Kerrey Enters Presidential Race With Call for Progress : Politics: Democrat warns that, without change, the next generation will suffer. He wants to lead ‘renewal.’

Sen. Bob Kerrey entered the Democratic presidential race Monday with a call for the nation to resume its “fearless, restless voyage of generational progress” after a decade of “unchecked selfishness and greed.”

In an appearance before several thousand hometown supporters in a downtown park, Kerrey said he was seeking the presidency to “lead a process of renewal in America.”

“I want to lead because I believe almost everyone but our present leadership knows what we must do,” declared Kerrey, 48, who began his political career in Nebraska as governor less than a decade ago. “I believe Americans know deep in their bones that something is terribly wrong and that business as usual--the prescription of the ‘80s--will not work for the future.”

Without a change in direction, Kerrey charged, the nation would bequeath to the next generation an economically “impaired” society burdened by “a massively enlarged federal debt” and fractured by “divisions of race and income.”

“Unless we do things differently now, (the next generation) can expect family lives where stagnant incomes will force them into more hours at work and less time with their children, where home ownership and college tuition and even adequate health care will be beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest,” he said.

Kerrey, who is divorced, was joined on stage by dozens of local officials and members of his family, including his ex-wife, Beverly Defnall, and their two teen-age children, Benjamin and Lindsey.

He became the fifth Democrat to declare his candidacy, following former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder and long-shot former Irvine Mayor Larry Agran. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is expected to join the race on Thursday; former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. is exploring the contest.

In Kerrey, the Democratic field adds an unconventional politician who often has been described as charismatic--and just as often termed complex, introspective and even enigmatic.

More than any presidential candidate before him, Kerrey has been molded by the war in Vietnam, where he won the Medal of Honor as a Navy commando and lost part of his right leg in a 1969 attack on a Viet Cong position.

Although embittered at first, Kerrey slowly recovered and even prospered through the 1970s, becoming a millionaire by building a chain of Nebraska restaurants and health clubs with his brother-in-law. He did not join the Democratic Party until 1978, after registering as a Republican until well into his thirties. Then, in 1982, he stunned this conservative state by upsetting Republican Gov. Charles Thone in his first bid for public office.

In office, Kerrey continued his capacity for surprise, serving one term and then deciding not to seek near-certain reelection. After a two-year sabbatical from politics, Kerrey returned to Nebraska and easily won election to the Senate in 1988.

Kerrey criticized President Bush on Monday as presiding over a “government whose engine has become inertia, whose direction is drift and whose compass is cynicism.”

“The year 1992 offers us a chance to break from a decade in which our leaders invited a season of cynicism,” he said. “They invoked morality but winked at greed. They criticized the public sector but then robbed it blind. They spoke of balanced budgets but never submitted one. They railed against taxes but raised them on the middle class. They called for civil rights but practiced racial politics. They wrapped their cause in motherhood but tried to strip motherhood of choice or meaningful opportunities.”

Kerrey said Bush “reminds me of some managers I’ve known in business; great person to be around; all the employees love him. But the business is losing money, its future is impaired, and all he’s offering is excuses as to why nothing can be done.”

Still, Kerrey generally dodged the opportunity to assail Bush on Monday. In an appearance later in the afternoon at a Denver elementary school, Kerrey announced that he would vote against Bush’s nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, but he disappointed some in his audience by sidestepping several questions inviting him to condemn Bush for racism or favoring the rich.

His tone on foreign policy issues in his announcement address was generally respectful toward the President. Kerrey praised Bush for the unilateral nuclear weapons reductions he announced last week.

But, in contrast to several of his Democratic competitors--who have virtually ignored foreign policy in their speeches--Kerrey called for a “new role for America in the world,” focused on resolving conflicts between the developed and less developed nations.

Although he forcefully criticized the Vietnam War after returning from it, on Monday he declared himself “proud . . . and grateful for the effort of those who made the policies of the Cold War”--those whose commitment to containing communism led the nation into the jungle war.

In remarks more typical for Democrats, Kerrey called on the President “to fight a trade war” against foreign competitors, including Japan, “whose adversarial policies,” he said, threaten both the American economy and the international trading system.

In his speech Monday--as throughout his short time in Washington--Kerrey largely avoided the ideological disputes dividing his party. Although generally liberal on most issues--he was a leading opponent of the President’s policies in the Persian Gulf--Kerrey has at times also stressed the limits of government’s capacity to solve problems and described the obligations of citizenship with a fervor uncommon on the left.

As a veteran and critic of the war in Vietnam--the defining political experience for millions of baby boomers now entering parenthood and middle age--Kerrey strikes some Democrats as the kind of “generational” candidate many have sought since Gary Hart faltered. Kerrey underlined that point Monday not only by stressing the obligations of this generation to its children but also by bracketing his speech with taped music from rock stars Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp.

With that eclectic profile, admirers believe Kerrey could bridge the internal Democratic fissure embodied by Harkin, a favorite of traditional liberals, and Clinton, who has most vigorously made the case for change in the party.

At the same time, such expectations represent perhaps his greatest risk. Although Kerrey’s candidacy has stirred considerable excitement among Democrats, that interest owes more to his touch of glamour and compelling personal story than to his specific accomplishments in the political arena, many party analysts agree.

His announcement speech affirmed his goals--better schools, more investment, the defeat of hunger in America--but left unaddressed the question of how he intends to reach them.

Also, some Democrats wonder if a politician who once walked away from office possesses the consuming drive that the nominating process now seems to demand. But those close to him insist that no one should underestimate the determination of a man who returned from the loss of a leg to run in marathons.