Bush Attacks Gore’s Veracity as Tone Sharpens

George W. Bush ended an issue-oriented week with a scathing personal attack against Al Gore, charging Saturday in some of the harshest language of the presidential campaign that his Democratic rival “spent the week misleading Americans.”

The Texas governor, who has promised to eradicate the nastiness and finger-pointing of Washington, cited a catalog of Gore “misrepresentations” and called them “serious business.”

“Not the legitimate debate of political disagreements,” he told a Pennsylvania Republican Party gathering via satellite from Florida, “they are a disturbing pattern of embellishments and sudden reversals.”

Addressing a labor union convention in Cleveland via telephone from Washington, the vice president disparaged Bush’s comments, remarking that Bush’s plan to talk about issues this week “didn’t seem to last very long.”

“With our whole future at stake, this is no time for personal attack, which is why I’ll never make any,” Gore told the International Union of Electronic, Electrical, Salaried, Machine and Furniture Workers. “After all, this election isn’t about me or Gov. Bush. It’s about you and your future.”

With just more than six weeks to go before election day, Bush has been struggling in national opinion polls and he has recently seen his lead slipping in key states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio. He has spent the last two days in Florida, where his younger brother is governor and he should be ahead, but the race there is neck and neck.

The Republican nominee for president has responded to the slippage by stepping up his campaign activity and focusing on issues, traveling 6,076 miles through nine states last week and reaching out to women voters with appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “Live With Regis.”

Karen Hughes, Bush’s communications director, defended Bush’s comments and described the candidate’s change in strategy from nice guy to attack dog as simply making an “important comparison” between the two men.

As Bush stumped in Florida on Saturday morning, his staff was rattled by a published report that the FBI has tentatively identified the person who allegedly sent a package of the Republicans’ debate preparation materials to a Gore confidant.

Quoting anonymous sources, the Associated Press reported overnight that “early evidence appears to point to a person in the Bush campaign, but further investigation to confirm that is needed.”

The videotape of a debate practice session along with sensitive documents had been mailed from Austin, Texas, nearly two weeks ago to Tom Downey, a former Long Island congressman who is helping Gore with his own debate homework. Downey said he immediately turned the package over to the FBI to investigate.

Visibly angry, Hughes refuted the AP story Saturday and accused the Justice Department of playing politics with a serious and ongoing investigation. Bush campaign manager Joseph Allbaugh also called FBI Director Louis J. Freeh to complain about how the investigation has been handled and to demand the identity of the suspect, if there is one.

On Saturday, the Gore campaign suspended a low-level staffer after an ABC News report quoted the man as saying that he knew of a mole--a Gore operative--working on the Bush staff. The Gore campaign investigated the matter and “found no evidence whatsoever that [it] . . . received or used confidential information from the Bush campaign,” said Gore communications director Mark D. Fabiani.

Still, the 28-year-old aide was placed on paid administrative leave “so that the campaign can review his actions and explanations over the last two days,” Fabiani said. Hughes dismissed the mole story as “rumor.”

Bush prizes loyalty above all other qualities, and the possibility of an inside job could be particularly painful, since Hughes said only a small number of top campaign aides had authorized access to the purloined materials.

The FBI said Saturday that it does not have any suspects in the case yet. “At this point we’re just looking into a preliminary inquiry,” said FBI spokeswoman Tracy Silberling.

Bush spent the last 5 1/2 days on a 12-city campaign swing designed to showcase his policies and regain momentum lost during several weeks of verbal gaffes and plunging poll numbers.

While he emphasized the issues, he also steadily escalated his attacks against his rival, culminating in the satellite message to Pennsylvania party faithful.

The campaign fell short of calling Gore a liar, but a Friday e-mail from the Bush campaign declared in the subject field: “Gore makes things up.”

And Hughes told reporters Saturday that “after the last eight years, the American people want to look to the White House and trust their president to tell them the truth. The events of this week have seriously cast doubt on the vice president’s statements.”

Bush highlighted a series of what he called Gore’s “embellishments and sudden reversals”:

* “He started by making up numbers for his mother-in-law’s prescription drug costs, numbers he later had to admit weren’t true,” Bush charged, “and we still don’t know the real story.”

The charge stems from a Gore speech to seniors in Florida recently in which the vice president said his mother-in-law and his aging dog take the same anti-arthritis medication and bemoaned the fact that the human version is three times as expensive as the animal version.

Gore staffers acknowledged the cost estimates were based on a congressional study rather than family receipts.

* “He then talked about a lullaby he says his parents sang to him as a baby,” Bush continued. “Only problem is, the lullaby wasn’t written until he was 27 years old.”

Accepting the Teamsters Union endorsement in Las Vegas on Monday, Gore said that his parents sang him to sleep with a labor anthem that urges Americans to “look for the union label.”

Gore’s comments were “tongue in cheek,” said spokeswoman Kym Spell. “He said yesterday it was a joke. He laughed as he said it.” In addition, Spell said, the version Gore remembered was written in 1901.

* Bush also charged Saturday that Gore “changed his tune on Hollywood; one week scolding them for their bad influence and the next week passing his wallet and letting them influence it.”

Gore castigated Hollywood in concert with a report by the Federal Trade Commission that entertainment companies purposely market adult content to children. He subsequently raised money for the Democratic Party at a string of celebrity-filled events.

Spell denied that there is any hypocrisy in Gore’s treatment of Hollywood, adding that it shows he’s “not afraid to stand up to his friends.” In addition, she said that Gore has a plan to end such entertainment marketing practices, while Bush does not.

* “He said he was involved in the very invention of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,” Bush charged. “The problem is, the reserve was first established in 1975, two years before Al Gore even went to the U.S. Congress.”

Gore this week called for the government to tap into the nation’s oil reserve to help ease rising oil prices. In his speech, Bush quoted Gore as boasting: “I have been a part of the discussions on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve since the days it was first established.”

Spell said in response that the reserve was authorized in 1975, but the locations, funding and establishment were worked out in 1977 by the Energy and Power Subcommittee of which then-Rep. Gore was a member.

“You simply can’t take Bush at his word when he promises to talk about the real issues,” Spell said. “He can’t help himself from making personal attacks and misleading statements that distort the real facts on the issues.”

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Times staff writer Eric Lichtblau contributed to this story.