ILLINOIS VOTERS EYE WILLIAMSON, BRAUN

CHICAGO -- A poll that suggests more voters are undecided in Illinois' U.S. Senate race means people are rethinking their support for Democrat Carol Moseley Braun, opponent Rich Williamson said Monday.

Braun said she intends to focus on issues in the final week of a race that so far has been concerned largely with character attacks and innuendo.

Williamson told a group of business leaders in the Chicago suburb of Oakbrook Terrace that the economy should be the main issue in the campaign. He called Braun a "silly liberal" who does not have the solutions to create jobs and let the marketplace work.

But the Republican also worked in a reference to Braun's questionable handling of a $28,750 inheritance paid to her mother, a Medicaid recipient, that was not reported to the state Department of Public Aid or to state or federal tax authorities.

He said the controversy was causing voters to reconsider their support of Braun. He cited a survey of 1,121 registered voters conducted Oct. 21-25 by the University of Illinois at Chicago that showed 28 percent of voters undecided. That compares with 18 percent undecided in an Oct. 17-19 poll of 1,000 registered voters commissioned by the Chicago Tribune.

A Braun aide, Steve Brown, said her attorney, Louis Vitullo, had expressed confidence that all necessary documents regarding the inheritance would be turned over to the public aid department Tuesday. Vitullo did not return a late afternoon phone call to his office seeking further comment.

In the new poll, Braun led Williamson 39 percent to 28 percent. It has a margin of error of 3 percentage points. The earlier Tribune poll showed Braun leading 50 percent to 32 percent, also with a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Braun told a news conference in Decatur that she was not worried about the narrowing gap in the polls.

"If I had paid a whole lot of attention to the polls in the primary, I probably would have gone home and gone to bed," she said. Braun upset favored incumbent Sen. Alan Dixon in the primary election.

In a show of party unity, Braun was joined at campaign stops Tuesday by Sen. Paul Simon, who had backed Dixon in the primary.

She said she wanted to concentrate on issues in the final days of the campaign.

"The Republicans are creating straw dogs," Braun told students at Illinois Central College in East Peoria. "They create an issue so they can beat it down. They don't want you to concentrate on the real issues."

In East Peoria and East Moline, Braun said she would make education and job retraining high priorities as a senator.

She said that in last decade, Illinois has lost 300,000 jobs and $4 billion that could have been used for retraining.

"Our single most important asset is a trained, educated work force that can meet the challenge of the competition," she said.