Bush Quotes Democrats to Assail Clinton : Republicans: The President carries appeal to blue-collar groups in effort to recast his image.

Seeking photo-friendly backdrops for appeals to ethnic and blue-collar Americans, President Bush on Sunday began in earnest to borrow the words of leading Democrats as he sought to recast his own image and cast doubt on that of Bill Clinton.

As the smell of grilled kielbasa wafted into the air, Bush reminded a Polish-American festival here that last spring, Paul E. Tsongas had described his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination as a “pander bear” who was “cynical and unprincipled.”

And Bush, whose speeches usually sound an unrelenting call for law and order, appropriated the rhetoric of Jesse Jackson as he reminded the crowd that “it’s cheaper to send a kid to Yale than to send a kid to jail.”

On a hot, humid and event-filled day in which he needed to change his shirt five times, the President aimed his message at the Reagan Democrats his campaign badly needs.

Bush began his day at a minor-league baseball game in Louisville, Ky., where he threw out the first pitch.

With his campaign clearly conscious of the dangers of making mistakes as Bush seeks to overtake Clinton’s apparent lead, the President and his aides went to unusual steps to avoid the boos and humiliation that have plagued his previous ballpark performances.

As a crowd of 10,000 waved pre-distributed American flags, a shirtsleeve-clad Bush dispensed with his windup and stepped off a good part of the distance toward home plate before taking aim at the catcher. Since Bush took office, every one of his pitches had bounced on its way to the plate.

But Sunday’s cautious lob reached the catcher’s mitt on the fly, although outside the strike zone, and the 68-year-old Bush threw his fist in the air in an unrestrained sign of delight.

Later, in Chicago, a pair of AIDS activists repeatedly sought to disrupt his appearance at the “Taste of Polonia” festival, seeming to throw the President off stride. His speech to the Polish-American crowd, from a set built around an old-fashioned firetruck, was sometimes disjointed and was received without notable enthusiasm.

After complaining at one point that Democrats had held control of the House of Representatives for 38 years, he added to the crowd’s apparent bafflement: “Ask Millie, our dog, and she’ll tell you that’s 266 years in a dog’s life.”

Bush ended his day with a live interview on NBC; he and Clinton were interviewed back to back.

The President’s appeals to working-class and middle-class voters were most notable for their use of others’ rhetoric to bolster his case.

He began Saturday, tarring Clinton with the “pander bear” label that Tsongas first pinned on the Arkansas governor. On Sunday, Bush continued the attack.

He told the Chicago crowd of his efforts to help victims of Hurricane Andrew, then said: “When I did all this to try to help these people, Gov. Clinton, of all people, accused me of ‘pandering’ . . . this from the man that Paul Tsongas called the ‘pander bear.’ ”

Bush also used Tsongas in an attempt to condemn Clinton’s economic plan, quoting the former Massachusetts senator as saying last spring: “The American people are just hearing how cynical and unprincipled Bill Clinton is.”

“That’s not from a Republican; that was from a Democrat--Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts,” Bush said. “And he’s right. He is right.”

Bush went on to quote Newsweek magazine as calling Clinton’s approach “economic fantasy” and suggesting that it could be much more costly than the Democrat has acknowledged. “While we’re eating a little kielbasa, he’s offering pie in the sky,” Bush said. “Who does he think he’s kidding? Not the American people.”

But the President did not acknowledge that the same Newsweek article had described his own plan as “terrifying.” Nor did he attribute to Chicago native Jackson a theme that Bush has only now begun to employ before working-class Americans.

“It’s cheaper to send a kid to Yale than to send a kid to jail,” Bush said. “Penn State is cheaper than the state pen.” But, he hastened to add: “For those who refuse to pitch in and help them build up America and instead tear us down--we need to show them what law and order is all about.”