Here Come the Big Guns

By STANLEY W. CLOUD HOUSTON

A George Bush operative told a group of reporters at the G.O.P. convention four years ago that "a presidential campaign is just like a war." The take- no-prisoners Bush juggernaut rolled out of New Orleans and three months later routed opponent Michael Dukakis. Fair warning to Bill Clinton: if you heard a faint rumble in the background at last week's Republican Convention, it was the sound of Bush's heavy artillery moving into place. Stand by for incoming.

Despite Bush's adroit acceptance speech, his handlers know that to elevate Bush in the polls, they need to bring down Clinton -- and fast. With James Baker directing the campaign, Bush will now begin trying to flush Clinton out of his comfortable moderate's nest and portray his opponent as just another tax-and-spend liberal Democrat with neither the experience nor the ability to deal with the nation's problems. The Bush team is sure to run a fine-tooth comb over Clinton's 12-year record as what Republicans are calling "the failed Governor of a small Southern state." And they will revive questions about his Vietnam War draft status by claiming, as Pat Buchanan did last week, that Clinton lacks the moral authority to make military decisions.

The Republicans won't stop there. Ironically, though Clinton has been praised for laying out a detailed economic plan, its very proposals provide some of the ammunition Bush needs for his late-summer assault on Little Rock. But the problem with these Republican bombshells is that while many of them are on target, the arguments tend to be aggressively hyperbolic and are occasionally contradicted by their own supporting documents. For one thing, the President faults Clinton for not favoring a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution -- though it was the Reagan and Bush Administrations that are mainly responsible for the enormous amounts of red ink in the federal budget.

Even as Republican speechmakers were taking aim at Clinton from the podium last week, aides were crisscrossing the sprawl of Houston to underscore their points over breakfast, lunch, coffee and cocktails with reporters. Meanwhile, Democratic fax machines were churning out rebuttals -- including a two-page reply to Bush's acceptance speech before he had even finished delivering it. As the volley of stats and cost estimates flying between both camps increases, the campaign is likely to be fought in four major policy arenas as well as on the "family values" front. The key lines of attack:

SPENDING. Given the Democrats' belief in an activist government, Clinton is vulnerable on this front. Bush correctly charged in his Thursday night speech that the Democrats' budget proposals would add $220 billion in federal spending, not counting the cost of Clinton's health-reform package. But that number is spread over four years, and it would go for potentially politically salable projects such as investing $80 billion to rebuild America's infrastructure or helping to finance bridges, roads, an intercity rail system and a nationwide information network.

But Clinton's vagueness on spending details gives Bush an opening to brand him an old-fashioned profligate liberal. "Governor Clinton and Congress know that you have caught on to their lingo," Bush said in his speech. "They know when they say 'spending,' you say 'uh, oh.' So now they have a new word: 'investment.' They want to 'invest' $220 billion more of your money -- but I want you to keep it."

Nor is the Bush camp the only one to voice reservations about Clinton's economic plan. The bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has serious objections, especially about Clinton's claim to be able to halve the federal deficit over four years. "The numbers do not add up," says a committee report. Noting that Clinton's plan would over four years produce reductions of about $4 billion in the growth of such entitlement programs as Social Security and Medicare, the committee sees this as a very small drop in a very large bucket. By 1996, notes the group, "entitlement spending is projected to exceed $900 billion!"

TAXES. Speaker after speaker in Houston charged that Clinton has advocated the largest tax increase in history. But the Republicans themselves could not agree on the size of those tax hikes: the Bush Administration's Office of Management and Budget used the figure $220 billion, while Bush and other speakers, like Congressman Newt Gingrich, cited tax increases of $150 billion. The issue has tremendous political force, especially in a time of less than 2% annual economic growth. The Bush team has charged that Clinton's taxes would force many small businesses to close and cost many people their jobs. Moreover, says Jim Cicconi, issues director for the Bush-Quayle campaign, "the dirty little secret of this plan is that to raise the revenues they need on the tax side to pay for the programs they want, they have to drop the ((higher)) tax brackets into the middle class." But Clinton advisers suggest that the Arkansas Governor would sooner scale back some of his spending plans rather than extend his tax-hike proposals to middle-income Americans. Still, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finds that the Clinton plan, by relying on higher corporate taxes and a new 36% tax rate for the wealthiest 2% of Americans (families earning more than $200,000 a year), is politically, as well as fiscally, unrealistic.

