Bentsen, Jackson Criticize Bush Ads

Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee Lloyd Bentsen and the Rev. Jesse Jackson yesterday accused Republican nominee George Bush's campaign of injecting racism into the presidential campaign by pounding Democrat Michael Dukakis over the Massachusetts prison furlough issue.

A Bush spokesman said the charge was "absolutely ridiculous and stems from desperation politics."

Dukakis attended a breakfast in Boston with Jackson and eight other black political leaders who pledged to support the Massachusetts governor's campaign in the remaining two weeks before the Nov. 8 election.

Then Dukakis was to fly via Wisconsin to California for a full day of campaigning today for that crucial state's 47 electoral votes. Bush and his running mate, Sen. Dan Quayle (R-Ind.), took a respite from campaigning at their Washington homes.

The tenor and substance of the GOP ticket's campaign advertising on television dominated the political dialogue yesterday.

Bentsen, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, told a television interviewer he thought the Bush campaign was making a racist appeal by focusing on Willie Horton Jr., a Black convicted murderer who escaped in 1986 from a Massachusetts prison furlough.

In 1987, Horton brutally stabbed a white Maryland man and twice raped his fiancee. Horton is currently imprisoned in Maryland.

Asked if use of the Horton case constituted "an element of Republican racist appeal," Bentsen replied: "When you add it up, I think there is, and that's unfortunate, and I just don't want to see this election won on that kind of packaging and that kind of distortions."

In Boston, Jackson avoided the word "racist" but said the Horton case was one of several "rather ugly race-conscious signals" sent out by the Bush campaign.

"There have been a number of rather blatantly race-conscious signals that have had the impact of instilling ungrounded fear in whites and alientation from Blacks," Jackson told reporters after the 90-minute breakfast with Dukakis.

"The use of the Willie Horton example is designed to create the most horrible psycho-sexual fears," Jackson said. "The furlough ad with black and brown faces rotating in and out of jail, the use of the Jackson-Dukakis ticket symbolism, which is distortion, referring to me as a Chicago hustler...there have been a number of rather ugly race-conscious signals sent from that campaign."

Dukakis made no mention of the prison furlough issue in a short statement after the breakfast. He said only that it had been a "good, constructive meeting" and that he was pleased by the Black leaders' commitment to his campaign.

But Bush campaign spokesman Mark Goodin said that for Bentsen and Jackson "to insinuate that the furlough issue has racial overtones is absolutely ridiculous and stems from desperation politics."

Goodin said the GOP campaign's television commercials focused not on Horton but on "how he got out of prison." He said correctly that Massachusetts granted furloughs to convicted first-degree murderers serving life without the possibility of parole. That policy was rescinded last spring.

"To insinuate that racism is involved in the furlough issue operates from the ridiculous premise that Black citizens care less about having a monster in their neighborhoods like Willie Horton than do white people," Goodin said.

"That is totally incorrect and an outrageous suggestion," he said. "Anyone who makes it should be ashamed of themselves."

Bentsen, interviewed on ABC-TV's "This Week With David Brinkley," said if Bush wins on the basis of such a campaign, "I think that'd be a tragedy, and I think that's one of the reasons the American people will turn against them, with that kind of campaign, and that's why I think we're going to put it all together."

On the same TV program, Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole, (R-Kan.) a former Bush opponent in the GOP primaries, also was asked if the Bush campaign's Willie Horton ads were racially motivated.

"I don't think that's the case," he replied, but then added: "I'm not involved in the Bush campaign. I can defend George Bush, but I'm not sure I can defend every ad."

Kitty Dukakis, the Democratic nominee's wife, appeared on CBS-TV's "Face the Nation" to say her husband had "underestimated how vitriolic, how vicious, how negative those false attacks were" by the Bush campaign.