Rivals Target Education, Economy : Clinton: Democrat maps out his prescription for long-term growth.

Broadening his message while intensifying his criticism of President Bush, Democratic presidential front-runner Bill Clinton on Thursday detailed a national economic strategy he said is needed to foster long-term economic growth.

The plan outlined by the Arkansas governor would, among other things, create a high-speed rail network linking major cities, develop “a door-to-door fiber-optics system by the year 2015” that would link “every home, every lab, every classroom and every business in America” for data transmission and establish a “federal, self-financing, public-private corporation” to repair the nation’s infrastructure.

These new proposals were blended with programs and themes Clinton previously has stressed. As in the past, he said he would develop energy policies that emphasize alternative fuels and support investment tax credits to encourage businesses to create new jobs. He also renewed his pledge to set up a civilian agency to encourage research in targeted technologies.

For workers displaced by spending cuts in the defense industry, he said, a Clinton Administration would help in retraining, job placement and relocation. He said he also would “create a fund administered by the National Science Foundation to help defense scientists, engineers and technicians master critical civilian technology fields, such as biotechnology, synthetic materials and renewable energy resources.”

Clinton spelled out these and other proposals in what his campaign billed as a major economic address at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia. He later repeated its major points in a speech to United Transportation Union officials in Cleveland.

Some of Clinton’s proposals were short on specifics. For instance, while touting the “door-to-door fiber-optics system” as comparable to the interstate highway system that “spurred two decades of economic growth,” he offered no details on how the plan would be financed.

Clinton aides said he would elaborate on this and other proposals as the campaign progresses.

When he turned his attention to Bush, Clinton was unrelenting in his criticism. He accused the President of compiling “the worst economic record in 50 years,” one that has caused “slower economic growth, slower job growth and slower income growth than any Administration since the Great Depression--and the biggest deficits and highest middle-class tax burden of any Administration in history.”

Clinton also charged that the only time Bush responds to the nation’s problems “is when the polls change or the pressures mount.”

Clinton referred to actions he said were influenced by Bush’s two opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

“Last year, the opponent was David Duke, the issue was civil rights and George Bush wrongly called the civil rights act a quota bill. Then came Pat Buchanan and his assault on arts funding. So Bush fired the head of the National Endowment for the Arts,” Clinton said.

Clinton also noted that on Thursday, Bush came to Pennsylvania--which holds its primary April 28--to embrace a lending plan to help families pay for their children’s college education. It is a plan that even Administration officials acknowledge closely resembles one already offered by the Arkansas governor.

“And they say I’m slick,” Clinton said.

Referring to Bush, he added: “A campaign conversion isn’t the same as a lifetime of conviction and a commitment to change.”

Clinton clearly relished the chance to focus on his message of economic revival rather than being pestered by questions about his character and past that have plagued his campaign since late January.

With his victories in primaries in New York and three other states last week establishing him as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Clinton returned to themes that had marked the early stages of his candidacy late last year.

He contended, for instance, that his prescriptions for rebuilding the economy “aren’t liberal or conservative. They’re both and they’re different.”

In an example of his willingness to break from his party’s past orthodoxies and rhetoric, Clinton borrowed a phrase favored by former President Ronald Reagan, saying, “The old Democratic theory that says we can just ‘tax and spend’ our way out of any problem we face” has failed.

Discussing ways to reduce the federal budget deficit, he restated his support for granting the President the power of the line-item veto--a position that puts him at odds with the Democratic-controlled Congress. He also noted that he has proposed a 3% across-the-board cut in the federal bureaucracy.

In emphasizing the need to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, Clinton proposed using federal transportation money “and perhaps funds transferred from defense” to create the high-speed rail network. “Bullet trains in five major corridors could serve 500,000 passengers a day at speeds up to 300 miles an hour,” he said.

He added that in the new global economy, “infrastructure means information as well as transportation.” His proposed fiber-optics system, he said, is needed as part of a “national strategy to create a national information network.”

On education issues, Clinton reiterated his proposal for a “national trust fund to provide tuition loans to all students.” In return, graduates would reimburse the government either by paying a percentage of their future earnings or by performing national or community service.

Clinton also proposes creating apprenticeship programs for high schoolers who choose not to attend college.

In addition, he said: “Every working person today should have the chance to hone and upgrade their skills every year. In a Clinton Administration, we’ll require firms to invest the equivalent of 1% to 1.5% of their payroll on training for everybody--not just top executives--or pay into a fund for training.”

In his speech at the Wharton business school, Clinton told his audience of students and faculty that he had come there partly because it “is home to much of America’s economic potential and has produced many of our best corporate leaders.”

But he also called Wharton “a powerful symbol of where our country went wrong in the 1980s. . . . It was here at Wharton that by 1987, the year the stock market crashed, 25% of the graduating class was going into investment banking--a quarter of the best graduates at one of America’s top business schools pursuing high incomes in high finance rather than in the apparently less glamorous work of creating jobs, goods and services to make America richer.”

Campaign officials said the Wharton speech was meant to build upon an economic policy address the candidate delivered in November at Georgetown University in Washington. In that speech, Clinton advocated what he has termed the centerpiece of his economic plan--a middle-class tax cut averaging $350 per family, to be funded by a tax hike on families with annual incomes over $200,000.