But are the Republicans correct when they say this would be the greatest tax increase in history? No. In truth, the record tax hikes are all Republican products: the Reagan Administration's 1982 increase ($98 billion over four years) and the new taxes of 1990 for which Bush now apologizes ($107.6 billion over four years). Clinton's plan would actually increase taxes about $92 billion over four years -- hardly trivial, but no blue-ribbon winner.

So how do the Republicans pump the figure up to $150 billion and beyond? By including as tax increases such items as Clinton's claim that he can raise $45 billion over four years by tightening IRS regulations for foreign companies operating in the U.S., and the $9 billion he projects from cracking down on tax fraud. These may be unrealistic projections, but they are not tax increases. Moreover, the Republicans' use of these figures is inconsistent bordering on hypocritical: on the one hand, they ridicule the notion that $45 billion could result from tougher IRS regulations on foreign companies, claiming that the real figure is closer to $1 billion; yet they include the full $45 billion among proposed Democratic tax increases.

MILITARY CUTBACKS. The Bush people went to great lengths in Houston to portray Clinton as an irresponsible defense cutter who would slice right through the muscle and into the bone. In fact, there's not much difference between the two camps on this issue. Clinton calls for $100 billion in defense cuts over four years; Bush has proposed $60 billion -- a tiny distinction when both sides propose to spend more than $1.1 trillion on the military over four years.

Another major difference has to do with troop levels: Clinton wants a fighting force of 1.4 million by 1996; Bush aims for 1.6 million. It is hard to understand the logic behind the G.O.P.'s claim that the Clinton plan would cost the U.S. a million defense-industry jobs, especially since the Arkansas Governor wants to use the military savings to help convert defense companies into high-technology industries. Clinton's internal projection of a loss of 300,000 jobs in five years is probably much closer to the mark.

HEALTH CARE. Clinton has played into the Republicans' hands by overselling his vague health-care proposal, which promises that "affordable, quality health care will be a right, not a privilege." The Bush forces brand this as an invitation to "socialized medicine," or as the President put it in his speech in Houston, "a health-care system with the efficiency of the House Post Office and the compassion of the KGB."

The Republicans incorrectly claim that Clinton supports a "pay or play" plan that would require companies to either provide their employees with private health-care insurance or pay a payroll tax for government-sponsored insurance. The G.O.P. estimates that a payroll tax of at least 7% would be necessary to cover all those who lack private insurance, and claims that such a plan would force many small businesses to close and cost 700,000 jobs.

Though Clinton now veers skittishly away from pay or play, he is vulnerable to attacks on this point because his economic plan contains not so much as a word about the costs of his health-care proposals. Why? "At the time we announced the plan," says Clinton issues aide Atul Gawande, "we didn't have every detail on the costs and savings ready. But we did want to establish the principle that we'd dedicate all the savings to expanded universal coverage."

The vagueness of the Clinton proposal has allowed the G.O.P. to lump it together with various congressional plans that lack, according to Clinton aides, the kind of cost controls that Clinton himself would insist upon. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Clinton health-care plan, such as it is, would require about $80 billion in new taxes. Clinton aides insist that there will be no payroll tax in their health proposal, which would be funded instead by direct government subsidies to cover those who are too poor to afford private health insurance. But they admit that despite their candidate's overheated rhetoric, they may have to introduce coverage very slowly.

As the President attacks on these four policy fronts, he will also stress what Republicans call the risk factor, framing the debate along the partisan lines of whether voters should trust a relatively unknown Governor of a small Southern state with both the economic revitalization of the nation and the conduct of foreign affairs in a still dangerous world. The answer may determine whether Bush, whose standing in the polls bounced up to near competitive levels last week following his precipitous decline, can win in November. If he cannot, he will be the first elected Republican President to be denied a second term since Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

( CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,250 American adults taken for TIME/CNN on Aug. 19-20 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%

CAPTION: Does Bush deserve to be re-elected?

Do you think Bush is doing a good job?

Do you have a favorable impression of

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Houston and Priscilla Painton and Walter Shapiro/Little Rock