RASER, Mich. - In the closing weeks of any close election, a candidate has a double role: the nurturing farmer who tends to the grass roots, and the clearcutter who slashes away at the opposition.
George W. Bush, deadlocked for weeks with Al Gore, has been working both roles hard in the last few days.
On Wednesday, the Texas governor urged voters in Wisconsin to get fellow Republicans to the polls, and to ''talk to those open-minded Democrats about that better day tomorrow. Don't be afraid to take our message to independents.''
But yesterday, responding to some enthusiastic slicing by the campaign of Vice President Al Gore, Bush took up his scythe with even more gusto.
In a speech at an engineering and design firm in Fraser, Bush vehemently defended his Social Security plan against Gore's recent attacks. And in doing so, he pulled out all of the ammunition at his command, casting Gore as prone to exaggeration, quoting passages from Gore's book ''Earth in the Balance,'' and poking fun at the vice president for claiming to have invented the Internet.
After Tuesday's third and final presidential debate in St. Louis, the Gore campaign began a concerted assault on Bush's plan to allow younger workers to invest part of their Social Security payments. Near the end of the debate, Bush said for the first time that the $1 trillion required to start such a plan would come from the projected $2.4 billion surplus expected for Social Security over the next decade.
Gore has long maintained that Bush had been withholding that information because it would unnecessarily imperil the Social Security surplus and scare older voters away from the candidate. The Democratic National Committee has siezed on the issue and is running ads in 10 battleground states saying Bush cannot possibly keep his promise to protect seniors' benefits and offer partial privatization to younger voters.
''Which promise is he going to break?'' it asks.
Bush's defense yesterday was no off-the cuff retort, but a carefully delivered speech off a Teleprompter. His policy points were peppered with characterizations of Gore as a big-government-loving Washington insider with a credibility deficit.
''Now, my opponent, a man prone to exaggeration sometimes, seems to be deliberately missing a trillion dollars,'' Bush said. ''Maybe if you've been in Washington too long, you lose your ability to count real money.''
Bush argued that the projected $2.4 trillion Social Security surplus was enough to pay benefits to grandparents, and allow their grandchildren to open personal accounts, which will have grown to $3 trillion by 2016.
Analysts say that as increasing numbers of the Baby Boomer generation retire, the Social Security trust fund will begin running annual deficits starting in 2015. Gore has argued that Bush's plan to take $1 trillion out of the surplus would leave the trust fund empty sooner than the currently projected date of 2037.
Scare tactics, Bush said yesterday.
''It is irresponsible for the chairman of the Democratic Party and for Vice President Gore to stoke the fears of seniors while ignoring the hopes of younger workers,'' Bush said. ''A true leader does not try to pit grandparents against grandchildren.''
Bush hammered away at the big differences between his and the vice president's philosophies, and cast himself as the true populist, even though Gore has made his own populist pitch that Bush's plan unfairly benefits the wealthy.
''Ownership in America should not be an exclusive club,'' Bush said. ''All Americans must have the right to plan for their own futures. With this Social Security reform, over time, the working class will join the investor class.''
Noting that a Texan had invented the integrated circuit in the 1950s, Bush said: ''It was an amazing achievement, unrivaled in the annals of technology until 1986, when one senator from Tennessee, alone in his office, invented the Internet.''
The adoring crowd of about a thousand - workers from the company and residents of the town in an important swing county - clapped loud and long for that.
He drew on all the unflattering Gore quotes, including a passage from ''Earth in the Balance'' where Gore says that ''new technology should not be embraced too eagerly.''
For its part, the Gore campaign maintains it is Bush who has a credibility problem.
''If Governor Bush trusts the people as he says, he would give them straight answers on Social Security,'' said Doug Hattaway, Gore's national spokesman. ''His attacks have grown more shrill as he has clearly lost the debate on the issues.''
