ES MOINES - Vice President Al Gore raised questions about Bill Bradley's health care plan and commitment to farmers, while the former New Jersey senator accused his rival of repeated misrepresentations during their debate here yesterday.
While the pair largely covered ground they plowed earlier in their race for the Democratic presidential nomination, there were moments of sharp repartee involving some of Bradley's votes in the Senate.
Gore continued to press for twice-weekly debates in exchange for an agreement not to use TV commercials. And focusing on a key issue for Iowans as they head into the state's Jan. 24 caucuses, Gore said, ''I think we ought to come back to Iowa and have a debate on farm policy.'' Bradley dismissed the idea.
The vice president also renewed his attacks on Bradley's health care proposal, claiming the plan would not only cancel Medicaid, but make Medicare insolvent by denying government surpluses to the program.
''A slight misrepresentation,'' Bradley said, explaining that under his program, Medicaid would be replaced with ''something better.''
Gore responded by calling Bradley's plan ''a little old $150-a-month HMO voucher'' that would be insufficient for coverage in Iowa. He presented the moderator, Des Moines Register Editor Dennis Ryerson, with a list of Iowa health programs and invited the newspaper to check out his charge.
''Again, you're misrepresenting,'' Bradley said.
Gore said Bradley's approach to Medicare reminded him ''of the guy who fell off a 10-floor building, and as he passed the fifth floor, he shouted: `So far, so good!'''
Bradley used his rebuttal time on a question regarding farm issues to return to the Medicare debate, reject ing Gore's assertions. ''For 18 years in the United States Senate I fought to protect Medicare,'' he said.
With the tenacity of a courtroom prosecutor, Gore also used sympathetic spectators in the audience as props to try to keep Bradley off balance. At one point, the vice president called on an Iowa farmer to stand up as Gore described a 1993 flood that inundated the man's land.
''Why did you oppose disaster relief?'' Gore asked Bradley, who served in the Senate at the time of a vote on the issue.
Bradley ignored the question. ''This is not about the past, but about the future,'' he told Gore, and suggested that Iowa farmers suffered from the failed agricultural policies of the administration.
It was a point Bradley returned to in his closing remarks, when he adapted a question used by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter.
''Al's been hammering me on my agriculture votes 15 years ago,'' Bradley said. ''But I would simply ask the family farmers of Iowa today, are you better off than you were seven years ago? Or do we need a change? Do we need to take a step to make things happen?''
From his opening remarks, Gore was the aggressor. He recalled that Bradley had accused him of holing up in a ''Washington bunker'' during their debate in New Hampshire Wednesday. Rather than working in siege conditions, Gore said, he and ''other Democrats'' had been laboring to create 20 million new jobs, win passage of major gun control legislation, and sustain a booming economy. ''That's a front line in the fight for the future,'' he said.
After being put on the defensive for the first half of the hour-long debate, Bradley began to counterattack. In response to a question involving national security, he said the Clinton-Gore administration had failed to press for a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons held by the US and the former Soviet Union.
Bradley also charged that Gore wanted to use the budget surplus ''to spend another $120 billion on the military and less than that on education.''
''That's not right,'' Gore said.
The vice president said he was ''proud to have the support of the Iowa teachers,'' whose statewide organization has endorsed his candidacy. He introduced another spectator, a teacher, and said, ''She needs help.''
Bradley said his education program would ''start at birth and extend for a lifetime.'' He vowed to double the Head Start program, add 600,000 ''great new teachers'' to the public schools, and invest in community colleges.
The candidates also exchanged implicit barbs aimed at each other's backgrounds.
At least three times, Gore mentioned that he was a Vietnam veteran. Bradley served in the Air National Guard.
For his part, Bradley described himself as the product of a small Missouri town. His father had been a banker ''who never foreclosed on a single home.'' His mother was public school teacher, Bradley said, while he attended public schools. Gore, the son of a US senator, attended an exclusive prep school in Washington.
