Clashing Campaign Targets: Goldberg vs. Lay

BEAVER, W. Va. -- The presidential campaign Friday turned into a tussle over values and decency, as Republicans assailed the coarse tone of a celebrity fundraiser for Sen. John F. Kerry and Democrats attacked the Bush administration’s ties to the indicted former head of Enron.

Ken Mehlman, Bush’s campaign manager, called on Kerry to release a videotape of Thursday night’s New York City fundraiser, which included risque humor and accusations that the president took America to war for his political benefit.

“If John Kerry is going to praise last night’s star-studded hate fest and characterize it as the ‘heart and soul’ of America, he should share those values with voters everywhere,” Mehlman said.

Mehlman’s counterpart in the Kerry camp, Mary Beth Cahill, sought to distance Kerry and running mate John Edwards from the incendiary language, telling reporters, “The views expressed by the performers are their own views.”

She did not directly respond when asked why Kerry had failed Thursday night to repudiate some of the comments directed at Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. “The performers have a perfect right to say what they said, but it is not what Sen. Kerry and Sen. Edwards would say, and they do not approve of some of the remarks made,” Cahill said, without offering specifics.

She added that the Kerry campaign would not release a videotape of the event, which featured appearances by actors Chevy Chase, Meryl Streep, Paul Newman and Whoopi Goldberg, unless the Bush camp established the same practice for its political fundraising events.

Kerry made no public reference to the concert Friday as he campaigned in New York and West Virginia. But his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, told reporters on his campaign plane that while she enjoyed the music, “some of the words I would not have used.”

Independent analysts suggested Friday’s back-and-forth was much ado about little of consequence.

“I assume right-wing talk show hosts will say it shows how despicable Democrats are, and a lot of Republicans will nod their heads,” said Tim Hibbitts, a nonpartisan pollster in Oregon. “And hard-core anti-Bushies and other far-lefties who enjoy heaping abuse on people they don’t like will say it’s great. But I don’t think a lot of swing voters are going to be distracted by any of this.”

Still, the controversy was an unwelcome diversion for Democrats, after a significant burst of favorable publicity that started Tuesday when Kerry announced Edwards was his running mate. The strident tone at the New York fundraiser also was a sharp contrast to the upbeat atmospherics that have surrounded the pair’s introductory tour of battleground states.

The Democratic fundraiser, an East Coast counterpart to the celebrity event held earlier this month in Los Angeles, pulled in $7.5 million for the Kerry ticket and the national party, a record. It also produced some of the more acrid commentary of the campaign.

Chase called Bush a liar and suggested that the United States invaded Iraq “just so he could be called a wartime president.” Newman said Bush’s tax cuts were “borderline criminal,” and singer John Mellencamp performed a song that referred to the president as a “cheap thug.”

Even some in the friendly audience squirmed when Goldberg performed a comedy bit that employed Bush’s surname as a sexual euphemism.

At the end of the concert, the two Democratic candidates took the stage with their wives and Kerry thanked the performers, saying they had conveyed “the heart and soul of our country.”

“Every one of these performers could be somewhere else. They could be playing it safe; they could be holding their beliefs about their country to themselves because their managers are telling them, ‘Oh, you don’t want to go out and do that,’ ” Kerry said. “They’re not. They’re here to join in making this a better country, and we are so grateful to each and every one of them for what they’ve done tonight.”

Republicans and their allies responded Friday with outrage. Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, a Democrat who has endorsed Bush, mocked Kerry during a conference call arranged by the Bush campaign.

Quoting from some of the more inflammatory remarks, which he noted were made “in a time of war,” Miller said Kerry listened to them and “sat there, grinning like a mule eating briars. This is just another example of how far out of the mainstream Sen. Kerry really is.”

The Kerry camp said the Bush campaign was only ginning up reaction to draw voters’ attention away from more substantive matters.

“Every day they look for excuses not to talk about the issues that people care deeply about,” said Tad Devine, a senior Kerry strategist. He said he believed it was “preposterous” to criticize Kerry and Edwards “for things other people said” when Cheney proudly admitted to using a vulgarity on the floor of the Senate recently in confronting one of the administration’s Democratic critics.

The question of values has emerged at the center of debate in the presidential campaign, with each side trying to define the word and to frame the discussion in a way that best serves its political interests.

For Democrats in this election, values are reflected in economic terms, or as Kerry put it Friday, “invest[ing] in healthcare, education, job creation and put[ting] America back to work.”

He and Edwards questioned Bush’s values by invoking the name of Kenneth L. Lay, the former head of Enron and a major Bush donor who was indicted this week on conspiracy charges involving the collapse of the former energy giant.

“Values are something you live in the choices of your budget, in the people you choose to help,” Kerry said Friday morning at a New York City fundraising breakfast. “Values are not to take three years and a few months before an election before you bring Ken Lay to justice.”

Edwards concurred. “Values is not a word on a piece of paper, part of a political slogan,” the North Carolina senator said. “Values are what’s inside you.”

He praised “middle-class working Americans ... struggling to get by. They represent the values of America. Not Enron. Not Ken Lay.”

For Republicans in this election, values are more a reflection of personal behavior, exemplified by Bush’s call Friday for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Speaking at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, the president said what gays and lesbians “do in the privacy of their house, consenting adults should be able to do.”

“This is America,” Bush said. “It’s a free society. But it doesn’t mean we have to redefine traditional marriage.”

The president’s remarks came as the Senate prepared to vote next week on a same-sex marriage amendment, one of the most emotionally charged cultural issues of the year.

Kerry and Edwards both oppose government recognition of same-sex marriages, but reject calls for a constitutional amendment outlawing the practice.

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Barabak reported from San Francisco, Gold from West Virginia. Times staff writer Peter Wallsten contributed to this report.