The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobbying organization, plans to help pay for advertisements that attack Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards and other trial lawyers for raising the cost of doing business.

The chamber will fund an independent political organization that will “tell the truth about the role John Edwards and the trial lawyers have played in driving up health care costs,” said a former Republican National Committee chairman and former senator who co chairs the group, the November Fund, Bill Brock.

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s campaign considers the ads an example of President Bush “allowing shadowy outside groups to do his dirty work,” spokesman David Wade said.

The Chamber of Commerce said it won’t endorse Mr. Bush, who includes curbs on lawsuits as part of his re-election campaign platform. Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have given more than two dozen speeches linking job losses and higher health-care costs to the kind of personal injury lawsuits that Mr. Edwards, 51, was involved in during his 20-year career as an attorney.

Mr. Kerry choosing Mr. Edwards as his running mate was the catalyst for the Chamber of Commerce’s first ever involvement in a presidential campaign, the Chamber of Commerce’s president, Thomas Donohue, said in an interview.

“We cannot ignore what may prove to be a make-or-break election for legal reform at the national level,” Mr. Donohue said. “When voters go to the polls, they need to know lawsuit abuse destroys jobs, drives doctors out of business, and forces companies into bankruptcy.”

The November Fund plans to spend millions of dollars on the advertisements, which would run in seven states where polls show a tight race between Mr. Kerry, 60, and Mr. Bush, 58, the Chamber of Commerce said in an emailed statement.

Campaign law bars political parties from taking large unregulated donations from corporations and individuals. It allows third-party groups such as the November Fund – known as 527s for the section of the IRS code that grants them tax exemptions – to raise unlimited money to promote issues or candidates.

Mr. Bush yesterday called for an end to advertising by groups not directly controlled by the candidates, including the Vietnam veterans who attacked Mr. Kerry’s military service this month.

The chamber said its support of the November Fund is intended to educate voters on how lawsuits hurt businesses.

The other co-chair of the November Fund, which was incorporated this month under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Service code, is Craig L. Fuller, who was chief of staff to Mr. Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, when he was vice president, and is a director of the Chamber of Commerce and president of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores.

The ads will “educate voters how much the actions of trial lawyers cost our economy over $200 billion a year,” Mr. Fuller said in an e-mailed statement. “Frivolous lawsuits are costing ordinary Americans over $3,000 a year per family in extra costs for everything from cars to child care to prescription drugs.”

Mr. Brock represented Maryland in the House of Representatives in the 1960s and in the Senate in the 1970s. He was a labor secretary and a trade representative during the Reagan administration.

Mr. Kerry has been supported by trial lawyers, who oppose the Bush administration’s proposals to limit lawsuits. Fred Baron, a Texas lawyer and former president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, is a Kerry campaign finance co-chairman.

Mr. Bush’s standard stump speech includes attacks on Mr. Kerry for selecting Mr. Edwards to be his running mate. “I don’t think you can be pro-doctor and pro-patient and pro-plaintiff attorney at the same time,” Mr. Bush said last week in St. Paul, Minn. “I think you have to choose. My opponent made his choice, and he put him on the ticket. I made my choice. I stand with the patients and doctors. I support medical liability reform now.”

Mr. Cheney also goes after trial lawyers on the campaign stump. “Lawsuits can ruin an honest business,” Mr. Cheney said during an early July swing through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. “It’s a lot easier for America’s businesses to hire workers when they know they don’t have to keep hiring lawyers.”

The chamber said it also would fund a voter education campaign on lawsuit abuse with businesses in six to 10 states. The campaign “will highlight the growing political influence of the trial bar and remind the business community of the dangers of having this group closely aligned with the White House.”

Mr. Donohue, 66, has been head of the Chamber of Commerce since 1997 and began the Institute for Legal Reform to push for restrictions on lawsuits. “That’s the issue that perhaps dogs American business more than anything else,” said Frank Coleman, a former Chamber of Commerce official.

He was hired away from the American Trucking Associations to improve the chamber’s lobbying efforts. Since taking over, he boosted the number of lobbyists to 18 from three, and sent money and staff into states to help elect federal lawmakers who support free trade, fewer government regulation of business, and lower taxes.

As Congress earlier this year considered legislation to limit how much people injured by medical malpractice could collect in damages, and a separate bill shifting most class-action suits from state courts to federal courts, the chamber and its Institute for Legal Reform spent $30 million to lobby during the first six months of 2004, according to filings with the secretary of the Senate. The chamber spent $35 million for all of 2003.

These latest efforts are in addition to the chamber’s efforts in individual House and Senate races, including a $400,000 advertising campaign against Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat, who is being challenged for re-election by former Republican Rep. John Thune. The ad criticized Mr. Daschle’s opposition to the medical malpractice bill.

Mr. Kerry urged Mr. Bush to quit “the tactics of fear and smear,” in remarks at Cooper Union in New York yesterday.

Mr. Kerry didn’t name the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam veterans and former Navy gunboat officers with financial backing from Republican donors in Mr. Bush’s home state of Texas.

Other veterans who served with Mr. Kerry are defending him, including Chicago Tribune editor William Rood, former Navy lieutenant Jim Russell, and former Green Beret Jim Rassmann.

The Swift boat veterans group said Monday that it doesn’t plan to quit its anti-Kerry campaign and will air new ads this week in New Mexico, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, three other states where polls show a close race between Messrs. Bush and Kerry.

The Bush campaign denies any connection to the ads. The Swift Boat Veterans group issued a statement saying it “has never coordinated its efforts with any party or any other organization. “A member of Mr. Bush’s veterans’ steering committee stepped down from the campaign after appearing in the latest Swift Boat Veterans commercial slated to air beginning today.

Senator McCain, a Republican from Arizona and former Vietnam prisoner of war, two weeks ago called the Swift Boat group’s ad dishonest and urged the White House to condemn it.