Liberal Democrats Get Preview of Presidential Possibilities : Politics: Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton typify sharpening factional split.

California Democrats got a good look at the party’s sharpening national debate Saturday as two potential presidential candidates squared off in separate appearances before a meeting of 800 liberal activists in Los Angeles.

With a shirt-sleeves affirmation of Democratic populism, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin received the more enthusiastic response at the feisty first California meeting of the Coalition for Democratic Values, an organization formed last year to advance the case for traditional liberal policies in the Democratic Party’s internal debates.

But Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s more restrained speech also received a friendly reception--an accomplishment in itself, because speakers throughout the day had repeatedly jabbed at the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of moderate Democrats that Clinton heads.

In the constellation of Democratic politics, the council has emerged as the leading voice calling for a fundamental reform of the party’s message in the upcoming campaign. With a membership drawn from many of the party’s leading liberals, the rival coalition has condemned the centrists for advocating a “pastel politics” that would leave the Democrats as nothing but a “faded and bland” imitation of Republicans, as Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) said at Saturday’s meeting.

Those themes also rang through Harkin’s speech as he lashed “those in our own party saying we ought to be more accommodating to the Bush and Quayle agenda.”

Brisk, colloquial and unapologetically militant, the two-term Iowa senator served the appreciative audience a speech that excoriated the 1980s as a decade of “greed and selfishness,” criticized the proposed free-trade agreement with Mexico, and called on the United States to reduce its troop deployments in Europe and Asia.

“We need a President who understands the real threat to our national security isn’t halfway around the world; it’s halfway down the street,” said Harkin, who has been actively exploring a presidential bid over the past few weeks.

Clinton, who has delivered several recent speeches that sharply criticized party orthodoxy, toned down his dissent and stressed his areas of common ground with the party’s left wing--increased investment in education, health care reform and expansion of college loan benefits. The audience seemed pleasantly surprised when Clinton condemned Bush for playing “the politics of division” on the civil rights bill.

But the crowd listened in stony silence as Clinton called on Democrats to support work requirements for welfare recipients and said Democrats should demand that recipients of government aid “exercise personal and family responsibility when they benefit from the programs we extend.”

Those were rare dissonant notes in a day given mostly to passionate restatement of traditional liberal beliefs. Throughout the day, a procession of elected officials and community leaders condemned school choice programs, demanded reopening of last year’s federal budget deal to find more cuts in the defense budget, chided Democratic congressional leaders for failing to confront President Bush more aggressively, and criticized the Persian Gulf War.

“I believe today . . . that we should have given sanctions a real chance to work,” California Sen. Alan Cranston told the group.