Political Leaders’ Analysis of Crisis Varies : Elections: Democrats are expected to blame rampage on GOP neglect of cities. But persisting anarchy could help conservative, law-and-order Republicans win support.

Televised scenes of Los Angeles burning confronted national leaders Thursday once more with the nation’s rawest wound--racial division.

President Bush issued a series of statements appealing for calm and condemning violence, with only scant mention of the verdicts. And although he delayed his departure from Washington to issue a televised statement appealing for calm, he stuck to his schedule for a speech and a political fund-raiser in Ohio Thursday.

“We simply cannot condone violence as a way of changing the system,” Bush said in his speech.

“Mob brutality, the total loss of respect for human life was sickeningly sad,” Bush said, adding that he would “make no apology for the rule of law or the requirement to live by it.

“I call on every American to show restraint and to respect people’s rights and property,” Bush said later to applause at the $1,000 a plate fund-raising dinner.

In response to questions about why the President avoided direct comment on the verdict, a senior Bush aide insisted the President really had been surprised by the outcome but felt he could not say so publicly for fear of “stirring up emotions.”

Although Bush condemned bigotry and briefly remarked on sharing the “frustration and anguish” about the verdict, his chief spokesman insisted that Bush’s remarks should not be interpreted as criticism of the jury’s decision.

Bill Clinton, Bush’s likely Democratic opponent, began the day sharply criticizing the King verdicts but saying little about the rioting. By day’s end, he was continuing to criticize the jury’s decision, saying “most of us who have seen the film don’t understand the verdict,” but in increasingly strong language, he denounced the street violence.

“The verdict in the King case is not an excuse,” he said in a speech in Birmingham, Ala. “The abandonment of the poor in our cities cannot be avenged” by “savage behavior” and “lawless vandals.”

Clinton appealed to the people of Los Angeles “no matter how angry you are” to “stop the violence and stop it now.”

Former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. cut short a campaign day in Nebraska to fly back to Los Angeles, where he tried to focus attention on social problems. “People are desperate for jobs and there are no career ladders for many of them,” Brown told reporters.

Ross Perot, the potential independent candidate, issued a statement from his headquarters in Dallas saying he was “disappointed” by the verdicts and calling the rioting “a tragedy because it further divides and weakens our country.”

Only conservative Republican Patrick J. Buchanan seemed to find the day’s events easy to respond to. The verdicts were “decided in a fair trial by a conscientious jury,” Buchanan said as he campaigned in North Carolina. The rioting, he added, was “inexcusable and indefensible.”

The eventual political impact of the riots will depend in large part on how long they continue, several analysts suggested.

If the riots end quickly, Democrats could portray them as the natural and inevitable consequence of what they will describe as Republican inattention to the problems of the nation’s cities.

In addition, if outrage over the verdicts spurs turnout among blacks, Democrats could benefit in the same way that female candidates seem to have benefited from outrage over last fall’s Senate interrogation of law professor Anita Hill, suggested University of South Carolina political scientist Earl Black.

But the longer the rioting goes on, Black said, the more likely it is to “create the possibility of something similar to what Richard Nixon was able to do in 1968--running as the law and order candidate” against a background of urban violence.

Times Staff Writers Douglas Jehl in Colombus, Ohio, Ronald Brownstein in Birmingham, Ala., William Eaton in North Carolina, Robert L. Jackson in Los Angeles and Robert Shogan in New Orleans contributed to this story.