Clinton Assails Administration on ‘Family Values’ : Campaign: Arkansas governor, in Mother’s Day speeches in San Francisco, denounces the Bush commitment to the politically charged issue.

Using as his backdrop a day celebrating women, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton made a frontal assault Sunday on the Bush Administration’s commitment to “family values,” the politically loaded issue co-opted by Republicans in recent elections.

In a strongly worded condemnation delivered on Mother’s Day in two churches here, Clinton suggested that President Bush and his followers cared only for the image of the family, not the realities facing Americans in crisis.

“We’ve been governed by an Administration that says it wants to run for reelection on family values,” he told several hundred people at the Third Baptist Church.

“What is the most important work of a nation? Raising and educating children. And we have devalued it and debased it.”

Earlier, at nearby Glide Memorial Methodist Church, Clinton had opened his attack on Bush without ever mentioning the President by name.

“For all the talk of family values by those who have governed this country for 20 of the last 24 years, we don’t do anything like we should in the rearing and educating of children,” he said.

“All the people who thump their convictions and religion and pretend to be so righteous, where are they when the family values can’t be found on the streets of this country? When there is no health care for pregnant women?

“When too many children are born with low birth weights? . . . Where are they?”

“Family values,” an umbrella moniker, was used in 1988 by Bush to separate himself from Democrat Michael S. Dukakis, and surveys showed that it helped Bush convert some conservative Democrats to his side. Although the term is rarely defined, Bush has used it to indicate his support for the traditional family, for child care, for religious beliefs.

The remarks Sunday were Clinton’s strongest effort yet to pull the issue away from Bush, and they came on a day when Clinton was surrounded by women in corsages and with visions of a multiethnic California.

Clinton visited two churches, one the oldest black Baptist congregation in the West and the second a racially mixed church in San Francisco’s troubled Tenderloin district. He campaigned with California Secretary of State March Fong Eu, and he met privately with Latino leaders and delivered a short speech at a belated Cinco de Mayo celebration.

Afterwards, Clinton flew to Omaha for a rally and then headed home to Little Rock.

Mindful of the day, the Arkansas governor paid tribute to his own mother, Virginia Kelley, who was widowed months before Clinton was born. She later remarried, had another son, Roger Clinton, and was widowed three times.

“She gave us a mother’s love, unconditional love, and discipline and values and the sense that we were the most important persons in the world to somebody,” declared Clinton, who said he was “asking for a chance to bring a mother’s love back to this country.”

And Clinton, laden with emotion, contrasted his own mother with the grieving mother of a 13-year-old boy killed last week in Washington by a stray bullet as he was returning from church services.

“In the tale of those two mothers shows the gap between America’s promise and its reality,” he said. “It is an America denying its problems until they can’t be denied and blaming other people instead of embracing the cause of change and in the grip of selfishness that will kill any nation.”

In the closest he came to criticizing Bush--besides the emphasis on family values--Clinton alluded to the chaos that struck Los Angeles last week in the wake of the not guilty verdicts in the trial of four police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney G. King.

Clinton all but suggested that the private greed made evident by looters in the riot’s first days was the result of the economic standards set by the nation’s leaders.

“Oh, to be sure, it was heartbreaking to see some little children going into the stores in Los Angeles and stealing from their neighbors,” he said. “But they live in a country where the top 1% of Americans have more wealth than the bottom 90%.”

Later, at the Third Baptist Church, he added that he condemned the violence that struck Los Angeles, “but I grieve for the causes that led to that destruction.”