A CITY IN CRISIS: HOPE AND PRAYER AMID THE ASHES : Clinton to Press His Message of Rebuilding : Campaign: The Arkansas governor arrives in Los Angeles and begins meeting with community leaders.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday night to press his call for national reconciliation in a series of meetings with community leaders reeling from last week’s violent eruption of racial hostility.

Clinton met privately late Sunday night with the Rev. Cecil (Chip) Murray and other community leaders at Murray’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church. “I listened for two hours and I learned a lot,” Clinton said on leaving the event.

Today, Clinton plans to confer with elected officials--including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and Councilman Michael Woo--and neighborhood organizations in the Korean, Latino and African-American communities, including the United Neighborhoods Organization and the South-Central Organizing Committee.

Clinton’s itinerary highlights the central theme of his message since the violence in Los Angeles erupted last Wednesday after the not guilty verdicts in the beating of Rodney G. King: that rebuilding community institutions is as integral to inner-city revival as new government programs.

Speaking with reporters Sunday morning in Washington, Clinton said he intends to talk with the Los Angeles community leaders about “what we can be taking out of this crisis that really makes a clear difference, not only for the people in their community, but for the people of the United States.”

Clinton said he hopes his visit will focus attention on the work that community groups have done to combat crime and poverty in depressed inner-city neighborhoods. “I want the American people to know about these people so they will be more willing to help them to rebuild our cities,” he said.

Clinton’s visit to Los Angeles dramatically illustrates the extent to which the verdicts in the King case and the subsequent violence have pushed aside all other issues in the presidential campaign. From the start of his campaign, Clinton has urged Americans to reach across racial barriers, but since the violence broke out, he has talked about virtually nothing else.

Clinton aides acknowledged concern Sunday that the White House might accuse the Arkansas governor of attempting to politicize the crisis by visiting Los Angeles. But “if that’s the worst that can happen he felt he should go anyway, because we think this is what the President should do,” said deputy campaign manager George Stephanopoulos.

In fact, later in the day, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp charged Clinton with reaching “a new low” in politics by trying to exploit the situation for “his self-perceived political advantage.”

Kemp complained that, although Clinton initially praised Bush’s leadership in dispatching troops, he “stooped to partisan demagoguery” on Saturday by “accusing President Bush and the Republican Party of helping cause the riots” through neglect.

Kemp asserted that, contrary to Clinton’s contentions, Bush’s fiscal year 1993 budget contains proposals for more spending for “radical anti-poverty programs, not less,” including $1.09 billion for programs to end homelessness, up 80% from $603 million in 1989.

Before he left for Los Angeles, Clinton told a labor audience in Washington that as President he would move aggressively to expand opportunities for the poor--but also stressed the limits to how much government alone can accomplish.

“I want to . . . build an industrial strategy to rebuild the manufacturing base, to educate our children, to solve our health-care problems,” he said. “But unless we can also bring America together again, unless people of different races can learn to look each other in the eye and tell the truth . . . and unless we can reclaim our children family by family and our streets block by block, it is going to be very difficult for any President to succeed.”

Clinton said society must reach out to “all those people who are profoundly disconnected from us” in the inner city and give them “a chance to come home again, to a real and meaningful life.” But, he added, “if there is one thing I’ve learned in public life in over a decade, it is you certainly can’t do anything for anybody they won’t do for themselves.”

The Arkansas governor spoke at two black churches in Washington on Sunday, the day he had urged all Americans to treat as a national day o prayer and racial reconciliation. But his words for President Bush outside one church were among his harshest yet.

Clinton said that although the Los Angeles riot was not entirely the “government’s fault,” it did reflect “more than a decade of denial of responsibility and manipulation of political symbols without doing anything to change people’s lives.”