PORTLAND (AP) – A bumper sticker couldn’t have said it better.

In a campaign season of glib one-liners, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Monday joined with an attack on President Bush using a bumper sticker phrase as ubiquitous as “Let’s not elect him in 2004 either.”

“It’s a very simple issue. Bill Clinton lied, but nobody died,” Albright said when asked, during a rally for Democratic candidate John Kerry, about her support for Clinton during his impeachment.

Albright, who served as secretary of state under Clinton and has been an informal adviser to John Kerry, went on to criticize the Bush administration’s efforts to build a coalition before the war in Iraq, its “bring it on” bravado and its work with other nations.

“Some people ask me what I’m doing, and I say flat out that I’m trying to overthrow the government,” said Albright, who also spoke Monday in Bangor. Then echoing Bush’s own phrasings, she said: “George Bush said it’s hard work? Well let’s give him a break.”

Pithy one-liners are coming from both campaigns. “W is for wrong.” “Kerry is consistently inconsistent.” And the tactic isn’t new this year. Politicians have long used prefab comebacks. (Think Ronald Reagan’s “There you go again.”)

But Albright’s comments struck the Bush campaign in Maine as offensive.

Peter Cianchette, state spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said Albright’s comments were surprising coming from a former official who should understand the complexities of global politics.

“When I hear things like that, she’s simply reciting senator Kerry’s drivel,” Cianchette said. “He seems to be want to be the critcizer-in-chief. What we need and what we have is a commander in chief.”

Each campaign and their supporters are trying outwit the other. It’s a war on the fender, each trying to outwit the other with simple messages.

But there’s none more simple than a black W crossed through by a red line – another popular bumper sticker, said Terry Cato, of Albany, Ore.

, who owns Bumpertalk.com. The Web page sells bumper stickers of all political varieties.

Its top seller: “10 out of 10 terrorists agree: Anybody but Bush.”

It doesn’t surprise him that politics play out in unlikely places, he said.

“If you can put a bumper sticker on your car that says I visited Disney Land,’ why wouldn’t people want to express their political interests?” he said.

Campaigns seem to have perfected the art of the bumper sticker message, said John Baughman, a political science professor at Bates College.

One-liners have punch and boil down issues. The more they’re repeated, the more likely they’ll sick, Baughman said.

“They work for selling burgers and they work for selling candidates,” he said.

AP-ES-10-11-04 1656EDT

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