Clinton’s Anger at News Media Surfaces in Hometown Speech : Campaign: He charges the press and his political enemies have unfairly attacked his record and character. Brown touts national health insurance.

In a sign of lingering bitterness that could interfere with his presidential campaign strategy, Gov. Bill Clinton on Monday lashed out at the press and political enemies he believes have unfairly attacked his record and character.

The front-runner for the Democratic nomination referred to charges that as governor he helped his friends. “People who don’t understand Arkansas, how it works . . . have often criticized me because I get along with people,” he told about a hometown audience of 1,000 campaign contributors at a $100-a-plate fund-raising lunch. “I thought the object of politics was to get things done.”

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Clinton’s rival for the nomination emphasized support for national health insurance and for cleaning up drug-blighted cities. Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. visited a senior citizens center in York, an inner-city neighborhood in Philadelphia, and a college campus in Lancaster, where he got an enthusiastic reception from about 1,000 people.

At the Little Rock fund-raiser, Clinton said that during the campaign “I have proved one thing--I’m not very slick. I often say something I shouldn’t.”

When he does so, he said, the news media skew their coverage to be “just a little bit off-kilter, so that that characterization that they love to make of me can be reinforced one more time.”

Since January, Clinton has had to defend himself against allegations about his character--including that he had extramarital affairs and that he tried to finagle his Vietnam War-era draft status.

Recent polls have found a substantial group of voters who say he is not honest enough to be President.

Campaign aides have insisted that Clinton will put the character questions behind him by changing the focus of the debate. They have said he will concentrate on policy questions--as he did last week in a major economic address in Pennsylvania.

But Monday’s remarks--and a similar episode over the weekend--suggest that Clinton’s anger may make it difficult for him to move on.

Last Saturday, during two interviews with Pittsburgh, Pa., television stations, Clinton lashed out at the press for mistreating him. “We live in a climate where the object of every election is to chew up all the candidates, he said.

Asked about Clinton’s comments Monday, Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s press secretary, said that “generally, we have been moving on” to a discussion of the issues. But she said Clinton used the Little Rock fund-raiser to explain to loyal supporters the reasons for the negative statements they have read about him in recent weeks.

The speech was the equivalent of “sitting around the dinner table at home, where you really get a chance to defend yourself” to other family members, she said.

Clinton also alluded to his political enemies. When he heard recently that one of his childhood homes had been extensively damaged by a fire, he said: “I didn’t know if it was a bipartisan effort or a real accident.”

Clinton suggested that he is being held to an unfair standard. He referred to a prominent Arkansas Republican and longtime Clinton rival, Sheffield Nelson, who was quoted in a Little Rock newspaper Monday as saying that Clinton’s recent state budget cuts suggest that his management of Arkansas was like former Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’ management of that state. Dukakis, the Democrats’ 1988 nominee, was pilloried when his state’s budget crunch coincided with the presidential election.

“You know everybody wants it both ways--they want to attack you for not spending more, and they want to attack you when you won’t run a deficit,” Clinton said. “They want to attack you if you raise taxes for investing in education, and they want to attack you if you underspend in education.”

Brown, meanwhile, vowed that national health insurance would be his “No. 1 priority” if he is elected. Brown advocates a “single-payer” health care system in which doctors, hospitals and insurance companies would be paid through the government or a nonprofit agency.

The reason that Congress has not passed a national health bill, he told 300 people at the York senior citizens center, is that insurance and pharmaceutical companies and other “medical interests” have a “stranglehold” on the health care system because of their extensive political contributions.

And, at a separate appearance before a group of Teamsters, Brown predicted that if billionaire H. Ross Perot decides to run as an independent candidate for President, he will put George Bush back in the White House.

All Perot will do, Brown said, is split the anti-Bush vote. “You’d almost think that Bush invented it,” he said. “ . . . You can pick between two people, divide the votes and Bush wins with 45%.”

Times staff writer Jack Cheevers in Pennsylvania contributed to this story.