WASHINGTON — The Republican Party is hitting back at Vice President Gore over his scathing new attack on the Bush administration, suggesting that the former and perhaps future presidential candidate is trying to “reinvent” himself after failing to confront terrorism as a member of the Clinton White House.

Mr. Gore has begun a nationwide publicity tour for his new book, “The Assault on Reason,” in which he bemoans the cheapening of public discourse while levying what may be the most serious charges any leading Democrat has made against the Bush administration.

The 2000 Democratic presidential nominee, who has not ruled out a White House bid in 2008, accuses the Bush administration of knowingly deceiving the American people leading up to the invasion of Iraq and of using “politics of fear” that he compares to the tactics used by terrorists.

The former vice president reserved perhaps his harshest condemnation for his onetime rival, President Bush. On the threat of terrorism, Mr. Gore writes that instead of making it better, the president “has made it worse. We are less safe because of his policy. He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us than any leader of our country in all the years of our existence as a nation.”

Mr. Gore also criticized the administration’s failure to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001, writing that the Clinton administration responded much more proactively to terrorist threats than did the current administration when it received warnings during the summer of 2001.

The book, which goes on sale today, elicited a critical response from the Republican National Committee. “Either Al Gore is trying to reinvent himself as being tough on terror or he has forgotten he was vice president of an administration whose approach to terrorism was far from effective,” a spokeswoman, Summer Johnson, said.

The White House responded to a similar criticism of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy over the weekend from President Carter, who said the Bush administration’s impact on the world has been “the worst in history.” But it chose not to engage Mr. Gore yesterday. “We don’t do book reviews,” a Bush spokesman, Blair Jones, said, repeating a refrain that the White House has used to respond to a number of critical books over the years, including those by former Cabinet members.

Mr. Gore’s chief argument is that the lack of reasoned debate in public discourse has seriously undermined American democracy. He writes in the introduction that “it is too easy — and too partisan — to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush.” He criticizes Congress, along with television and the press, but ultimately his book is a 308-page repudiation of the Bush administration on virtually every level.

“This administration has turned the fundamental presumption of our democracy on its head,” Mr. Gore writes at the conclusion of a chapter titled “Convenient Untruths.” “And in the end, its assaults on our core democratic principles have left us less free and less secure.”

In one section early in the book, Mr. Gore goes so far as to equate the Bush administration’s use of a “fear campaign” to the tactics of terrorism.

“Terrorism relies on the stimulation of fear for political ends. Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual danger that the terrorists are capable of posing,” Mr. Gore writes. He goes on to assert that “ironically,” Mr. Bush used the same method to go to war in Iraq. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the president, Mr. Gore writes, chose “to further distort America’s political reality by creating a new fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger Iraq was capable of posing.”

The former vice president, who has been known most recently for his warnings about the threat of climate change, was an early and vocal opponent of the Iraq war, and in his book he takes the Senate to task for what he sees as its failure to sufficiently debate the use of force.

His comments could loom large if he becomes a presidential candidate, as they signal an implicit criticism of Senator Clinton and John Edwards, who voted to authorize the war. Mr. Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, has said his vote was a “mistake,” while Mrs. Clinton has pointedly refused to go that far but has said she would not vote the same way if she knew then what she knows now.

Neither of those statements appears to satisfy Mr. Gore, who writes in his book that “all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.” Of the leading Democrats, only Senator Obama of Illinois opposed the war from the start.

Mr. Gore has been the subject of endless speculation about whether he will make a late entry into the 2008 presidential race. In recent interviews, he has said a White House run is unlikely but not impossible. “I’m not a candidate, and this is not a political book. This is not a candidate book,” he said yesterday morning on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Mr. Gore’s combination of experience and opposition to the war could give him a distinct advantage over his Democratic rivals if he ran for president, a Democratic consultant, Hank Sheinkopf, said. “He has much more experience than Senator Obama, and therefore he poses a significant threat should he enter the race,” Mr. Sheinkopf said.