Candidates Offer Likely Glimpse of Debate Plans

With the presidential campaign moving into its crucial debate phase, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush presented sharply different visions of the economy Thursday and are likely to do the same today on energy and the environment.

The two are laying foundations for their competing presentations to the nation next week, and Gore is taking the unusual step of inviting what an aide called “working Americans” to his debate training camp to help him prepare.

On Thursday, Gore offered an audience of scholars a broad-brush picture of his economic policy. He cast himself as the protector of the nation’s well-being and said that on election day “prosperity itself will be on the ballot.”

Bush, campaigning in Green Bay, Wis., sought to tar Gore as a big spender.

“If the vice president gets elected, the era of big government being ‘over’ is over, and so too, I fear, could be our prosperity,” he said.

He accused Gore of “proposing the largest increase in federal spending in 35 years, since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson,” and said: “That staggering level of spending is one major difference between my opponent and me.”

Today, in the heart of the Michigan auto country, Bush is expected to pitch his plan to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Gore and virtually all environmental groups say this would risk one of the nation’s greatest wildernesses for a relatively small amount of oil.

Gore plans to polish his credentials as an environmentalist during a visit to a National Audubon Society preserve in a leafy Washington suburb. His running mate, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, plans to use a Houston oil refinery as a backdrop for an attack on Bush’s environmental policies in a city that has been derided as the smoggiest in the country.

But for all the heated talk on the campaign trail about social issues--Medicare and Social Security, education and the environment--campaign professionals recognize that bracing the voters’ decisions will be this central question: Which candidate is most likely to continue the good times and improve the lot of those who have been left behind?

Gore used the address at the Brookings Institution here to make that point, to renew his argument against the $1.3-trillion, 10-year tax cut that is the centerpiece of Bush’s economic policy and to preview the approach he is likely to follow in Tuesday’s debate, the first of three.

As framed by both candidates, the argument about the economy comes down to choices about how to use the federal budget surplus, figured at slightly more than $4 trillion over 10 years.

Gore would use it to help eliminate the national debt and would direct $500 billion in tax cuts to help middle-income taxpayers pay for college tuition and health care, among other needs. Bush argues that the surplus should be returned to taxpayers in the form of the larger tax cut he advocates and that this would fuel economic growth.

Gore envisions eliminating the national debt by 2012 for the first time in nearly 200 years and thus reducing, and then eliminating, the interest payments that go with it. Those payments, he said, amount to the “third-largest federal program,” taking up more of the country’s budget than any program other than Social Security and defense.

With the spending and tax priorities he has outlined, Gore said, “within eight years, the government spending would be the smallest share of national income that it’s been in 50 years.”

The speech at Brookings, an 80-year-old public policy research center, was long on themes, short on specifics and just plain short. It ran only 14 minutes, and the vice president took no questions from the audience of experts.

Also Thursday, during an appearance with his wife, Tipper, on “Larry King Live,” Gore brushed off questions about his tendency to exaggerate.

“Oh, I think that in itself is an exaggeration,” Gore responded after King brought up the matter.

“I think that, in a campaign, when you get a fact wrong, all of a sudden you’re accused of, you know, committing some horrible offense.”

Lieberman, spending much of Thursday in Washington, used the Capitol as a backdrop and, with dozens of Democratic legislators as his chorus, echoed Gore’s daily denunciation of Bush’s tax cut proposal.

Bush, he said, was “signing blank checks on an account his tax cuts have already depleted.”

Bush, in a continuing effort to raise doubts about the outlook for the nation’s economy if Democrats remain in the White House, issued one of his harshest attacks in recent weeks, saying of a President Gore: “In four short years, he would leave obligations that would haunt our children for generations.”

Among them, by Bush’s accounting:

About 20,000 to 30,000 bureaucrats added to the federal payroll, 412 new Medicare regulations, a Medicare bureaucracy doubled in size and additional IRS agents performing more audits of taxpayers.

The Bush campaign said the predictions were based on studies by the Senate Budget Committee staff and by a policy research group the Gore campaign has identified with former officials of the Reagan administration.

The Texas governor predicted that spending would grow by $2 trillion over 10 years, or about $20,000 per household--more than three times the amount of new spending proposed by Bill Clinton in 1992, he said.

Bush spoke to several hundred supporters gathered around him and his wife, Laura, in a warehouse of the Tosca Limited container manufacturing plant in Green Bay.

“My opponent once seemed interested in reinventing government,” Bush said. “Now he seems interested only in expanding it. For him, big government has never really been dead; it’s simply been biding its time, waiting for its next chance.”

“We have come too far and learned too much to go back to the old ways of tax and spend,” Bush said, adding: “Vice President Gore has cast his lot with the old Democratic Party.”

With campaign attention shifting toward the debates, the vice president plans to prepare by, among other things, working with a selection of people he has encountered during his campaigning: a teacher from East Lansing, Mich., for one, and a firefighter and health care worker, among others.

As many as 15 or 20 people are expected to journey to his debate camp in Sarasota, Fla., and then to the debate in Boston, all at the expense of the campaign.

They will act as a “reality check,” said a member of the Gore camp familiar with the debate plan put together by Gore’s Nashville headquarters.

In the debate, he said, “the idea is not to score political points as much as to tell the American people what you would do. Having these folks there will help him do that.”

Rather than picturing the debate as a head-to-head match with the Texas governor, the Gore camp presents it as a new opportunity, much like the candidate’s speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, to pepper a national audience with details of the vice president’s policy agenda across a broad spectrum of issues.

“I think it will probably give both of us a better chance to flesh out the details and the specifics, which I like,” Gore said Wednesday night of the debate, while flying back to Washington from Iowa.

He began the now thoroughly routine pre-debate practice of expectations-adjustment, in this case building up those for his opponent.

Citing Bush’s performance in a primary debate against Sen. John McCain of Arizona, “when the chips were down,” and the debating skills he demonstrated against incumbent Ann Richards, a formidable debater, in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial race, Gore said: “He’s won every debate he’s been in, practically. So I think he’s an excellent debater.”

The vice president will train at the Mote Marine Research Center, an 11-acre campus on Sarasota Bay. It is known for its work with sharks.

In another campaign development, McCain pressed Bush to accept his challenge to ban soft money from the race.

Gore accepted the proposal McCain advanced along with Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.). Bush did not, and McCain said in an interview with Associated Press that accepting the ban on the largely unregulated and unlimited contributions “would have been a major step toward ridding the political system of its most pernicious evil.”

In Florida, GOP vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney was greeted by Gov. Jeb Bush, the presidential candidate’s brother.

Jeb Bush bristled as reporters approached him, first saying “we’re going to carry Florida,” and then adding: “I don’t talk to the national press anymore. . . . Whatever you ask, that’s what I’m going to say: We’re going to carry Florida.”

But Florida, where the GOP was hoping the governor’s popularity would help deliver the state to their candidate, is considered up for grabs.

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Times staff writers Dana Calvo and Scott Martelle contributed to this story.