Rivals Give Unintentional Boost to Rockefeller’s Prospective Candidacy : Politics: The senator woos Southern Democrats alone when Arkansas’ governor is detained. Bush gives an indirect assist on child welfare issue.

In the slow-to-develop 1992 Democratic presidential campaign, West Virginia Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV’s prospective candidacy has just gotten a jump-start. Credit not only his own resourcefulness and the charismatic magic of his family name but also the unintended help of a couple of potential White House rivals--Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and President Bush.

Clinton, another likely Democratic contender, inadvertently gave Rockefeller an opening to make influential friends here in the South while Bush unintentionally helped bolster Rockefeller’s credentials on the key issue of child welfare.

Rockefeller’s good fortune began Friday when plane trouble kept Clinton from showing up as scheduled here in Raleigh for this weekend’s Southern regional caucus of Democratic National Committee members. That left the 6-foot, 6-inch, boyish-looking Rockefeller, who pronounced himself “aggressively happy” to be here, alone on stage to court nearly 100 party leaders from 13 states, most of whom will be delegates to next year’s national convention.

In a 30-minute speech and a series of tete-a-tetes Friday night, Rockefeller, 54, did everything but whistle Dixie to please his hosts, many of whom were still raving about his blend of self-deprecating humor and idealistic conviction over their country ham and grits Saturday morning.

“Before this I would have laughed if anybody had said you can sell Jay Rockefeller in the South,” said Amy Burks, Alabama national committeewoman. “But I think Southern people will like him.”

“I could go to our Rotary Club and convince them to vote for Rockefeller,” said Sylvia Owen, national committeewoman from Mississippi.

At least as important to Rockefeller is the indirect assist he has gotten from, of all people, Bush. This is in connection with the National Children’s Commission, which Rockefeller heads and which will issue its much-heralded report on public policy related to the nation’s offspring Monday in Washington.

Under the statute setting up the commission in 1988, Bush got to appoint one-third of its members, many of them staunch conservatives who were expected to resist Rockefeller’s liberal inclinations on such issues as child health care and parental leave.

But Rockefeller managed to persuade the liberal members of the commission, appointed by the House and Senate, to accept compromises that satisfied Bush’s appointees. The results are $55 billion worth of consensus recommendations, nearly all of which have the unanimous support of the 30 commission members--and a potent addition to potential candidate Rockefeller’s agenda.

Commission Chairman Rockefeller likes to talk in bipartisan terms.

“My dream would be that the President would take our report and rip off the cover and place on the book the seal of the President of the United States and call it President Bush’s program for the children of America,” he told reporters here.

In fact, Rockefeller’s aides indicate they would be surprised if Bush did anything of the sort. That would leave Rockefeller in charge of promoting the report amid an already scheduled blizzard of publicity: A slew of personal interviews on network television and individual stations around the country this week, followed by public appearances in at least a dozen states next month.

“I want to keep this report in the face of opinion makers,” Rockefeller said. “I will be unrelenting in this effort.”

One key idea that Chairman Rockefeller will be pushing which cannot hurt candidate Rockefeller’s chances: a tax credit of $1,000 per child for every family in the country.

The focus on the welfare of children gives Rockefeller another broad-based, middle-class issue to supplement his advocacy of national health insurance, growing out of his early leadership of yet another study, the Pepper Commission inquiry into the state of health care in the country.

But whatever his substantive credentials, Rockefeller’s personal charm was as vital in scoring points here with the Southern Democratic leaders. With a straight face, the scion of the nation’s pre-eminent billionaire dynasty asserted that he had started off life weighing the choice between two paths--”getting by week-by-week by making a buck, or inheriting wealth.”

Said Rockefeller: “I looked at those two alternatives. It was a serious consideration that I held within my mind. But I am a man of courage and I did make a decision. And I decided on inheritance and I’ve never really regretted it.”

But Rockefeller struck a responsive chord among many in the crowd by recalling how he had responded to the challenge of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier by joining VISTA and moving to the bedraggled town of Emmons, W.Va., to aid the downtrodden.

“I worked hard,” he said. “But the truth is the people of Emmons changed my life a little more than I changed theirs.”

Here in Dixie, Rockefeller did not flinch from taking on the sensitive issues of civil rights and quotas. Charging that President Bush had dispatched “his pit bull,” White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, to break up efforts to reach a compromise on pending civil rights legislation, he contended that Bush “is telling lies about quotas” to divide the Democratic Party and advance his own reelection chances.

Rockefeller has yet to make up his mind on whether or not to run for the White House. But his top aide, Lane Bailey, said here in an interview that such a decision was now “weeks, not months, away.” And Rockefeller made plain before he left which way he is leaning.

“My interest is growing and the fever is not diminishing,” he said. “People are responding to my ideas, I think, well, and I am responding to what I am hearing.”