Clinton Accuses Bush of Using Diversion, Denial : Politics: His harsh speech charges President with ‘four years of broken promises’ and ‘ducking’ a debate.

EAST LANSING, Mich. —  In a day marked by some of the harshest rhetoric of the presidential campaign, Bill Clinton on Tuesday accused President Bush of practicing the “politics of diversion, division and denial” and called his record “four years of broken promises and trickle-down economics.”

In a spirited, lectern-thumping speech to students at Michigan State University, the Democratic nominee blamed Bush for the cancellation of the first presidential debate, which was to have been held here Tuesday night.

“This is not a partisan issue,” Clinton said. “Why didn’t he show up today?”

Then, pressing his attack in extraordinarily personal terms, Clinton supplied an answer. The proposed debate format--with a lone moderator rather than a panel of questioners--would have made it difficult for Bush to practice “his politics of diversion, division and denial.”

The Arkansas governor also delivered a blistering attack on Bush’s economic record, calling it “four years of broken promises and trickle-down economics” and linking it to the President’s hesitancy to debate.

Accusing Bush of “ducking this debate,” Clinton said: “I guess I can’t blame him. If I had the worst record of any President in 50 years, I wouldn’t want to defend that record either.”

He characterized Bush’s campaign as one “designed to sow fear and uncertainty and doubt--to make the American people look backward when they ought to be looking forward, designed to ignore the real consequences in real people’s lives of the awful mistakes of the last 12 years.”

He called Bush “a President who will say anything to get elected but does nothing after he gets elected. After four years of that, it’s time for a change.”

While Clinton spoke, Bush campaigned across the South, urging voters not to let Clinton do to the country what he did to Arkansas. “He talks one way around the nation,” Bush said. “He delivers misery at home.” And when Clinton finished, Republicans held a news conference at the university to castigate his record.

In his speech, Clinton emphasized his prescription for economic revival in this recession-battered state, saying that controlling health care costs lies at the center of his strategy.

Sounding a populist note, he vowed to “take on the people who are making a killing out of this system--the insurance companies, the regulators, the paperwork. . . .” The rest of his words were drowned out by cheers and applause from the several thousand students in the audience.

If elected, he vowed, he’ll submit an economic recovery plan within the first 100 days of his presidency that “will revitalize this economy, improve education, control health care costs and challenge the American people to do what it takes to compete and win. . . .”

Clinton quoted from a letter he said Bush wrote while a vice presidential candidate in 1980. He did not say to whom the letter was addressed. In it, he said, Bush accused then-President Jimmy Carter of refusing to debate the Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan.

“I believe he (Carter) wants to avoid debate because he wants to avoid talking about his economic record,” Clinton quoted Bush as saying. “How do you debate the merits of an economic policy that put 1.9 million people out of work? You don’t. What you do instead is to sit in splendid isolation.”

Today, Clinton said, “the figure is not 1.9 million. There are 3 million more Americans out of work than when he (Bush) took office. There have been three times as many bankruptcies as new jobs created in this country.”

Pounding the lectern with his fist, Clinton’s face reddened as he continued:

“We have had the first decline in industrial production in the history of the United States, a decline in the income of the average family of $1,600 in the last two years alone, 2 million more people in poverty. Welfare is growing five times as fast under Bush as under Reagan or Carter. Health care cost is increasing at three times the rate of inflation and, get this, the fastest growing bureaucracy in the federal government is the White House staff.

“I wouldn’t want to defend that record either.”

In defense of his 12 years as governor, which Bush roundly lambasted during his trip through the South on Tuesday, Clinton noted that Arkansas “ranks first in the country in job growth this year . . . and has the second-lowest tax burden in the country.”

“I got into this race for President,” he concluded, “because I did not want you and your generation--including my daughter, who is a little younger than you are--to grow up to be a part of the first generation of Americans to do worse than their parents.”

Immediately after Clinton’s outdoor rally, GOP Chairman Richard N. Bond and Michigan’s Republican Gov. John Engler held a press conference to launch a counterattack. Engler called Clinton “Slick Willie” and “a weather-vane politician spinning out of control.”