Playing the "dum-dum" card

Tired of having their man labeled a liar, the Gore campaign asks why Bush can't "string together a coherent sentence."

By Jake Tapper

Oct 7, 2000 | On the defensive after continued questions about Vice President Al Gore's tendency to tell stories that don't hold up under scrutiny, the Gore campaign launched a personal attack of its own Saturday, slamming George W. Bush by insinuating that the governor's intellectual skills leave something to be desired.

The charge, issued by Gore campaign spokesman Douglas Hattaway, came following a Saturday campaign stop in Florida, after Bush attempted to describe how a single mother who makes $22,000 a year manages to pay a higher marginal rate on each dollar than someone who makes $200,000.

"For the first time she's in the 15 percent bracket," Bush said. "When you add another 15 percent or 16.2 percent payroll tax on top of that, plus the 2.9, I mean the payroll tax and the Medicare tax, 16.4 percent you end up with a high marginal rate."

According to an account in Reuters, Bush then paused, leaned away from his microphone and "appeared to be checking his arithmetic, to see if the numbers were right. Apparently, the answer was no, because the Texan recovered by throwing out random percentages."

''Fifteen-point-three percent," Bush said. "Twelve-point-four. Two-point-nine. I was trying to do some fuzzy math. I used [Gore's] calculator.''

In a statement sent to reporters, Hattaway said "Bush is routinely unable to string together a coherent sentence to explain his own proposals. Americans will decide whether Bush's uncertain command of the facts and his garbled language bear on his ability to be an effective leader."

The Bush campaign did not immediately return a call for a comment.

In an interview, Hattaway insisted that he wasn't calling Bush dumb, even though that's what his statement certainly seemed to imply. "We're only asking that he address this constant fumbling over the issues and his own proposals," Hattaway said. "People will decide what to make of it."

Asked if he thought Bush was smart enough to be president, Hattaway told Salon, "Um" -- long pause -- "I'm not making any comments about his intelligence, only about his ability to explain his own proposals."

Asked again what he thought, Hattaway said, "it doesn't matter what I think. But the Governor's statement raises the question of why he can't explain his own proposals."

A senior Gore adviser said Hattaway's statement was less a major strategy shift and more an expression of irritation that Bush and his supporters were jumping on every single word out of Gore's mouth, labeling him a liar. Thus, the adviser said, "today seemed like a good opportunity to put Bush back on the defensive, on an issue he hasn't had to seriously address: his constant fumbling."

The defensiveness began Friday afternoon, when Condoleezza Rice, the chief foreign policy adviser for Bush, participated in a conference call to assure reporters, apparently, that her boss wasn't a dum-dum.

That wasn't quite how she would put it, of course. A more generous assessment of the call was that Rice valiantly tried to change reporters' impressions of an exchange between Bush and Vice President Al Gore during Tuesday's presidential debate. The back and forth, about Russia's possible involvement in the crisis in Yugoslavia, left many observers -- even Republicans -- wondering if Bush had any idea what he was talking about.

"The foreign-policy debate prep team needs to turn it up a notch," Scott Reed, the campaign manager for '96 GOP nominee Bob Dole, told the Wall Street Journal Friday. "Whichever of Bush's policy advisers suggested that we turn to Russia's Vladimir Putin as a mediator did the G.O.P. candidate a disservice," conservative columnist William Safire wrote in Thursday's New York Times.

Next Page: Rice: Gore was the dummy, or a liar

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