Gore Touts Plan for Cleaner Trucks

Vice President Al Gore announced a new partnership between the federal government and the truck industry Friday designed to make commercial vehicles safer and more fuel efficient.

The partnership between the government and industry groups adds $47 million to an existing $95 million designed to make dramatic advances in fuel economy on four classes of commercial trucks and buses that account for more than 90% of all fuel used by such vehicles.

“To see how former adversaries are working together and planning together for a cleaner and stronger future, all of this gives me a sense of renewed optimism for our country and our environmental future,” Gore said.

But on a day when the presumed Democratic presidential nominee tried to draw attention to his environmental record, media attention was focused on a news conference he held Friday--the first in 61 days.

Gore used the news conference to scorn Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s attempts to cast himself as an environmentalist and to fend off repeated questions about Cuban castaway Elian Gonzalez.

Speaking to reporters in a hotel lobby here, Gore said Bush allowed Texas to become the most polluted state in the country by replacing the state’s environmental watchdogs with “people who worked for polluters and special interests.”

“Gov. Bush seems to have this smug assumption that he can get away with calling himself an environmentalist, despite the record of what has gone so badly wrong in Texas,” Gore said.

His long-frustrated press corps then peppered Gore with questions about the Gonzalez case and his reasons for opposing President Clinton, who said Thursday that there is “no conceivable argument” for the 6-year-old boy not to be reunited with his Cuban father.

Gore reiterated his position that, ideally, the case should be resolved by all the family members meeting together, without attorneys or government officials.

Barring that, he said, it should be determined by a domestic family court. He said he came to this position five months ago when the father was in Cuba and it was unclear if he was speaking freely.

But the vice president repeatedly ducked questions of what he thinks now that the father has come to the United States and demands to be reunited with his son.

“I have expressed my views and they remain unchanged,” he said about a half-dozen times as reporters pressed him on the subject.

Gore also refused to answer questions about why the presidential race is so close--many national polls have shown Gore and Bush in a statistical tie, despite his advantage as a vice president in a time of economic growth.

“Oh, I’m not a very good political analyst,” he said. “I try to concentrate on the substance of the issues. I’ll leave the political analysis to you.”

The 20-minute news conference was the first Gore has held since Feb. 19, when he spoke to reporters the day of the South Carolina primary while in Springfield, Mass.

The reporters covering his campaign have become increasingly frustrated by their lack of access to the vice president, who has regularly held interviews with local media. Gore aides, in response, gave members of the traveling press corps buttons Friday that read: “I was at Al Gore’s first general election press conference.”

Meanwhile, the Bush campaign defended the Texas governor’s record on the environment, saying the state had reduced noxious air emissions. Still, federal figures showed Texas to have one of the worst records in the country.

Ari Fleischer, a spokesman for Bush, the presumptive Republican nominee for the presidential race, noted that the governor had spent the last several weeks unveiling a series of proposals on health care and education.

“There’s a very clear difference between the two candidates,” Fleischer said. “Gov. Bush began the campaign with a series of policy initiatives. Al Gore begins it with a series of attacks.”

Gore tried to set the tone for the day with his announcement of the new partnership.

Standing in the cold, cavernous freight room of a trucking company in a drizzly Detroit suburb, Gore praised the “21st century truck initiative” as “an important step toward a cleaner and stronger economy.”

Within 10 years, the partnership aims to develop “production prototypes” that would triple the fuel economy of heavy pickups, double the fuel economy of 18-wheelers and exceed emission standards by reducing air pollutants.

Gore was flanked at the morning announcement by industry CEOs, union leaders and federal officials such as Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater and EPA head Carol Browner.