Clinton Captures Rhythm of South, Finds His Stride : Democrats: After stumbling in role of front-runner, the candidate appears to have regained his confidence.

His accent is in full flower, and his Southernisms are expanding exponentially. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a son of the South, is getting sustenance and gaining sass as he campaigns through his native turf.

Take his derisive dismissal of President Bush, delivered a few nights ago before hundreds of enthusiastic supporters in a Greenville, S.C., hotel: “If I had behaved as a child the way he behaves in office, gettin’ up every day just the most powerful person in the world, blamin’ somebody else for his problems, my momma would’ve spanked me,” he shouted, as hundreds of Southern heads nodded approvingly.

Somewhere on his wild roller-coaster ride of a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton has found his confidence. Finally, he seems to have become the candidate he was supposed to be, those long days ago when he was tagged the front-runner, those days before controversy about his personal life battered his campaign.

Earlier this week, in Georgia, he captured his first win of the primary season. He hit upon a consistent theme with which to bludgeon former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, blasting his rival’s economic proposals as merely a refined version of Reaganomics.

He passed through seven days bereft of controversy--and the way this campaign has gone, that alone constituted a winning streak. But most of all, he seemed to gain strength from being, simply, home.

Before an achingly lovely tableau of the South--a white-pillared Colonial home bedecked in patriotic bunting, American flags whipping in the breeze, clouds plying the skies but holding their rain--Clinton was drinking in the applause of hundreds during a campaign stop in Camden, S.C.

“I live in a state with only 2.5 million people, where even your enemies call you by your first name and smile,” he declared, setting off a ripple of laughter from his listeners. “I don’t know how to do anything in public life but fight for people like you.

“And it’s high time you had somebody in the White House who . . . felt the pulse of the ordinary men and women, boys and girls of this country whose lives and dreams are being drowned out by an insane economic policy, a divisive political philosophy and a neglectful leadership.”

In style, at least, Clinton is back at the top of his game, more and more frequently delivering the forceful, evocative addresses that helped gain him the early front-runner status that evaporated as controversies over alleged womanizing and his draft status during the Vietnam War sundered his candidacy.

It is not so much Yale-educated lawyer and one-time Rhodes scholar on display here; it is the boy wonder of tiny Hope, Ark., Southern to the core.

In South Carolina, he reminded folks that he vacations in the state. In northern Florida, he pointed out similarities to his home state. In Texas, he was “your neighbor from Arkansas.” Implicit, of course, is that the other fellow, Tsongas, is a Yankee.

Exit polls from Tuesday’s primary in Georgia and surveys of voters elsewhere in the region suggest that Southern voters are more sympathetic to Clinton’s early travails.

James Carville, a Louisiana native and a senior Clinton adviser, said: “People in the South are redemptive in nature and distrustful of a set of charges that have not been substantiated.”

Buoying Clinton’s confidence is his campaign’s feeling that its new effort to define Tsongas as a Wall Street sympathizer is paying off as next week’s Super Tuesday bonanza of 11 primaries and caucuses approaches.

Clinton is undeniably basing his message on class. His new advertisements say he’ll “put people first.”

Not only has Clinton’s confidence returned, but so has his focus on the issues that fueled his early surge and seem to inspire certitude in the candidate, who for all his abilities as a campaigner--and a style some describe as “slick”--is at heart a policy wonk.

“Personal responsibility,” Clinton’s label for pet proposals that demand more of Americans, from child-support payments to required work for welfare recipients, was ditched at the height of the womanizing rumors. But it has been reborn as “opportunity and responsibility.”

As he went through the litany on Friday in Tampa, Fla., before a largely elderly audience, he demanded once again that America provide education, job training, health insurance and child care to welfare dependents.

And then, he said, they should get the message. “We’ve helped you, now you’ve got to go to work.” The line drew the biggest applause of the speech.

Clinton hopes to thump Tsongas across the South on Tuesday, and he is traveling frenetically to do it. On Friday, while Tsongas appeared in Arizona and Florida, Clinton was in Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Louisiana. Each of the stops was brief, but the candidate got what he sought--coverage from local television reporters.

While the candidate is currently upbeat, the history of his campaign suggests that can change in a snap.

Exit polls from Georgia and other states suggested that most voters--when asked directly about the controversies that have surrounded Clinton--had decided to ignore them. But most voters also continue to pick Tsongas when asked which candidate they most trust.

An NBC-Wall Street Journal nationwide poll released Friday showed that Clinton’s “unfavorable” ratings have climbed significantly since January--to nearly one-third of the electorate. More than 40%, when reminded of the twin womanizing and draft allegations, said that they had “serious doubts” about whether they could vote for him.

BUCHANAN REAPS DIVIDENDS: Candidate uses direct mail to raise funds and possibly lay base for ’96 campaign. A24