Bush and Clinton Leave No Doubt War of Words to Escalate : Candidates’ attacks, counterattacks and flanking maneuvers have already intensified. And as Election Day nears, more waffling and inconsistency is expected.

With the battle for the White House officially joined, President Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton have quickly erased any doubts about its nature: This campaign is going to be fast, relentless, and mean.

Already, the attacks, counterattacks and flanking maneuvers have reached an intensity not typically seen until October. And in these rancorous engagements, the two sides have revealed an aggressive philosophy--both intend to constantly force the debate back onto one or two central arguments and quickly neutralize issues that threaten to distract from those core contentions.

Bush and Clinton “are each clearly trying to avoid letting the other frame the debate on terms unfavorable to themselves,” said Thomas E. Mann, director of the governmental studies program at the Brookings Institution.

As part of that strategy, both men are moving to maximize their differences on issues where they perceive an advantage--and minimize them on questions where they feel vulnerable.

On the latter front, Clinton recently softened his support for tougher fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, and thereby moved a bit closer to Bush on an issue that sparks controversy in Michigan and other Rust Belt states. Bush, meanwhile, has echoed a key Clinton proposal to retrain American workers.

At the same time, both campaigns are trying to frame in the sharpest possible terms two contrasts with their opponents.

In Bush’s case, the linchpin arguments are trust and taxes. Bush is portraying Clinton as a tax-and-spend liberal who would make the economy even worse by expanding government and is hiding his intention to do so as part of a broader pattern of misleading voters about his political agenda and personal life.

For Clinton, the centerpiece arguments are trust and the recession. The Arkansas governor maintains that Bush, trapped in the grip of an obsolete laissez-faire economic theory, has failed to produce a plan to revive the economy and, in a desperate attempt to save his job, is unleashing both wild accusations and implausible promises he has no intention of keeping.

The efforts by the two sides to force the debate through these competing prisms is perhaps most visible in their skirmishing the last week on the economy and the federal budget.

In his acceptance speech last Thursday, Bush moved to reattach himself to the conservative economic agenda of restraining the scope and size of government. That required some artful stitching: Bush has been under fire from conservatives not only for raising taxes, but also for presiding over the most rapid increase in domestic spending since John F. Kennedy, as well as a resurgence in federal regulation.

On the podium in Houston, Bush reversed course on each of those issues. He promised to extend for another year an ongoing ban on most new federal regulations, and he again called for Congress to approve a balanced-budget amendment. Most dramatically, he called for an unspecified across-the-board tax cut and, as a further restraint on government spending, a new checkoff that would allow taxpayers to divert up to 10% of their bill toward deficit reduction rather than government operations.

Many economists quickly questioned those proposals because Bush offered little indication of where he would find the spending cuts to reduce the existing $315-billion deficit--much less offset the revenue lost from his tax proposals.

Then on Monday, Bush followed his ringing call for fiscal restraint with the announcement of a new job training program that will cost $10 billion over the next five years.

“There is no way these numbers add up,” said Stephen Moore, director of fiscal studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “You can’t cut taxes, raise spending and balance the budget.”

But summing the numbers economically may be less important than aligning them politically. By promising to cut overall spending and taxes, Bush underscores his differences with Clinton’s proposals to increase taxes and spending on domestic programs.

Seen through that light, Bush’s surprising job training announcement comes into sharper focus as an effort to neutralize secondary issues--and shift the debate back onto his preferred battlefield.

Some observers, noting that Bush had earlier proposed to cut training programs for displaced workers, see Bush’s new training initiative--like his proposal this spring to allow all Americans access to federal loans for college education--as an effort to deny Clinton a clear contrast on issues the Democrat has stressed.

But while announcing the job training proposal Monday, Bush also returned to his larger theme. Although promising to pay for his own plan only with unspecified spending cuts, Bush criticized Clinton for backing a tax increase to pay for his job training agenda. “We really do have a vast philosophical difference,” Bush declared in New Jersey on Monday. “I believe we can pay for this new job training offensive without raising taxes . . . or increasing overall government spending.”

To Clinton and his aides, these machinations stamp Bush as guilty on exactly the charge he levels against them: trying to be all things to all people. “It’s hard to imagine a more cynical approach to campaigning,” said Bruce Reed, Clinton’s policy director. “First they attack our philosophy; then they steal our ideas. One day they are accusing us of taxing and spending; the next day they are proposing new spending proposals without suggesting what the means are to pay for it.”

That criticism typifies the response of Clinton and his aides to Bush’s flurry of proposals in the last week: Their goal is to simultaneously dismiss Bush’s tax-cutting and spending ideas as purely political and to question the President’s sincerity and motivation in offering them.

As Clinton put it in an address to the Detroit Economic Club last Friday: “Across the country, people are eager for real answers about how we can create new jobs and save existing jobs, but the promises Mr. Bush made (in his acceptance speech) are intended to only save one job: his.”

Still, Clinton in the last few days has shifted his own feet in ways that allow Republicans to question his sincerity. In that same Detroit speech, Clinton moved to neutralize an issue the GOP was banking on in the Midwest when he pledged to be “flexible” in urging auto makers to increase the fuel efficiency of their cars.

Former Michigan Gov. James J. Blanchard--who is directing the Democratic presidential campaign in the state--says he believes the impression Clinton’s answer left is that while he still backs the goal of greater efficiency “he will work with the industry to work it out,” while minimizing the economic disruption.

The Bush Administration opposes increasing fuel efficiency requirements, arguing that insisting on them could wipe out thousands of auto-manufacturing jobs throughout the Rust Belt.

And to GOP critics, Clinton’s response fits a pattern of strategic fuzziness: “There are few issues on which Gov. Clinton’s instinct is not to waffle,” said David Tell, the Bush campaign’s director of opposition research. “I would say that he’s waffling on this one and he will continue to waffle until he paints himself in a word corner he can’t get out of.”

Bush made clear on Tuesday that he is not going to let Clinton wiggle off the hook on the issue. Referring to the push to raise fuel efficiency standards--now at 27.5 miles per gallon--to 40 miles per gallon by the year 2000, the President said, “We’ve got to fight against that kind of extremism.”

Observers like Mann expect quite a bit of waffling--and accusations of inconsistency--from both candidates between now and Election Day as they perpetually jostle for tactical advantage.

“My view is that for both of these guys, all of the details are negotiable,” Mann said.

But even amid that fog, he adds, the two men continue to offer the voters starkly different approaches, with Bush insisting that the key to prosperity is restraining spending and taxes while Clinton pins his hopes for economic revival on often expensive government initiatives in education, training, scientific research, infrastructure and health care.

“There is a dramatic contrast on economic and social policy between these two candidates, and no matter what, that will come through loud and clear,” Mann says.