ASHINGTON - Top White House aides are helping Vice President Al Gore write campaign speeches, work up attacks against George W. Bush's budget plans, and develop everything from crime-fighting proposals to health and education reforms.
Gene Sperling, head of President Clinton's National Economic Council, and Bruce Reed, chief White House domestic policy adviser, and scores of lower-level aides are lending their expertise legally on their own free time, Gore's presidential campaign says.
Good-government watchdogs wince at the overlap.
''These guys are dropping any pretense of a separation between campaign and government. The problem here is of perception and the average American does not expect his or her taxpayer money to go toward Al Gore's campaign,'' said Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity.
Some examples of Gore's use of government staff:
As the vice president flew to Atlanta on Tuesday for an address, campaign aides referred reporters' questions on the speech to Reed and helpfully distributed his telephone number at the White House. Gore proposed a $500 million rehabilitation program for prisoners and parolees.
Sperling and his White House staff crunched numbers for a 15-page indictment of Gore's Republican opponent's tax-cut and spending plans that concluded, on page 6, that Texas Governor ''Bush would need to make cuts of nearly 40 percent to balance the budget.''
Sarah Bianchi, who transferred to the Nashville-based campaign last month, worked during the past year on Gore's health and Medicare proposals from her desk at the White House.
On a campaign trip in February, reporters were handed ''Gore 2000'' press releases bearing the stamp of the official fax machine in Gore's White House communications office. Campaign spokesman Chris Lehane later called it ''an inadvertent mistake'' by a junior staffer.
''There's a lot of this that goes on in politics,'' Lewis said. ''But these folks take it to a whole new level - the Lincoln Bedroom comes to mind - in using public property for campaign ends.'' said Lewis.
A Gore campaign spokesman, Doug Hattaway, underscored that official aides may legally free-lance as long as they clock 40 hours of work on official business each week and do not use government resources, such as computers and phones. ''Anyone who helps out works strictly according to the rules and we're grateful for them,'' Hattaway said.
Ari Fleischer, campaign spokesman for Bush, who has his gubernatorial staff at his disposal, declined to make an issue of the muddied line between Gore's official and campaign resources.
''The issue raised is not who writes the vice president's material but what the vice president is saying ... negative attacks that are part and parcel of old-style politics,'' Fleischer said.
Bush sometimes calls on state officials to do his political bidding. Last week, his campaign dispatched state Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander to a Gore appearance in Dallas, where she defended the governor's education record.
Among other legal perks of incumbency, Gore uses the White House travel office to handle the logistics of his campaign trips.
