Gore, Bush aides spar over debate miscues
By Tom Raum, Associated Press, 10/12/00 LANGHORNE, Pa. -- While the presidential contenders mostly stayed above the fray Thursday, their surrogates refought the first and second presidential debates.
Al Gore's team accused Bush of "errors on life-and-death issues," particularly the Texas governor's inaccurate statements about a Texas crime. Bush officials conceded the miscue, but said the Gore camp was frantic. The furious back and forth came a day after the two candidates squared off in Winston-Salem, N.C., in their second of three presidential debates. For the most part, the candidates themselves engaged in low-key campaigning -- Republican Bush in suburban Philadelphia and Democrat Gore in Milwaukee -- as an attack on a U.S. warship in Yemen and new violence in the Middle East cast a shadow over the race. Gore aides followed the same script that Bush's campaign used against them a week earlier. Their primary target: Bush's statement that three men convicted in the 1998 Texas dragging death of James Byrd Jr. behind a pickup truck would be put to death. In fact, only two got the death penalty; the third received life imprisonment. The criticism focused not only on Bush's mistake -- which he acknowledged quickly -- but on whether such a comment could taint further legal proceedings. "That is a statement that prejudges the outcome of the case," Gore campaign chairman William Daley said in a conference call with reporters. "Governor Bush made serious errors, including errors of life-and-death issues," said Gore campaign spokesman Mark Fabiani. "Mr. Bush needs to be held to the same exacting standard applied to Al Gore last week." The Gore campaign distributed a statement by Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe, who wrote that "the governor's statement is a truly shocking one for any executive official to make during the pendency of appeals from criminal convictions." Firing back, Bush campaign officials insisted Bush's mistakes were less serious than what they view as Gore's shading of the truth. "I think the Democrats are frantically trying to distract attention from their candidate's problem with credibility and his long and disturbing pattern of misrepresenting, embellishing and exaggeration," said Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes. Gore officials suggested Bush's misstatements were not being treated as critically as Gore's had been. In the first debate, Gore wrongly asserted that he had traveled to Texas in 1998 with the head of the federal disaster agency to inspect flood and fire damage. He also overstated the plight of a 15-year-old Florida girl he said was forced to stand in class because of overcrowding. The misstatements allowed Republicans to wage a weeklong assault on Gore's credibility. The Gore campaign sought to turn the tables on Bush. Bush officials noted that during Wednesday's debate they had distributed a press statement correcting the sentences received by the three men in Byrd's death. And Bush acknowledged the error in a post-debate interview on ABC. "Listen, we all make mistakes," he said. Bush declined to say whether his mistake on the Byrd case was comparable to Gore's alleged miscues. "When Governor Bush made a mistake -- as everybody does -- we immediately corrected it -- rather than trying to spend two weeks obfuscating, changing stories and exaggerating the exaggeration," Hughes said. L. Michael Seidman, a Georgetown University law professor not associated with either campaign, said it was "inappropriate for him (Bush) to speak in such emphatic terms" of the executions. Still, Seidman said he did not see Bush's statements as creating a serious problem for the defendants' appeal in court. "Judges are not as subject to public pressure" as jurors are, he said, adding, "I think it's less of a problem." It would have been different if Bush had made such statements pretrial, he said. Meanwhile, Gore spoke to about 3,000 people in Milwaukee in his only campaign event of the day, before heading back to Washington for national security consultations. Bush campaigned alongside Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge in this Philadelphia suburb and then headed for Grand Rapids, Mich. At a town hall-style meeting, Bush emphasized Social Security and other issues important to seniors in a state that has one of the nation's largest elderly populations. He also stopped by a party for senior citizens at a Philadelphia recreation center. "I take nothing for granted. I've got lot of work to do," Bush told reporters. |