ASHINGTON - In the first ad salvos of the general election, George W. Bush is going after Al Gore on education and Gore is hitting back at Bush for opening with a negative tone.
Just days after the two clinched their parties' nominations, Bush was out first with his spot, which is filled with smiling children but a razor-sharp message: ''Clinton and Gore had eight years, but they've failed.''
Within hours, the vice president responded with an ad of his own: ''On the issue of education, America deserves a real debate, not more negative ads from George W. Bush.''
Each ad makes selective use of education statistics, which can be sliced in myriad ways to prove a point. The Bush ad highlights the worst of the national statistics. The Gore ad finds the worst numbers out of Texas.
The Bush campaign is spending less than $100,000 to air its 60-second ad in six Illinois media markets, some of which reach into neighboring battleground states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Iowa. Yesterday, the Gore campaign said it would air its spot, also 60 seconds, in the same markets and would spend about the same amount of money.
With limited dollars remaining for the four months before the party conventions, Gore had hoped to hold off for a while before beginning TV advertising. But when Bush prepared to go on the air, Gore advisers decided they had to respond immediately.
Nearly eight months before Nov. 7, ''the general election has begun,'' said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication, who studies political ads.
The ads are running in southern Illinois, which holds its primary election on Tuesday, but they are clearly intended as early groundwork for the fall.
''We're able to reach four key swing states for the fall election,'' said Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer.
The Gore ad opens with what has become a familiar charge: that the other side went negative first. It then proceeds to criticize Bush's Texas record, much in the same way that the Bush ad criticizes the national record.
''George W. Bush - from South Carolina to New York he used dirty politics to trash John McCain's record. Now he's running attack ads against Al Gore,'' the Gore ad says.
Education consistently ranks at the top of voter concerns, particularly among women, whose votes could be decisive in the fall.
Since he wrapped up the nomination, the Texas governor has been focusing tightly on education, making it a daily theme.
A new poll out yesterday shows Bush and Gore neck and neck with voters on the issue of education, though other polls show Gore with an advantage.
Bush's education plan would remove many of the federal regulations that govern the spending of education money. To keep the money that aids the poorest children, schools would have to show they are making improvements. Otherwise, the federal government would give the cash directly to parents, who could use it to send their children to private schools.
Gore has proposed a massive new federal investment - $115 billion over the next 10 years, to be paid for out of the projected budget surplus - to triple the number of charter schools, provide universal access to kindergarten, modernize old schools and construct new ones, recruit teachers, and give raises to high-performing instructors.
In his ad, Bush says that under the Clinton-Gore administration, national reading scores ''stagnated.'' It doesn't mention that they had been dropping through the 1980s.
Jamieson noted that Texas scores followed the national trend.
''He's attacking Gore in an area in which he didn't make an improvement in Texas,'' she said.
