CLINTON AIDES ASSAIL DOLE ON DONATION CURBS.

Byline: Alison Mitchell The New York Times

The Clinton campaign accused Bob Dole on Monday of making a last-minute conversion to the cause of campaign finance restrictions and released a new television commercial accusing Dole and the Republican Party of accepting $2.4 million in donations from ``foreign interests.''

But the president himself side-stepped the issue entirely during a rainy autumn day of campaigning across the Midwest, returning instead to education, a subject that appeals directly to the kind of swing voters that he has wooed all year.

The two-pronged effort illustrated the Clinton campaign's technique of allowing the president to sail above the partisan fray, while his surrogates and advertisements aggressively respond to the Republicans.

On Sunday, Dole, who in the Senate joined other Republicans in killing or delaying campaign finance bills on several occasions, called for new rules that would allow only U.S. citizens to make donations to candidates. He also urged a ban on the unlimited donations to political committees now allowed from corporations, unions and other groups.

Clinton's aides Monday sharply accused Dole of hypocrisy. Joe Lockhart, Clinton's campaign spokesman, said that Dole's call to limit campaign contributions was like Jack Kevorkian ``giving a lecture on the sanctity of life.'' Michael D. McCurry, the White House press secretary said, ``his conversion to the cause of campaign finance reform this late in the game is certainly a political deathbed conversion.''

But Clinton did not speak of campaign fund-raising at all during a rain-drenched rally in Parma, Ohio, and a ceremony for an airport expansion in Detroit. Instead, he displayed his capacity for ethnic campaigning, joking in the blue-collar suburbs of Cleveland, ``I'm the only president in history who has ever come to Parma twice just to eat pierogies.''

Clinton also moved to draw a distinction between himself and Dole, but on his own chosen grounds: education and programs such as the direct student-loan program, which Clinton steered through Congress in 1993. The program offers loans directly from the government as opposed to through banks.

``Thirty-one years ago my opponent voted against the creation of the student-loan program in the first place,'' he said. ``Three years ago he opposed the direct lending program which your president just praised and which you know has improved college loans right here at Cuyahoga Community College.''

Tying his opponent to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., Clinton also said Dole ``opposed the creation of the Department of Education, and now he says that he and Speaker Gingrich will eliminate it. I believe they're wrong and we're right.''

The president, who pledged in 1992 to clean up the system of political contributions, has said little about political money-raising in the weeks since questions started to be raised about large donations to the Democratic Party by individuals tied to an Indonesian conglomerate, the Lippo Group. The issue was subsequently seized upon by Dole.

On Friday, Clinton said he had asked the Democratic National Committee to review all donations and assure they were appropriate. Shortly afterward, the party suspended fund-raising by John Huang, who at one time worked for the Lippo Group's U.S. banking subsidiary, and asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether he had solicited any improper donations.