ES MOINES - Hoping to gain ground on Vice President Al Gore in this crucial caucus state, former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley sharpened his usually mild campaign yesterday, highlighting his own antismoking record and pointing out inconsistencies in Gore's record dating back several years.
Bradley also described the Gore campaign's theatrics, such as the presence of a costumed volunteer known as ''Corn Man'' at his events, as ''adolescent'' and sarcastically called it a show of ''real class.''
With the Democratic contest growing more tense by the day, Gore responded forcefully on the tobacco issue, saying Bradley is breaking his pledge to run ''a different kind of campaign.''
''Well, I've led the fight against smoking and against, you know, the efforts by the companies to lure children into smoking,'' Gore said in a telephone interview with reporters.
''I just kind of think that smacks of sort of desperate, negative campaigning,'' said Gore, who spent the day talking with senior citizens in Davenport, Iowa, about the high cost of prescription drugs and rallying his troops in Muscatane, Iowa.
With the critical Iowa caucuses less than two weeks away, and with both candidates' major policy proposals on the table, hand-to-hand political combat is coming to dominate the race.
That is especially the case in Iowa, where Bradley lags far behind Gore and has sought to recover from a lackluster debate performance Saturday. Although Bradley has surged in New Hampshire and elsewhere in the Northeast, the former senator and New York Knicks player has been slower to catch on in the region around his native Missouri.
A day after describing Gore's education proposals as being in a bureaucratic ''box,'' Bradley visited a Des Moines elementary school to decry the health effects of smoking.
Bradley denounced smoking as a cause of widespread illness and death and said its control is key to the health care plan at the center of his campaign.
He suggested he could save billions to pay for his health care plan with measures such as spending an extra billion on antismoking programs at the Centers for Disease Control, doubling funding for community health care centers, and supporting new research into the causes of youth smoking.
Speaking with reporters later, Bradley said he was not attacking Gore but drawing natural contrasts required by a campaign.
''At some time, this was going to become competitive,'' Bradley said. ''The issue is ... consistency over time and intensity of feeling'' on tobacco, Bradley said.
In a news release, Bradley described himself as a ''leader'' of antitobacco efforts while he was a senator. The release also targeted Gore's record, citing a 1985 vote by then-Senator Gore against an amendment introduced by Bradley to prevent a drop in the tobacco tax.
It included a quote from a letter Gore wrote to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 1988 saying he does not think tobacco advertising bans are the solution to smoking addiction.
Yesterday, however, a key leader in the antismoking battle rose to Gore's defense.
''He supported strong tobacco-control efforts before anyone else did,'' said David Kessler, a former head of the Food and Drug Administration in the Clinton-Gore administration. Kessler, now dean of the Yale School of Medicine, praised Gore for ''remarkable acts of courage'' in the antismoking fight.
Gore has been criticized by opponents for his tobacco record. After a speech at the 1996 Democratic National Convention in which he spoke about his sister's death from lung cancer, critics pointed out that Gore's family had reaped profits from tobacco farming in Tennessee, and Gore was slammed for being hypocritical.
Bradley's critique of Gore's tobacco record underscored the difficulty he is having running a wholly positive campaign.
Yesterday morning, Bradley gave an audience in Mason City his standard assessment of negative campaigning.
''I believe you've got to give people something to vote for, not something to vote against,'' Bradley said.
Yet among the Gore positions noted by the Bradley campaign's release were two quotations dating from 1988 and a vote Gore made as a senator 14 years ago.
Bradley spokesman Eric Hauser defended such jibes, saying Gore's attacks have been hypocritical and far nastier in tone.
