ALTIMORE - Vice President Al Gore yesterday blamed George W. Bush for leaving a million poor children in Texas without a nutrition program last summer.
Seizing upon a new report that found Texas left $33 million in federal school lunch money unused, Gore declared: ''Hungry children need food, not photo-ops.''
In a half-hour address to Democratic Party moderates that largely recapped his campaign agenda, Gore jumped at the chance to carve up his presidential rival in the company of friends.
''Now some would have us believe that this election is about little more than personalities and photo opportunities,'' he told about 300 members of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization Gore helped form 15 years ago. ''But you and I know that nothing can be further from the truth.''
Gore, trailing in the polls, is increasingly turning to a strategy Bush's father used to defeat Democrat Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. In that race, Vice President Bush turned the ''Massachusetts miracle'' - the state's revived economy - into a public relations mess, lambasting Dukakis for the polluted Boston Harbor and a prison furlough program that produced Willie Horton.
Under the Texas governor's leadership, Gore argued, the second-largest state in the nation has watched its budget surplus roll ''away like tumbleweed,'' while the number of uninsured has climbed, pollution has worsened, and jails have filled up.
''Now you might think that the governor of a state ranked dead last in the entire nation for families with health coverage, who then gets a surplus courtesy of the national economic boom, might turn his attention to moving from number 50 to say 45 or maybe even better,'' Gore said to chuckles. ''But no!''
In a voice dripping with sarcasm, he also attacked Bush for enacting a tax break for the oil industry early in his first term. ''Now I don't really know how many oil executives in Texas lack health insurance,'' Gore said. ''But I can tell you this: A lot of children in Texas do.''
Texas, which operates on a two-year budget cycle, faces a shortfall of about $610 million in two critical areas: its Medicaid program and prison system. But Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett said the state Legislature is expected to approve a supplemental spending bill to cover the Medicaid and criminal-justice costs when it meets next year. He also said the state's overall $1 billion surplus will more than cover these costs and still leave ''as much as $500 million surplus for next year.''
Bartlett noted that this approach is ''identical'' to the 13 supplemental spending bills President Clinton has enacted.
He also said that since Bush took office in 1995, he has steadily increased funding for the poor and that the bulk of the record $1.7 billion in tax cuts went to homeowners, small businesses, and consumers - not wealthy Texas oilmen as Gore had suggested.
A study by the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-poverty group based in Washington, found that 9 percent of more than 1.5 million poor children in Texas who received free or discounted school lunches participated in a summer nutrition program in July 1999, ranking Texas 44th in the nation.
But Bartlett said that one month ago, participation was 23 percent, slightly above the national average.
In Austin yesterday, Bush met with former defense secretary Richard Cheney, who is heading the search for a vice presidential candidate.
