ILWAUKEE - Opening what aides describe as a week of positive, more personal messages, Vice President Al Gore yesterday accepted his first endorsement from a national environmental group and all but ignored George W. Bush.
Gore recited a familiar list of proposals for cutting industrial pollution, protecting national forests, combating sprawl, banning new oil and gas drilling off Florida and California, and initiating what he called the ''environment decade.''
In a small break with White House policy, the vice president said he would immediately oppose timber sales in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, rather than await the results in 2004 of a five-year review of the ban as the administration prefers.
''I will assure full and permanent protection for the roadless areas in the Tongass, America's great and temperate rain forest,'' Gore said to cheers.
Bush, meanwhile, was in Denver, where he accused the Clinton administration of leaving the military unprepared, telling a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience that the Pentagon is in dire need of a sign that says ''Under New Management.''
While Gore, departing from his attack-a-day approach, did not mention Bush in his speech, the League of Conservation Voters, which backed the vice president yesterday, did that for him.
It is a shift aimed at softening Gore's daily-attack image by relying instead on surrogates to sully the Texas governor's record, campaign aides said.
Deb Callahan, president of the 9 million-member group, declared that ''Governor Bush's friends are the big corporate polluters and lobbyists for the timber, mining, and oil companies.''
She called Texas ''the most polluted state in the nation'' and warned that in a Bush presidency, ''America's clean-air laws would be crippled.''
Gore, dressed in a blue polo shirt and tan slacks, stood stiffly on her right as she spoke.
Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer responded that Texas air and water have gotten cleaner during the governor's tenure, ''as opposed to campaigns that are not so clean under Al Gore. It appears he's finding new surrogates to do his attacks for him ... since his attacks were backfiring. So much for Al Gore running a positive campaign.''
Gore sought to balance his environmental advocacy with his boasting about national prosperity, saying that the United States can improve its quality of life and the economy at the same time and can export pollution-fighting equipment around the world.
''We will no longer accept a situation where asthma is on the rise in the United States,'' Gore said.
In a day of campaign role reversals, Bush, who typically allows his surrogates to handle the harshest criticisms of Gore, lashed out at the vice president, accusing him and President Clinton of allowing the country's military readiness to dangerously erode.
