EW BRITAIN, Conn. - Vice President Al Gore berated the Republican-controlled Congress yesterday for doing ''nothing for the people'' and for refusing to act on the Clinton administration's domestic agenda.
Gore, sounding a campaign theme he plans to develop in the days ahead, accused the Republican Party of serving special interests at the expense of the American people.
''Unless this Congress starts doing its job now, this will be remembered in history as the Congress that blocked progress for people all across the board,'' Gore told students and faculty at Central Connecticut State University.
''Don't just take it from me,'' said Gore, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. ''As one Republican staff member in the Senate just admitted, `You couldn't get a Mother's Day resolution through Congress right now.' Let's face it: Never has so little been done, in so much time, to benefit so few.''
Gore is on a seven-state campaign swing this week, during which he will appear publicly with the man he defeated in the Democratic primary, former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley. Yesterday's trip to Connecticut, where polls now show Gore in a close contest, was his first visit to the Nutmeg State since his Super Tuesday primary sweep, which clinched his nomination.
Meanwhile, Democratic California Governor Gray Davis, one of Gore's most enthusiastic supporters, announced yesterday that he would almost certainly refuse the vice presidential slot if offered it.
''I would say no,'' Davis told the Associated Press. The California governor said he has had ''conversations with the powers that be'' and has suggested a few names to Gore.
Gore aides refused to discuss vice presidential possibilities. ''We've all taken a vow of silence,'' said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, who was traveling with Gore yesterday and has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential choice.
Gore has been seeking in recent weeks to sharpen the contrast between himself and Bush by attacking major business and other monied interests that he accuses Republicans of coddling. First he accused pharmaceutical companies of price-gouging and then went after ''Big Oil'' by calling for a federal investigation of escalating gasoline prices.
Yesterday, Gore trained his attack on Congress for failing to pass a patients' bill of rights, or a bill that would ''guarantee basic paycheck fairness for women,'' or to raise the minimum wage. He repeatedly referred to Capitol Hill lawmakers as the ''do-nothing-for-the-people-Republican Congress,'' stressing each syllable of the cumbersome phrase.
''The big, wealthy special interests are the ones they are taking their instructions from,'' he said.
The vice president expanded the blame to his presumed Republican opponent, Texas Governor George W. Bush, who Gore said ''aids and abets'' congressional inaction by his silence.
The Bush campaign reply was derisory.
''It's an amazing lack of leadership for the sitting vice president to call on the governor of Texas to accomplish what he has failed to do,'' said Bush campaign spokesman Dan Bartlett. ''Instead of calling on George Bush, Al Gore should phone home.''
Attacks on Congress or the Washington establishment are not uncommon among presidential candidates. What makes Gore's tactical turn stand out is that the candidate making the attack is himself so identified with that establishment, having spent the last 23 years of his life in the House, Senate, and the Clinton administration.
''It's a little tricky, since he is, constitutionally, the presiding officer of the United States Senate,'' said Stephen Hess, an analyst with the Brookings Institution. ''The public isn't terribly interested in Congress at this time,'' Hess said. ''It's awfully hard to go down Main Street to pick a fight over what Congress is doing.''
One of Gore's early appearances when he took office as vice president in 1993 was to stand among Republican and Democratic members of Congress in the Capitol, promising to put partisanship aside and work in tandem for the American public.
The relationship between the White House and Congress has been poor since the Republicans won control of the House and Senate in 1994 and deteriorated further during the impeachment and trial of President Clinton in 1998-99. Aside from free trade legislation, Clinton has been largely unable to get his domestic agenda passed.
Lieberman, commenting about Gore's assault on Congress, said he thought the attack was valid.
