GOP group's ad shows Nader attacking Gore

Following the theory that your enemy's enemy is your friend, a Republican group is paying for a new television ad featuring Ralph Nader attacking Vice President Al Gore.

The 15-second ad produced by the Republican Leadership Council does not urge people to vote for Nader, the Green Party candidate for president. But it plays on Democrats' fears that liberals will vote for Nader and take votes from Gore that he needs in his tight race with Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

A media buyer for the Washington, D.C.-based group was trying to buy $100,000 of television time yesterday in Seattle, Oregon and Wisconsin, said Mark Miller, the group's executive director. The ads are scheduled to begin airing Monday.

Those are all places where the race between Gore and Bush is close and where Nader has proved popular, drawing up to 10,000 people at recent campaign rallies.

The ad uses attacks Nader made on Gore at a Washington, D.C., news conference this week. It begins with this remark from Nader: "Al Gore is suffering from election-year delusion if he thinks his record on the environment is anything to be proud of."

The ad continues:

Announcer: What's Al Gore's real record?

Nader: Eight years of principles betrayed and promises broken.

Announcer: Ask Al Gore, why?

What's not mentioned in the Republican ads is that Nader also criticized Bush at the news conference, calling him "one of the most bumbling, corporate-indentured, horrible-record Republican candidates."

The Nader and Gore campaigns quickly condemned the ads. The Bush campaign said it had nothing to do with them, and U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn, R-Bellevue, said they wouldn't help Bush.

"These ads aren't showing that, first, George W. Bush is environmental enemy No. 1 and two, in the campaign to build the Green Party, we're campaigning against both Al Gore and George W. Bush," said Nader spokeswoman Laura Jones. "So fundamentally the ads are misleading."

Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, one of the Senate's leading liberals, talked to reporters yesterday in a conference call organized by the Gore campaign.

"Come Election Day it is incredibly important for people in states like Washington to understand what is going on here, with the Republicans putting money into these kind of ads," Wellstone said.

He repeated claims by Gore backers that a vote for Nader could secure a Bush victory.

"The progressive community cannot let that happen," he said. "It is so antithetical to the work of all of us for the last three decades."

A Gore spokeswoman said Bush should ask the Republican Leadership Council not to run the ads.

"It's disappointing that he has to use a third party to go after Al Gore instead of talking about the issues and debating about facts," said spokeswoman Maria Meier.

Bush spokesman Ken Lisaius said he had not seen the ads.

"Those aren't our ads; our ads are focused on Gov. Bush's positive agenda," he said.

But Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn, R-Bellevue, a Bush campaign adviser, objected to the ads.

"I think that's not the way to help the Bush campaign," she said. "I think it would be more helpful to encourage people to vote for George W. Bush."

Miller of the Republican Leadership Council stressed that the ads do not tell people to vote for Nader and should not be viewed as a Republican attack.

"They are not our words, they are the words of Ralph Nader," Miller said.

"It's one thing when a group makes an allegation in a political ad. We are not making allegations, we are only running Ralph Nader as Ralph Nader."

Miller described his group as an organization of centrist Republicans who are "fiscally conservative and socially tolerant." Many Republican senators and House members are on its advisory board.

The group has also produced ads attacking Democrats in the New Jersey and New York Senate races this year.

During the presidential primaries last spring, it ran ads attacking Republican Steve Forbes and defending Bush.

Miller said the Nader ads were in part inspired by an anti-Nader ad produced by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, which backs Gore.

The ad, which is running in Oregon, Minnesota and Wisconsin and may start running in Seattle next week, says that Bush would appoint Supreme Court justices who would end legal abortion.

"Voting for Ralph Nader helps elect George W. Bush," an announcer says in the ad. "Before voting Nader, consider the risk. It's your choice."

Miller said if Democrats object to his ads on the grounds that they are a third-party negative attack, they should feel the same way about the pro-Gore abortion ads.

"You can't have it both ways," he said.

Seattle Times staff reporter Mike Lindblom contributed to this report.