice President Al Gore injected the nuclear arms issue into the presidential race Thursday by attacking Senate Republicans for sinking the international test ban treaty. The Republican candidates backed their congressional colleagues.

Gore’s campaign rushed out a television ad accusing the Republican-run Senate of going “against the tide of history” and ending 40 years of bipartisan cooperation on arms control. “There is no more important challenge than stopping the spread of nuclear weapons,” Gore stated in the 60-second ad, the first of his presidential campaign and an effort to show off his credentials in defense and foreign policy.

For the Republican candidates, defending the near-party-line vote proved tricky. They sought to distinguish their opposition to the treaty from their support for the general concept of arms control.

“No American, Republican or Democrat, supports the spread of nuclear weapons,” Texas Gov. George W. Bush said in a statement released in Austin. “But this flawed treaty was not the way to further the cause of peace in the world.”

Elizabeth Hanford Dole, who had written to Republican leaders urging the treaty’s defeat, reiterated her opposition Thursday, as did fellow GOP hopefuls Gary Bauer and Steve Forbes. Republican Sens. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and John McCain of Arizona, who also seek the White House, both voted to reject the treaty.

As the consensus among the Republican candidates suggest, the Senate vote is unlikely to surface as an issue in the GOP primaries. Nor is there division between Gore and his rival for the Democratic nomination, former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey.

Bradley said he strongly supported the test ban, which seeks to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons by forbidding explosive nuclear tests. “We need to restore a bipartisan consensus about how to protect and advance America’s security interests if the U.S. is to lead in creating a more secure world,” said Bradley, who stumped Thursday at a Latino health clinic in Santa Ana.

Still, the partisan rancor over the Senate vote offered Gore an unexpected opportunity to highlight his long experience in arms control, while pointing up the lack of foreign policy experience of most of the other presidential contenders.

“This is an example of a real event . . . that allows him to talk about the fact that he’s been involved in these issues for a number of years,” one senior Gore advisor said Thursday. The ad, produced early Thursday morning, began running hours later in Iowa and New Hampshire, and nationally on CNN.

The spot features a subdued Gore talking directly into the camera as he condemns the vote. Speaking from a script he scribbled out himself, the vice president talks about his 20 years of work on arms control issues while a picture flashes of a younger Gore with former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and George P. Shultz, President Reagan’s secretary of State.

In airing the ad, Gore pushed back more traditional biographical spots he had planned to launch this weekend in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two states that open the presidential balloting next year.

Though the ad focuses primarily on the Republican Senate, Gore aides said it did not represent a reversal of his recent change in campaign focus. In the last two weeks, Gore has shifted from primarily contrasting himself with Bush to emphasizing his differences with Bradley. “We’ve got a number of tasks we have to do in this campaign,” a Gore strategist said.

However, it remains to be seen whether political fallout from the test-ban vote will last much beyond the next few days. Traditionally, foreign affairs plays a fairly small role in presidential elections. Pollster Andrew Kohut suggested the treaty vote might be different.

“While foreign policy isn’t at the top of the public’s agenda . . . stopping weapons of mass destruction is one of the key issues for the public when it does think about foreign policy,” said Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. “It is an area in which the Democrats can probably go on the attack, at least initially. The raw material is there.”

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Times staff writers Edwin Chen and Miguel Bustillo contributed to this story.