Promises, Pleas End Campaign : Republican: An emotional president appeals for support and rests his case on familiar twin pillars of his candidacy: trust and taxes.

By DOUGLAS JEHL

Nov. 3, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

HOUSTON — With hoarse-voiced defiance and evident emotion, President Bush concluded his bid for reelection on Monday with a plea for the support of Americans whose Election Day decisions he said would “cast a shadow forward” into the nation’s history.

In a daylong coda that brought his life’s last political campaign to a close, Bush blended the harsh tones of final attacks on Bill Clinton with the more somber notes of an appeal that carried the pain of what he called “probably the most unpleasant year of my life.”

“Your voice will echo down the corridors of time,” Bush told thousands of supporters who packed an Astrodome annex here, “and with your vote you are going to help shape the entire future of this, the most blessed, special nation that man has ever known, and God helped create.”

His voice cracking with sentiment at the end of a six-state tour, Bush called the votes Americans will cast today “an act of power, a statement of principle” and advised: “Only conscience should be your guide.”

As he also sought to register a more direct claim for four more years in the White House, Bush rested his case on the twin pillars that have sustained his quest for a second term: trust and taxes, the issues on which he sees the starkest division between himself and his Democratic rival.

He urged Americans to “discard” the voices of pollsters and pundits who have discounted Bush’s comeback bid and described the race as Clinton’s to lose. To a raucous reception at a Texas homecoming rally here, he proclaimed his campaign at the brink of “the biggest comeback in American political history.”

With his wife, Barbara, at his side, Bush told the audience that he had returned to Texas “a little tired, a little worn, but fired up” at the end of what he called “the battle of my life.”

The end of the long and bitter race clearly left him both drained and relieved. In midafternoon, he, his eldest son and top aides sat in a conference room aboard Air Force One for an impromptu midair concert by the Oak Ridge Boys, whose gospel renditions left the President with tears running down his cheeks.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” Bush told a few reporters later as he and his advisers adopted a rare informality on his final dawn-to-midnight quest for votes.

Aiming his hopes at a crucial cluster of states that held 108 of the 270 electoral votes necessary for victory, Bush rushed from New Jersey through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and Louisiana and finally on to Texas for the closing notes, the rally in his adopted home of Houston.

He said again and again of the choice facing the nation that “what it boils down to is who has the experience and who has the character to lead the the greatest, freest country on the face of the Earth.”

Along the 1,645-mile route, Bush roused supporters and taunted critics with a medley of harsh assaults upon Clinton’s traits and economic-policy “taxophone,” and complaints about press coverage he said had been “the most biased in political history.”

But his words also carried a dark undertone of anger at Republicans he said had sold his comeback prospects too short.

In New Jersey, he accused the non-loyalists of “running for cover,” and all but spat out: “We are going to show them wrong.”

The crowds that greeted the President throughout the day were sometimes small by election-eve standards. In Glenolden, Pa., at a ball field across the street from the cemetery, so few supporters braved the rain to see Bush that Clinton supporters were able to press their way near the front to chant a mocking “one more day.”

At stops along the way, top Bush strategists pointed to Clinton’s even more grueling march as evidence that the Democrats also remained uneasy about Election Day. While most polls show Clinton holding at least a seven-percentage-point lead in the popular vote, the Bush aides said their own assessments showed that vast numbers of voters remained undecided.

Robert M. Teeter, the Bush campaign chairman, said he was briefing the President several times a day about “how we can do it.”

But another Republican aide traveling with Vice President Dan Quayle said Clinton now appeared likely to win by an eight-point popular-vote margin. He said Bush’s comeback bid had been stalled by the disclosure of a memorandum last Friday that seemed to contradict the President’s accounts of his role in the Iran-Contra affair.

Apart from his delight in the Oak Ridge Boys’ music, Bush was said by aides to be in a nostalgic mood, reminiscing to longtime friend James A. Baker III, his current chief of staff, about his first campaign, an unsuccessful 1964 bid for the U.S. Senate in Texas.

He reminded the crowd here that this would be the final day he would campaign on his own behalf, even after a hoped-for victory for a final term. Amid the new spirit of informality, Baker, the usually reclusive chief of staff, proposed $1 bets with reporters about which states would land in Bush’s column.

The six states the President visited Monday offered the potential to put Bush over the top if he could bring about a clean sweep. That would require that Bush not only hold on to narrow leads in Ohio and Texas but to score minor upsets in each of the four others.

From a thunderous early-morning speech at a New Jersey town square through midday airport-hangar rallies to the roaring evening congregation in Baton Rouge, Bush spared little effort in trying to woo support. In New Jersey, he presented former Republican Gov. Thomas H. Kean as a model of a politician whose victory had confounded the polls; in Pennsylvania, where Catholics form a crucial voting bloc, he paid a visit to Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

As he pressed his two-point attack upon Clinton, Bush renewed his warnings that the nation could neither trust nor afford an opponent the President insisted lacked the experience, philosophy and character necessary to accede to the Oval Office.

He portrayed recent news of a growing U.S. economy as “bad news” for a Democratic rival whose tax-and-spend agenda could win favor only if Americans were convinced that the nation was in decline. He contended that a Clinton Administration would bring “higher taxes, more spending, economic stagnation,” and warned: “When Bill Clinton’s blowing that ‘taxophone,’ middle-class America will be singing the blues.”

In charging also that that his rival lacked attributes crucial to leadership, Bush reminded his audiences of Clinton’s equivocation on major policy issues, including the Democrat’s conflicting statements in 1990 about a congressional vote that authorized the Persian Gulf War.

Boasting of managing a world that has changed at “almost biblical proportions,” Bush said his Administration’s success “can be measured by the headlines that were never written, the crises that never occurred.

“Let’s keep a President in that Oval Office who is strong and knows how to stand up for America,” he said in Madison, N.J.

But some 28 years after he lost his first quest for high office in that Senate race, Bush seemed also to look throughout the day for words by which his Administration might be remembered should that experience be repeated.

In an airport hangar in Louisville, Ky., Bush first began to speak poetically of the role elections can play in setting the nation’s course. And even earlier, he spoke with emotion in remembering the Gulf War victory, calling it a “proud moment” in the nation’s history. “And the press and the media are not going to distort it,” he added. “It was decent and noble and made us the leader of the entire world.”

Bush also continued to deride the Democratic ticket, which includes environmentalist Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee, as “Gov. Clinton and Ozone,” once again calling attention to the harsh tone of the highly personal attacks that have dominated the Republican campaign.

David Williams, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate who introduced Bush in Kentucky, referred to Clinton as an “Arkansas stud” and said that between the two men the nation faced a choice between “a fighter-pilot hero and a draft dodger.”

But Bush and his aides softened that edge on a day in which he seemed determined, whether reelected or not, to exit the world of campaign politics on a higher plane.

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang, with Bush, and Paul Richter, with the Quayle campaign, contributed to this story.

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in Ft. Worth, Albuquerque, Denver and Little Rock, Ark.

President Bush campaigns in Houston.

Ross Perot campaigns in Dallas.