EW YORK - After 48 hours of being pounded by ads that criticized John McCain for proposing to cut breast cancer research funding, the Arizona senator's campaign lashed out at George W. Bush yesterday for exploiting the fears of cancer patients and their families.
''It is very unfortunate,'' McCain said on NBC's ''Today'' show. ''It's not the first time or the last. They have done nothing but run negative ads in state after state.''
With a critical round of primaries on Tuesday that includes New York, the McCain campaign also continued its attempts to link the Bush campaign to a television ad running in four states and financed by $2.1 million in unregulated ''soft money'' that attacks the senator's environmental record.
Staten Island borough President Guy Molinari, a cancer survivor who heads McCain's New York campaign, called on Bush to stop using cancer patients as political pawns. ''I know what cancer is all about,'' he said. He also noted that ''John McCain's sister has had breast cancer.''
Molinari demanded that Bush apologize and pull the ads off the air. ''Do you want to win that badly?'' Molinari asked of the Texas governor.
Bush, campaigning at a breast cancer research center on Long Island, faced his harshest questions yet about the decision to air radio ads criticizing McCain's record on breast cancer.
He spent most of a news conference defending his decision to politicize the issue. ''This is an issue. The ad came right off the man's Web page. This is what he laid out. This is what he thought was important,'' Bush said.
''I don't think the senator should be squealing about pork and then squealing when somebody disagrees with one of the cuts he wants to make,'' he said.
The ad features Geri Barish, a Long Island woman who was initially described by the Bush campaign as a breast cancer survivor and longtime advocate, but who is in addition a Republican operative from the area. Barish lost but has continued to work with Governor George Pataki to secure funding for breast cancer research. At yesterday's event, Pataki introduced her as, among other things, a research-funding lobbyist.
Though McCain has an overall record in support of cancer research and as a foe of big tobacco, he includes several small breast cancer research projects on his Web site in a list of hundreds of congressional measures he calls wasteful spending.
Bush, wearing a pink ribbon symbolizing the fight against breast cancer, thanked about 100 guests at a forum at the Stony Brook Health Sciences Center for letting him take ''a little time off the campaign trail to talk policy.'' But it seemed evident that Bush - flanked by several politicians, including Pataki, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and former presidential candidate Elizabeth Dole - was carrying out the third day of a strategy to use women's health issues against McCain.
Despite two days of tough questions, Bush did not back down from the ad, and instead attacked McCain for saying on his campaign Web site that he would ax two Long Island programs that he considers ''garden variety pork.''
''A legitimate role of the federal government is to fund research to cure disease,'' Bush told the panel, in an apparent dig at McCain. ''It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when we cure cancer.''
Pataki also defended Bush's ad and was critical of McCain's suggestion that the two medical research programs should be funded through health agencies instead of unrelated federal agencies such as the Energy and Defense Departments. Giuliani, who is in a tough Senate race here against Hillary Rodham Clinton, remained uncharacteristically quiet, saying it was possible for him to back Bush as a ''friend'' without getting involved in the particulars of this debate.
The issue of breast cancer is sensitive on Long Island, where as many as one in nine women has contracted the illness, and where many activists believe the environment has contributed to the high rates. But it is also an issue the Republican Party here has recently sought to turn to its advantage. Former GOP senator Alfonse D'Amato funded numerous breast cancer research projects here - a point made several times at the Bush panel yesterday.
Representative Peter King, a New York Republican who accompanied McCain as he campaigned in Manhattan yesterday, called the Bush radio attack ads ''last-minute desperation smear tactics... scurrilous ... malicious.''
Meanwhile, the ad on the environment aimed against McCain is funded by a group linked to longtime Bush supporters in Texas that calls itself ''Republicans for Clean Air.'' The ad has been criticized as a distortion by independent environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, as well as media organizations.
After the McCain campaign complained to the Federal Communications Commission, which concluded that the ad failed to adequately identify who paid for it, news organizations tied the commercial to wealthy Texas businessmen with connections to the Bush campaign and administration.
At a cold but sunny noontime rally on Wall Street, McCain warned that ''$2 million has come into this campaign from a source we don't know, alleging things that are untrue.''
The Republican ''machine'' that tried to keep him off the ballot in parts of New York, ''is trying to fool you again,'' McCain told the crowd.
''These ads are being sponsored, coordinated and managed by the George Bush for president campaign,'' charged McCain campaign manager Rick Davis.
