hen former Senator Bill Bradley said during Monday night's Harlem debate that Vice President Al Gore voted several times two decades ago to preserve tax breaks for segregated private academies, Gore labeled it a ''phony and scurrilous'' charge.
And besides, the vice president said of one of those votes, in 1981, 336 other House members sided with him.
Yesterday, on Web sites, and via fax machines, the dispute continued. But the record suggests that Bradley is mostly correct: that Gore's votes, however well-intentioned and however much company he had in making them, had the effect of preserving tax exemptions for thousands of segregated private schools that had sprung up in the wake of court-ordered public school desegregation.
But Gore was on the offensive as well: Bradley, he said, was the only Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee to vote in 1995 to end a tax break designed to encourage minority ownership of radio and television stations. Bradley conceded that he cast the vote, but disputed Gore's inference that he opposes opportunities for minority ownership of broadcast outlets.
Ralph Neas, who was the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights from 1981 to 1995, said last night that both candidates have admirable voting records on civil rights issues. Gore's votes that helped block an end to tax-exempt status for segregated schools and Bradley's vote in 1995, Neas said, ''were inconsistent with the excellent records both men compiled in Congress on civil rights.''
The more serious charge of the two was Bradley's, made as part of his effort to revitalize his campaign by drawing caustic comparisons between Gore's liberal positions today and his conservative congressional voting record on issues ranging from gun control to abortion.
The Monday night debate, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, also produced several other accusations and denials. Among them:
Bradley denied, in response to a question, that he had advocated appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the 1996 campaign finance scandals. ''I did not propose a special prosecutor,'' Bradley said during the debate.
But only a day before, Bradley, during an appearance on ''ABC This Week'' came very close to saying just that: ''I think that it would be very important to get to the bottom of it. I think a special prosecutor is one way to do that.''
Gore insisted that Bradley had done nothing about ''racial profiling'' in his home state of New Jersey. Yesterday, Governor Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who lost the 1990 Senate race to Bradley, wrote to Gore that Bradley ''did little, if anything at all, to address the problem.''
But former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, also a Republican, said in an interview it was ''totally unfair'' to criticize Bradley for not taking earlier notice of police practices in his state. ''As a US senator I don't understand how Bill Bradley could have had anything to do with it at all,'' Kean said.
Gore charged that Bradley, before giving a major education address earlier this month, ''went for 14 months without making a speech on education policy per se.'' Bradley gave three education speeches while touring Western Iowa on Jan. 10.
The most serious charge, though, was Bradley's accusation about Gore's votes in 1979, 1980, and 1981, when Gore represented a largely rural Tennessee district in the House.
Those three years, the House and Senate, pushed by conservative Republicans and a major lobbying campaign by the Christian Right, amended Treasury Department spending bills to forbid the Internal Revenue Service from stripping tax-exempt status from segregated private schools.
But the amendments drew the support of substantial majorities, including most House members from Massachusetts, because of concerns that rules the IRS proposed to identify and penalize schools that were deliberately segregated might ensnare institutions, including private parochial schools, that had done nothing to avoid integration.
Yesterday, Gore's aides hammered at that point, and at Bradley for ''distortion'' on the issue, by insisting that IRS rules would have required admission quotas for black students that many private schools could not possibly have met.
But the IRS rules required no such quotas, according to Neas and Jerome Kurtz, who was the IRS commissioner under President Carter.
Kurtz said Gore is wrong on the issue, and that the massive opposition to the rules - 200,000 letters to the IRS alone, he said - was led by people ''who cast the proposed rules in the worst light.'' The congressional votes, Kurtz said, tied the government's hands until a 1983 Supreme Court decision, on an 8-1 vote, upheld the right of the IRS to deny tax-exempt status to segregated private schools.
The US Commission on Civil Rights, in a 1980 document, said the congressional votes had the effect of encouraging segregated private schools. By 1979, the commission estimated, 3,500 private schools had been founded or had seen enrollments mushroom in districts, predominantly in the South, where public schools had been desegregated. Yet, despite federal law, just 110 lost tax-exempt status.
The issue exploded when the IRS developed guidelines for establishing evidence that private schools were intentionally discriminating. ''This was a very serious problem, and the law was crystal clear,'' Kurtz said, adding that in some Southern school districts, including Birmingham, Ala., segregationists using tax-exempt donations were establishing private school districts within public districts.
As outlined in public documents, and explained yesterday by Kurtz, the IRS proposed to focus its attention on the new or high-growth private schools in those districts with the so-called ''20 percent'' rule. It provided that if such a school, for example, was located in an area with a 30 percent minority population, then the IRS would look into its tax-exempt status if less than 6 percent of its student body was nonwhite.
Kurtz and Neas, in separate interviews, said that those guidelines did not amount to quotas; and that any private school, for instance, a Hebrew school in a black community, might offer a legitimate reason for not meeting such numbers.
''The religious right tried to turn it into a quota issue, and it was not,'' Neas said.
Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Newton, who voted against restricting the IRS action, said that Gore was wrong to vote the way he did. ''At the time, Al represented a conservative district in the South,'' Frank noted. ''Al should now be able to say, from time to time, that this or that vote was wrong.''
Even so, Frank, who is neutral in the race, said he doesn't regard the issue as a ''vote that matters,'' and he suggested that Bradley was wrong to make so much of it.
Aides to Bradley made the same point yesterday about Gore's criticism of Bradley's vote on the minority broadcast license issue.
Responding to Bradley's charges about his IRS votes, Gore denounced Bradley's 1995 vote to repeal the tax break rewarding sales of radio and television companies to minority-owned businesses. Gore said Bradley had effectively ''voted against'' several well-known African-American media outlets and programs.
The vote eliminating the provision was politically charged, prompted by reports that the media giant Viacom Inc. stood to avoid up to $600 million in taxes through the sale of its cable TV systems to a partnership owned by an African-American businessman. That news infuriated congressional Republicans, and many Democrats, who felt Viacom was exploiting an affirmative-action provision mainly for financial gain.
A Bradley spokeswoman said yesterday that Bradley's vote was not motivated by the Viacom controversy, however.
''His belief was that there were better ways of helping minority business owners than through the tax code,'' said campaign spokeswoman Kristen Ludecke.
The tax break was ultimately repealed in 1995 with little congressional opposition. Although it was signed into law by President Clinton, Gore said Monday he would seek to restore it.
Frank expressed disappointment at the tone of the dialogue. ''The voters' expectations for perfection are lower than both of them seem to think. Both of them are reluctant to admit past error,'' Frank said.
