USTIN, Texas - George W. Bush yesterday received a vigorous defense from the bottom half of the Republican presidential ticket. Yet it wasn't Dick Cheney coming to his aid, but the running mate's wife, Lynne V. Cheney.
In a pair of Sunday-morning talk show appearances, Cheney issued a finger-waving denunciation of Vice President Al Gore, accusing him of ''problems with hypocrisy'' on issues such as media glorification of violence.
Later, in a conference call with reporters, a senior Bush aide bluntly conceded that the Republicans had lost support among women voters and that the governor of Texas would be working in the coming week to regain it.
''We think that women are a key group that are going to come back to Governor Bush in the course of the campaign,'' said Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer.
In appearances on CBS and CNN, Cheney lashed out at the vice president and his running mate, US Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, for embracing a Federal Trade Commission report denouncing violence in Hollywood films and music, yet a day later attending a star-studded fund-raiser in New York that put about $6 million into Democratic coffers.
''They're, with a wink and a nod, letting the entertainment industry get away with poisoning the minds of our kids,'' Cheney, a prominent social conservative commentator and former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, said on CNN's ''Late Edition.''
''Al Gore, I think, must have an extraordinarily low concept of the American people's intelligence to think that he can, in the daytime, ride around in school bus and talk about values, and talk about how important it is to raise the culture so that our children can thrive, and at night, go to a party with the entertainment industry, raise millions of dollars, listen to scatological jokes about people who are concerned about the entertainment industry marketing adult products to our children,'' Cheney said.
On the CBS program ''Face the Nation,'' she said Gore has ''problems with hypocrisy'' and is ''fooling the moms and dads of this country into thinking that he's on their side, or trying to anyway.''
Gore spokesman Kym Spell said that the vice president and Lieberman were serious about eliminating violence from children's films and music and that the Radio City Music Hall fund-raiser did nothing to undercut their authority on the issue.
''Unlike a Bush-Cheney ticket, Al Gore is completely capable of disagreeing with his friends and taking action when necessary. Al Gore has proposed a real plan to help stop the marketing of violence to children and has offered to let the entertainment industry do it themselves, and then if that doesn't happen, we're going to work with them to make sure our children are no longer targets of violent material,'' Spell said.
The charges and countercharges were made as Bush himself continues to shift from focusing on Gore's character to engaging him on the issues. Today, Bush begins a six-day, 6,076-mile trip to nine states that Fleischer said will be a ''metaphor covering all phases of life,'' starting with the birth of a hypothetical child and showing how Bush would help him all the way through retirement.
The governor of Texas will use a speech today at a hospital in Little Rock, Ark., to recap how his tax plan would help young families. He will wind down Friday and Saturday in Florida with a new health care proposal aimed at seniors.
In between, he will stop in Illinois to appear on Oprah Winfrey's show and will visit Missouri, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky.
Fleischer said a goal of the trip is to regain the support of women who have swung over to the Democrats in a so-called gender gap now widening in public opinion polls. Asked why Bush had lost that support, the spokesman said many are ticket-splitting voters who had been captured by Gore's recent rhetoric.
''It is notable in the ebb and flow of this election that Governor Bush has been the lone Republican to close the gender gap,'' he said. ''But just as events changed once, we see a strong possibility of making events change twice.''
A new tool for the campaign is a 16-page booklet that will be distributed at campaign stops and made available over the Internet. Called ''Real Plans for Real People,'' it has the look of an architectural blueprint and highlights Bush's proposals on education, health care, Social Security reform, tax relief, and community renewal. During the primary season, the campaign released a 457-page compilation of Bush's speeches and position papers.
''There is an appetite from the American people to look at these documents,'' Fleischer said.
Spell dismissed the booklet as a poor imitation of a larger book released by the vice president two weeks ago.
''It's a little astounding to me that after the Gore-Lieberman ticket put out a 190-page-plus plan detailing our plan for America's future, that they would come back with 16 pages of recycled press releases,'' she said.
''I think a real plan would have real details, including an answer to the long-asked question of how Mr. Bush is going to pay for his $1 trillion Social Security privatization plan.''
