Clinton Strolls, Faces Character Queries : Democrats: Issue again comes up in chats with Pittsburgh voters. Brown courts Philadelphia blacks, drops in at a wedding.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton walked the streets of this city Saturday in an effort to sell voters on his platform, but he also faced questions on the issue of his character--a subject he has been trying to put behind him.

Clinton’s rival in the Democratic presidential race, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., sought support in Philadelphia’s large black community, meeting with several of its political leaders and even dropping in on an African-American couple’s wedding reception. Brown is hoping that a strong showing among black voters will help him score an upset win over Clinton in Pennsylvania’s April 28 presidential primary.

Clinton, the heavy favorite to claim the Democratic nomination, took a 45-minute stroll through an open-air market in Pittsburgh during which he fielded questions from a large and generally warm crowd on the economy, health care and the environment. But during the two-block morning walk, and later in local television interviews, he also was confronted with questions about his personal life from interrogators such as Bill Gibson.

“What did you mean, you didn’t inhale?” asked Gibson, a 42-year-old industrial engineer, as Clinton reached through the crowd to clasp his hand. Gibson was referring to Clinton’s statement in the days before New York’s April 7 primary that he had tried marijuana during his college days, but had not inhaled the smoke.

“I’d never smoked cigarettes,” said Clinton, who kept a broad smile on his face. “I didn’t know how.”

In the TV interviews, Clinton addressed the character issue in a way that suggests he intends to forcefully present his side of it, even as he tries to move his campaign toward the high road of policy discussion.

During one interview, Clinton steered the conversation to a discussion of the nickname he has made clear he detests: “Slick Willie.”

He said, “It bothers me a lot . . . this image in the community that I’m slick--not straightforward and candid with people.”

But, he added later, “I guess if you’re going to have something tied around your neck, it’s better that it be a bogus charge, rather than a true one.”

Clinton spent part of Saturday afternoon at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium watching a baseball game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies. Asked when he arrived which he favored between the state’s two competing teams, Clinton diplomatically replied: “Pennsylvania.”

In Philadelphia, Brown met privately with the city’s former mayor, W. Wilson Goode, and other black political and church leaders. Goode later praised Brown for having ideas that he termed “very, very refreshing.” But he offered no endorsement of him.

Brown aides say that despite Clinton’s record of consistently winning the lion’s share of black votes in other primary states, they remain confident that their candidate can make inroads among blacks in Pennsylvania.

“It’s not so much that blacks favor Clinton, it’s that they don’t know Jerry,” said Mike Bourbeau, Brown’s Pennsylvania campaign manager.

As a result, Bourbeau said, Brown’s campaign is striving to inform blacks about the candidate’s record of appointing large numbers of minorities to judgeships and other important state jobs during his two terms as California’s governor.

Sheilah Vance-Lewis, a politically active black lawyer in Philadelphia who was among those meeting with Brown on Saturday, said he has the potential to appeal to blacks because he “really has a feel for people’s suffering.”

She also said that because of the discrimination that has been directed at blacks, they are “very open to someone who might be cast as an underdog.”

After talking with Goode and other local leaders at the offices of a black church, Brown dropped in briefly on the wedding reception for Denise and Andre Lowe, a black couple from New York who were among his supporters in that state’s primary earlier this month.

They invited him to their wedding party in Philadelphia, the bride’s hometown, and Brown arrived with a flourish.

“Denise and Andre, congratulations! The whole world is looking at you!” Brown shouted as TV camera crews trailing him turned their lights on the Lowes and their surprised guests.