October 3, 1999
Web posted at: 7:14 p.m. EDT (2314 GMT)

PORTLAND, Maine (AllPolitics, October 3) -- Vice President Al Gore went on the offensive Sunday against his lone opponent for the 2000 Democratic nomination, rapping Bill Bradley for supporting the Reagan economic plan in the early 1980s and leaving the Senate after Congress fell into GOP control.

"Bill Bradley voted for all those budget cuts. I did not," Gore said in an interview on CBS's "Face The Nation." "When Newt Gingrich took over the U.S. Congress ... I tried to rally the troops, the forces of what I regard as progress. And Sen. Bradley chose that moment to say that he was going to leave the public arena."

"(Bradley) said he might even run as an independent (for president in 1996), which would have elected Bob Dole and would have given the Republicans control of both the Congress and the executive branch," Gore said.

The half-hour interview, conducted at a farmer's market in Portland, came at the end of a week of upheaval in the Gore campaign.

Until a week ago, Gore had not even uttered Bradley's name on the campaign trail. But with the former senator closing in on Gore in the polls -- and topping him in quarterly fund-raising figures released last week -- the vice president decided to move his campaign operation from Washington to Tennessee and challenge Bradley to a string of debates.

He reiterated that challenge Sunday.

"I'd like to have debates every two weeks and have them on different issues each time -- education, health care, etc.," he said. "Let's really roll up our sleeves and get into the stuff of democracy."

Once seen as the unassailable front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Gore conceded Sunday that "the campaign's entered a new phase" and that Bradley has "crossed the threshold of credibility and competence."

But he insisted that he welcomed the tightening of the race as "a healthy development" that will help the Democratic nominee best the GOP standard-bearer in 2000.

"I think the best way for us to ensure a Democratic victory in the fall of 2000 is to have an all-out discussion of these issues and try to draw the public toward our party, toward that discussion," Gore said.

Gore aides tell CNN that the new strategy of taking on Bradley is designed to blunt his outreach to the Democratic Party's liberal base. But a key Bradley supporter from that base dismissed Gore's criticism.

"The vice president can say whatever he wants to say to try to score a point," said Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) on CNN's "Late Edition" "But (what) people are really interested in is, 'Do we have a candidate that connects to us?'"

But even as Gore seeks to reinvent his campaign, a new controversy dogged him Sunday. An unreleased government audit, obtained by CNN, criticizes the Gore campaign's general chairman, Tony Coehlo, for alleged financial mismanagement of the U.S. pavilion at the 1998 World's Fair in Lisbon, Portugal.

Gore said Sunday that while he hadn't read the audit report, Coehlo continued to have his confidence and would continue with the campaign.

Sunday, October 3, 1999

• Unrepentant Ventura deflects furor over Playboy interview
• Gore chides Bradley for supporting Reaganomics, leaving Congress
• Elizabeth Dole wants arts endowment funds eliminated
• Gore says he's keeping Coehlo as campaign chairman

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