NEWS ANALYSIS : Rivals Brown, Clinton Grapple Over True Meaning of ‘Change’ : Democrats: Arkansas governor seeks to ‘reinvent’ government. California foe favors an incendiary rebellion to overturn the status quo.

In their increasingly bare-knuckled battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. are scrapping most ferociously over the mantle of change.

Each promises to bring “fundamental change” to Washington. But they define change in very different ways, with Clinton offering himself as the man with a plan to “reinvent government,” while Brown promises a less specific but more incendiary rebellion to overturn the status quo.

Think of the federal government as a house: Clinton casts himself as the architect with the training to refurbish and renovate it, Brown wants to burn it down.

At every opportunity, Brown argues that changes in policy cannot occur without the creation of a broad-based social movement to challenge special interests in Washington. In the absence of such a movement, any idea--no matter how compelling--will be stymied, he contends. “Unless you have a theory and a methodology and a movement to change that gridlock, all this will be an academic discussion and we’ll be around here in four years discussing the same issues,” Brown declared in a debate with Clinton last week.

Bridling against that vision, Clinton offers his own career as evidence that change is possible within the political system. “I just object to being able to answer every question on education or anything else (by) saying, ‘Well, nothing can be done because the system is broken,’ ” Clinton responded to Brown last week. Referring to his 11 years as governor, he said, “We’ve done a lot of things (in Arkansas) that we couldn’t have done if we just said nothing can be done because the system’s corrupt.”

Brown’s visceral skepticism may be closer to the public’s cynical mood, many analysts believe. In effect, Clinton’s stance puts him in the position of defending the very profession of politics at a time when most people view it with enormous distrust. As Clinton is learning, being called the most talented politician of your generation these days is like being termed the world’s most-talented oil company executive during an oil spill.

“Clinton is a brilliant guy, but he is also a brilliant politician in a year where ironically that turns out to be a liability,” says former New York Democratic Senate candidate Mark Green, now New York City’s consumer affairs commissioner.

Brown, however, still hasn’t convincingly demonstrated that his message can move the voters it is ostensibly aimed at: the blue-collar and lower-income workers he says are locked out of the political system. Except in Michigan--where he won labor support by attacking “fast-track” negotiations on the proposed free-trade agreement with Mexico--Brown’s greatest strength has been among white, better-off voters attracted to his environmentalism and casual disdain of politicians, polls have shown.

Beneath their divergence in rhetoric, Brown and Clinton share a common problem: a widespread suspicion among political insiders--and, according to the polls, many voters--that neither of these career politicians is as committed to shaking up the status quo as he claims.

With Brown, some suspect his outsider guise is just the latest in a series of political poses that he discards as easily as the expensive suits he abandons for a union jacket at labor meetings.

With Clinton, some express concern that his commitment to change extends only as far as the first powerful interest that stands in its way. Referring to his record in Arkansas on issues such as environmental protection and workplace safety, consumer advocate Ralph Nader said, “Clinton is a corporatist Democrat. He’s someone who says let the corporations retain their power and I’ll try to gild the lily with an educational program here and a welfare reform program there.”

To the extent that the debate between Clinton and Brown rises above these allegations of insincerity, it extends a divide in liberal thought that has endured since the Populists and the Progressives squared off at the turn of the century. Like the Populists, Brown raises the roof for a revolt against the heights of corporate and governmental power. Like the Progressives, Clinton downplays issues of social power in favor of specific reforms and innovations aimed at expanding opportunity and streamlining government’s operation.

Throughout his campaign, Brown has argued that simply electing a new President won’t produce the policies liberals desire. He points frequently to the example of President Jimmy Carter, noting that even with a Democratic Congress, his Administration was unable to push through legislation most liberals supported, such as labor law reform.

Actually achieving those changes, Brown says, requires not just a candidate but a “grass-roots movement, like the Rainbow Coalition, like other groups that pull together and create a countervailing power.”

As the Democratic presidential field has narrowed, such declarations--combined with a desire to stop Clinton--have won Brown increasing praise from union leaders and liberal activists such as Nader.

“If you believe in political redemption, you would believe this is a new Jerry Brown,” said Nader. “If you don’t believe in political redemption, you say I don’t care what he believes in, he is raising in the mainstream media issues of power and abuse of power to a degree that no presidential candidate has in decades. And in a way that’s a kind of redemption itself.”

Clinton, by contrast, is far less convinced than Brown that the best way to deal with social problems is to build up organizations such as labor unions that present themselves as the voice of ordinary Americans.

Although he has tried to minimize his conflict with traditional Democratic constituencies during the campaign, Clinton springs from the generation of post-liberal thinkers who reject the view that organized labor always knows what is best for working people, or that the only way to help consumers is to embrace the consumer movement’s agenda. In early March, for example, Clinton angered labor leaders by praising workers at a General Motors plant in Texas for breaking with their union to accept proposed changes in work rules that kept the plant open.

“To Clinton, it’s not a question of rebuilding organized interests to speak for the masses; the masses can speak for themselves,” says Bruce Reed, the campaign’s policy director.

Thus, Clinton puts more focus than Brown on policies that attempt to bypass institutions in order to “empower” individuals directly--sometimes in ways that organized liberal interests resist.

Clinton, for example, supports a national service trust fund that would allow young people to pay off federal college loans by working two years as police officers, teachers or community service workers. Many unions fear that idea would create low-wage competitors for public jobs, and Brown opposes it on those grounds.

In his urban policy, Clinton has advanced several ideas that would skirt city bureaucracies to work directly with individuals and communities. These include tenant management of public housing and the creation of a national network of small business development banks to make loans to inner-city entrepreneurs.

In his sketchy discussions of urban policy, Brown puts more emphasis on giving money directly to cities through revenue sharing and block grants. On the other hand, his welfare reform proposal--which would convert federal grants into vouchers that could supplement pay in private sector jobs--shares some of the same “empowerment” spirit as Clinton’s reforms.

For Brown and Clinton, the greatest challenge in the days and weeks ahead may not be demonstrating the superiority of their vision, but rather the depth of their commitment to it. Before either can persuade voters he is the man to change the federal government, each man may first have to show he has changed himself.