ASHVILLE - It was an intrusion Al Gore seemed to relish: George W. Bush's first campaign visit to the vice president's home state. Apparently, Gore expected the Republican front-runner's stump speeches on education to give a boost to his own $115 billion plan.
Bush said he was flattered that his ideas had been so thoroughly studied by Gore. ''He must be worried,'' said the Texas governor.
Flanked by four of the state's political powerhouses - Governor Don Sundquist, former governor Lamar Alexander, Senator William Frist and former senator Howard Baker - Bush looked ahead to a possible general election matchup with Gore.
''I'm going to come after him hard here,'' Bush promised, after favoring students at Una Elementary School with a sometimes ad-libbed reading of ''The Night Before Christmas.''
Across town at Pearl-Cohn High School, where students wore T-shirts printed with the message ''I have a future,'' Gore outlined in detail the 10-year cost of his federal commitment to education - universal preschool and teacher salary increases - that he first sketched in May.
For months, Gore's Democratic primary rival, Bill Bradley, has pressured Gore to put price tags on his campaign promises. Bush zeroed in on Gore's price tag yesterday, calling it ''fairly typical of somebody who runs around the country saying I'm going to spend money and solve your problems.''
Staking out ground far afield from both Bradley and Bush, Gore argued that education cannot be left solely to state and local governments.
''It's not good enough to say this is merely a state and local problem and it is certainly not good enough to say now is the time to divert the money budgeted for public schools into vouchers,'' Gore said.
Bush has proposed taking some federal money from poorly performing schools and giving it to students for vouchers to attend private schools.
The vice president, Bush said, would instead leave children ''trapped in failure.''
Gore cracked that Bush's plan ''kind of gives a new version of the three Rs: Reckless and retrograde, reactionary, radical - that's four Rs. I sincerely believe that it's an ideologically driven mistake.''
Gore urged voters to ''rigorously debate'' the rival approaches. Bush said he would happily debate Gore but added that ''it is presumptuous'' for either to take their respective nominations for granted.
The two candidates were essentially shadowing each other around Nashville. After his own school appearance, Bush headed with country music stars Loretta Lynn and Travis Tritt to a $750,000 fund-raiser at the Wildhorse Saloon, scene of a $1.6 million Gore fund-raiser Wednesday night.
