Caught in the cross hairs of criticism from Bob Dole and Ross Perot, President Clinton says he's sticking with "a campaign of ideas, not insults" to show voters what a second term would look like.
"You have to decide," the president told big crowds as he campaigned across the South, once considered safe country for Republicans.On Friday, Clinton charged into Georgia, the home state of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is attacked by Democrats as much or even more than Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole.
He said he will ask Congress to assign 100,000 college work-study students as reading tutors for elementary students - part of his plan to make sure that every 8-year-old can read. The administration said the plan would not require additional federal money because it draws on new work-study slots authorized by Congress.
It is Clinton's fourth visit this year to Georgia, a state he narrowly carried four years ago; this time, his campaign says he is ahead in the polls. Clinton and Dole both are spending heavily on ads in the state.
Trying to help his own campaign, the president also was trying to boost Democrat Max Cleland's hopes of winning the Senate seat left open by the retirement of Sen. Sam Nunn. Nunn was campaigning with Clinton and Cleland.
Dole, also campaigning in the South, stepped up his attacks on the president's character. "Where is the outrage in America? Where is the outrage in America? Where has the media gone in America?" Dole asked a rally in Houston on Friday.
"When do the American people rise up and say, `Forget the media in America. We're going to make up our minds.' This is about saving our country," he added.
Only a day earlier, Dole asked: "Is there no honor in this administration or in this White House? "When will the American people have enough? . . . Don't inflict this on America for four more years; we can't take it."
Perot rejected Dole's entreaty to quit the presidential race. But he saved his harshest words for Clinton. He said the president faced "huge moral, ethical and criminal problems" that could force him from office in a second term. "We are headed toward a second Watergate," Perot asserted in a midday speech to the National Press Club.
"And for two years, nothing's going to happen while we fool with this. And the last thing we need is to lose two more years while our government is frozen because the president is being investigated."
His speech Thursday came one day after Dole's campaign manager, Scott Reed, met with Perot in Dallas in hopes of persuading him to drop out of the race and endorse Dole. During questions after the speech, Perot said he had no intentions of pulling out of the race.
In a reception before his luncheon speech, Perot referred to the meeting with Reed as "trivial" and "insignificant."
Perot has long argued that both major parties engaged in unethical and questionable fund-raising practices. Although he has generally described these transgressions as good people getting caught up in a corrupt system, his assessment Thursday of the president and Vice President Al Gore was far more pointed.
Perot sought to portray the White House as a place where politicians countenanced criminal behavior in exchange for campaigncontributions.
"I never thought I would live to see a major drug dealer give 20,000 bucks in Florida and then be invited to a big Democratic reception by the vice president of the United States, Al Gore, and then be invited to the White House for a reception," Perot said.
"Now then, right after his trip to the White House they caught him with 5,828 pounds of cocaine," he continued. "Don't you think we should set a higher standard? I hope you do. The White House had to know about the prior arrests. They had to know about his connections to the Cali cartel. But hey, this guy gave 20,000 bucks, so let him come on in, right?"
Clinton floated above the attacks, as he has for weeks, stressing economic and family-values themes rather than responding. It is the strategy of a front-runner, far ahead in the polls and trying to run down the clock.
"I have run a campaign of ideas, not insults, to give you the ideas of what I will do in the next four years if my contract is renewed in less than two weeks from today," Clinton told an airport rally Thursday outside a Northrup Grumman hangar at Lake Charles.
The Lake Charles operation produces J-Star radar aircraft. The president said there were 100 jobs at the plant when he took office compared with 1,400 now. The Pentagon is buying 19, and the administration is trying to persuade NATO to order more of the planes, Clinton said. "I'll do my best."
Later, Clinton went to a community center in a tough neighborhood in the New Orleans suburb of Marrero to talk about law and order.
He said his approach has been "to take the politics out of crime and try to put the police and the people back into the business of lowering the crime rate and bringing safety back to America and restoring fundamental freedom."