Senate OKs Funds for Nicaraguan Opposition : Central America: President Bush does a selling job on conservative senators worried that a vote for the measure could be used against them in campaign commercials.

WASHINGTON —  The Senate on Tuesday approved $9 million to help the Nicaraguan opposition in that country’s elections, but only after President Bush persuaded conservative senators to put aside fears that the vote could be used against them in negative campaign commercials.

The senators’ anxiety was laced with irony: several of them, including North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms, were among the earliest and most unrestrained users of the 30-second political rabbit punches they now fear.

The conservatives favor helping Nicaragua’s anti-Communist opposition, but under Nicaraguan law the U.S. government must pay a $2-million tax to Nicaragua’s Sandinista government to give money to the opposition. Conservatives fretted all day that the vote could be used by future challengers in Senate races to accuse them of voting to aid the leftist Sandinista regime.

And Democratic liberals who oppose the aid plan did their best to heighten that anxiety.

“I’m staggered at the number of people willing to face those 30-second spots,” Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.) said during the debate.

For years, conservatives have called Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega “an avowed Communist tyrant.” Now, Bumpers asked conservative colleagues, how will they explain that they “gave that scoundrel $2 million of taxpayers’ money?”

At the White House, Bush tried to reassure the conservatives, telling a group of seven Republican Senate leaders at a morning Oval Office meeting that “senators don’t want to give aid to the Sandinistas and neither do we, but we have no choice,” spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said.

The bill, which passed the Senate 64 to 35, already has passed the House. Bush is expected to sign it quickly in an effort to get the first money to Nicaragua before Sunday--the deadline for voter registration efforts.

The handling of the bill, several senators said, was a dramatic illustration of how negative campaign blitzes based on controversial votes have altered the legislative process.

Bumpers, in an interview, laughed as he called the conservative discomfort “poetic justice”--a payback for the many times conservative Republicans in the Senate have put liberals on the spot with roll-call votes that opponents later featured in negative advertisements.

Others found the day’s events more troubling.

“It’s the way that campaigns have evolved,” said Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.). “It becomes very difficult to get the public to see the full scope of the debate.

“We have a responsibility to lay that to rest,” she said, then quickly added, “but I’m from Kansas,” where a relatively small population has limited somewhat the role of television ads in political campaigns. “It’s not a state like California.”

Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), the Republicans’ deputy leader, was more blunt. “There’s a lot of duplicity here,” he said. “There’s not a thing you do here that can’t be turned into a 30-second ad.”

The bill approved by the Senate would provide $5 million to a variety of Nicaraguan groups to use for nonpartisan election assistance--training for poll watchers, for example. Another $2 million would go to the main Nicaraguan opposition coalition to directly support the election of its candidate, Violeta de Barrios Chamorro, the editor of the La Prensa newspaper, in her race against Ortega to be president of Nicaragua.

But under Nicaraguan law, any candidate or party receiving money from a non-Nicaraguan source must pay a tax equal to the amount of the outside contribution. The tax goes to the government’s Electoral Tribunal, which has been designated to run the election. By comparison, U.S. law flatly forbids any candidate for federal office from receiving campaign contributions from foreigners.

The Administration has made the aid a centerpiece of its current Central American strategy, which seeks to overturn Sandinista power through elections rather than through the armed conflict that the Reagan Administration had fostered.

Opponents of the plan have argued that the money is excessive, an effort to “buy the election.”

“This is too much money; it’s flooding dollars into Nicaragua,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who noted that the money that will go to Chamorro’s campaign will amount to more than $5 for every registered voter in Nicaragua, one of the world’s poorest countries.

Opponents also denounced sending more money to Nicaragua at a time when the federal government is cutting domestic spending programs to ease the budget deficit. Led by Harkin, they proposed an amendment forbidding any U.S. money from going to pay the Nicaraguan tax, which would effectively have killed the aid package. The amendment put the Administration in the position of asking its supporters to go on record as voting to give money to Ortega’s government.

“We’ve got this strange coalition of far right and far left” opposing the Administration, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said before the Senate vote. “When you get close to entering an election year, people get nervous.” Thirty-seven Senate seats are up for election next year.

Supporters of the aid sought to reassure nervous senators with a letter from Bush calling the aid “the only means we have to help ensure that democracy asserts itself peacefully through a free and fair election” and a letter from Chamorro saying that the “election represents a historical opportunity for Nicaragua.”

After a day full of squirming and maneuvering, the Senate defeated Harkin’s motion, 59 to 40.