Clinton, Bush Step Up Debate on Family Values : Politics: Both focus on the issue in Cleveland speeches. The Arkansas governor accuses the President of not helping troubled families.

The 1992 presidential campaign is threatening to become a family feud--or at least a feud over family.

Speaking at the City Club in Cleveland on Thursday, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton said the strains on family life were at the “core” of the nation’s problems and accused President Bush of failing to back up his rhetoric about traditional values with specific programs to bolster troubled families.

“Of course there’s a values crisis in America,” Clinton said. “But there’s an action gap as well. Addressing one without the other isn’t a plan of action--it’s posturing to distract from inaction.”

The United States, Clinton insisted, “simply cannot go on being the only major nation in the world without a family policy--one that enshrines family values by placing a value on family.”

President Bush, also speaking on the subject Thursday at a Cleveland fund-raiser, said the nation needed to reverse “the demise, the dissolution, the decline of the American family.”

“I know that there are those who are deprived, who are born into almost helpless situations, but there are all kinds of ways that we can help,” he said, adding that his urban aid proposals each “in some way or another, strengthens and does not diminish the American family.”

The two speeches were the latest volley in a suddenly escalating debate. On Tuesday, Vice President Dan Quayle sent the issue into orbit when he blamed a “poverty of values” for the crisis in the inner cities, and accused television programs such as “Murphy Brown” of undermining moral standards.

Clinton, Bush and Quayle all based their addresses on the same doleful numbers: a growing number of single parent families--12% among whites, 45% among blacks--high teen-age pregnancy rates, astronomical levels of divorce.

But they decisively part company on two key questions: what has caused these trends and what, if anything, government can do to reverse them. In their contrasting responses, Clinton, the President and Quayle have demonstrated again that cultural divisions generate more explosive emotions than any other issue in politics.

Even if some found it a bit bizarre, the vice president’s criticism of a fictional character’s pregnancy out of wedlock dramatically crystallized a venerable Republican argument. As the President did in a less colorful speech last weekend at the University of Notre Dame, Quayle pictured the family as under assault from cultural forces largely immune to government action and allegedly hostile to traditional values, from Hollywood producers to rebellious baby boomers.

In his address Thursday, Clinton agreed that family values are “under fire” from the popular culture. “Like any parent, I’m troubled by the gratuitous violence and sex and mixed moral signals on television,” he said.

But he maintained the most pressing threat to family life is economic strain that compels parents to work longer hours and spend less time with their children. Clinton characterized Quayle’s speech as “cynical” because “it ignores the relationship of our family problems to our national economic decline.”

From those divergent diagnoses flow distinct prescriptions. In his Notre Dame speech, Bush mostly exhorted members of the audience to commit themselves to strengthening their family ties. “Government alone is simply not enough,” he said.

His only references to government policy was a passing mention of his proposals to allow parents greater choice in the selection of their children’s schools--and a call for tougher law enforcement. On Thursday, Bush called again for overhauling the nation’s welfare system, though the Administration’s primary role has been to encourage state experiments.

Like the President, Clinton argued Thursday that government alone could not reverse the worrisome trends in American family life. “A President’s words can move a nation,” Clinton said, “but talk must be backed up with action or we risk diminishing the bully pulpit into a pulpit of bull.”

Clinton offered his own action plan, centered on programs he has pushed from the start of his campaign. Among them:

* Raising the earned income tax credit to boost the income of working-poor families;

* Increasing spending on training for welfare recipients and then requiring them to take public service employment after two years on the rolls;

* Establishing a national system of child support payment collection through the Internal Revenue Service and reporting delinquent payments to private credit agencies in an attempt to cut off credit for “deadbeat dads”;

* Passing the legislation vetoed by Bush that would ensure parental leave for pregnancy and the care of sick children;

* Fully funding the Head Start program for disadvantaged children and encouraging parental involvement. President Bush has substantially increased funding for the program, but not as quickly as Democrats have urged.

The surface debate over these individual policies obscures deeper points of conflict. One such divide centers on Republican attempts since the 1960s to paint the Democrats as contemptuous of traditional values, and, especially, as willing to exempt the poor and minorities from reliance on such mores as respect for work and personal responsibility.

“Republicans have beaten Democrats bloody on this issue for more than two decades, by declaring themselves to be the natural leader of the nation in defining and enforcing common values,” says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American values, a New York-based think tank concerned with family issues.

Nothing has been more central to Clinton’s campaign than trying to build bridges over that political fault line. On issues like welfare reform and his support for the death penalty Clinton has tried to express affinity for moderate middle-class values. Since the Los Angeles riot, for example, he has embraced the highly charged view--common to middle-class whites but offensive to many liberals--that a “culture of poverty” among the poor has contributed to the distress of inner cities around America.

But Clinton also has said government cannot demand responsibility from the poor without first offering them greater opportunity--such as training for welfare recipients and tax policies that reward work.

At the same time, he has expressed the traditional Democratic commitment to social tolerance on issues like abortion, which he believes should remain legal. At an emotional rally earlier this week in Los Angeles, he openly appealed for support from gays--and delivered an impassioned plea against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

That blend of liberal and moderate notes has somewhat scrambled the historic lines of debate between the parties on the values agenda. On some questions, Bush and Clinton divide along familiar ideological lines: Bush supports the ban on gays serving in the military while Clinton said again this week he would revoke it.

But Clinton’s proposed work requirement for welfare recipients is more specific than anything the President has proposed. And, unlike many liberals, he joins the President in encouraging states to experiment with a variety of ideas to reduce out-of-wedlock births among welfare recipients--from paying teen-agers not to get pregnant, to denying additional benefits to women who have children while on public relief.

As he tries to define what he calls a “third way” in social policy, Clinton is walking a narrow line. Mindful of the price paid by previous Democratic nominees who seemed estranged from middle-class values, he sought again Thursday to distinguish himself from what he has termed the “stereotypical” liberal view that blames breakdowns in personal behavior-- particularly among the poor--solely on government neglect and economic deprivation.

But in the speech he also repeatedly conveyed a greater commitment to government action on these problems than the Administration. As he strikes that note, says one Republican strategist close to the White House, Clinton risks also conveying an excessive fondness for government intervention--”a kind of Great Society hyperactivity.”

Establishing credibility to speak about family values and responsibility is also a challenge for Clinton--whose public image still bears the scars from his tussles with the tabloids. In a late March Times Mirror survey, voters chose Bush over Clinton by an 8-1 margin when asked which was a good family man.

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl contributed to this story.