Candidates Begin Labor Day Blitz

Vice President Al Gore’s campaign said Friday, for the first time in public, that a vote for Ralph Nader would boost George W. Bush’s presidential prospects. Meanwhile, the Democrats announced a 24-hour Labor Day blitz of four politically crucial states.

The Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, Joseph I. Lieberman, took aim at Nader, the Green Party presidential nominee, with barely a sentence during an informal address at an intimate fund-raiser in Portland, Maine. But it stood out because he and Gore had so far ignored Nader.

A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, the senator from Connecticut said during a brief reception that raised about $20,000 for the Democratic Party. Nader has pulled around 6% in some national polls this summer, but recent surveys have placed him closer to 3%.

Gore’s aides do not profess to be overly concerned about Nader, but in the last week Nader supporters began dogging Gore as the vice president campaigned in the Pacific Northwest.

They offered a noisy counterpoint, demanding in their chants that Gore “let Ralph debate” if the vice president and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the Republican presidential nominee, negotiate a debate agreement.

Meanwhile, a day after Republicans released an ad mocking Al Gore for raising money in a Buddhist temple and saying he helped invent the Internet, George W. Bush on Friday called it a “tongue-in-cheek” response to the Democrats’ “withering” assaults.

“I don’t think this is mean and ugly,” Bush said. “I think this is a tongue-in-cheek use of a man’s own words.”

Bush, who has promised to “change the tone” in Washington, told Kentucky high school students on Thursday that politics doesn’t have to be “mean and ugly.”

He said the Republican National Committee’s ad, which started airing Friday in 17 states, is aimed at undermining the credibility of a $30-million Democratic Party ad campaign that attacked him over the summer.

“The basic point the Republicans were making is, this is a man who will say things to get elected, including distorting my record,” Bush told reporters as he set out from Austin, Texas, on a campaign swing through Louisiana and Arkansas.

The Democrats have run a number of spots attacking Bush’s record as Texas governor. The ads have criticized his handling of the environment and children’s health insurance, and they portrayed him as an ally of “big drug companies.”

The new Republican ad shows Gore at a 1996 political fund-raiser in a Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights, Calif. It also shows a clip of Gore saying, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” The narrator says, “Yeah, and I invented the remote control.”

“This was humorous and accurate,” Bush said. “This is the man’s own words. And let the American people judge whether or not it’s accurate.”

Kym Spell, Gore’s deputy communications director, said Bush’s “downward spiraling poll numbers have apparently made him so dizzy that he can no longer distinguish negative from positive. His ridiculous statement is today’s sign of just how desperate the Bush campaign has become and how out of touch George W. Bush is with the American people.”

Also Friday, the vice president announced plans to campaign around the clock from Sunday afternoon until Monday evening.

In the afternoon, he’ll go to a construction site in Philadelphia. At midnight, he’ll talk with nurses, orderlies and doctors at a hospital in Flint, Mich. Just before dawn, he’ll stop at a diner in Tampa, Fla., and then talk with bakery workers and firefighters there. He’ll continue on to a labor rally in Pittsburgh and yet one more rally, at the Louisville Motorway Speedway, at the end of the day in Kentucky.

The Labor Day marathon--or “The American Workathon,” as the Gore campaign calls it--will open a week in which Gore plans to focus on the economy and, on Wednesday, deliver a speech that aides say will present a proposed federal budget and set his goals for the nation’s economic progress.

For all the attention paid so far in the campaign to health care and education, Gore’s advisors and outside experts, including Republicans, know that more often than not voters’ choices are built around the economy.

Fears that the switch to a high-tech, trade-driven economy will leave workers behind are at the center of Nader’s campaign, and the Gore camp views the nation’s economic progress over the last 7 1/2 years as the vice president’s strongest card.

Even among Republicans, it is recognized as one of Gore’s most powerful weapons.

Twelve years ago, when Bush’s father ran for the presidency after eight years as President Reagan’s vice president, he talked about crime and devotion to the American flag. But his political foundation was built on this question: Are you better off now than you were eight years ago?