Clinton’s New Emphasis Touts Record as Governor : Politics: Democrat denounces Bush over education issue, scores Perot for lack of specifics.

Democrat Bill Clinton criticized President Bush on Thursday for paying only lip service to education, and Ross Perot for failing to back up his talk of change with specifics about what he would do if elected President.

After several weeks of seeming to hesitate in how to handle the twin challenges of Bush and Perot, both of whom lead him in some polls, Clinton appears to have settled on an approach that leans heavily on his record to portray himself as the one candidate in the general election who has backed up words with deeds.

“There are three people running. There’s only one person who has demonstrated a 10-year commitment” to solving the nation’s problems, Clinton said in a morning radio interview as he launched a week of campaigning in California.

Later, in a speech at the Children’s Discovery Museum here, Clinton blasted Bush for urging children to read more while cutting funds for reading programs. Bush’s approach, he says, is, “Read more, but I’m going to make it harder for you to do it.

“If we had a President who put his money and his action and his heart and his work where his mouth is, more people would follow his example,” Clinton said.

Clinton timed the speech to coincide with Thursday’s release of a federal report showing that reading scores for American children remain low. Clinton aides distributed fact sheets designed to show that Bush had “failed as the education President.”

Even as he warned that the country cannot afford another four years of GOP rule, Clinton offered some of his most direct criticism to date of his other rival for the presidency, the undeclared independent candidate, Perot.

“There’s something else we don’t need four more years of either, which is talk that sounds good but has no plan of action to back it up,” he said. Although he did not mention Perot by name, he left no doubt about the target of his remarks.

In all three of his public statements during the day--radio interviews with stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco and the speech here--Clinton emphasized his record of a decade as governor working on economic development, education and social welfare issues. He portrayed Bush as a President who has failed to deliver on his promises and Perot as a pseudo-outsider who offers strong talk about action, but no record on the issues facing the country.

At the same time, Clinton sought to borrow some of Perot’s thunder by portraying himself as the real outsider in the race and acknowledging voters’ anger at the political system.

“I think winning a party’s primary is a disadvantage in this day and age because when people read or see the coverage, all they see is politics, and voters hate politics,” Clinton said in his interview with KABC talk-show host Michael Jackson in Los Angeles.

Perot “never ran in the primaries,” he added. “He can say, ‘I hate politics. I’m not part of any of this.’ Most of what he says is stuff I’ve been saying for seven months about things I’ve been doing, not just talking about, for 10 years.

“I’m not a good sound-bite politician,” Clinton insisted somewhat improbably, in explaining why he has had trouble getting his ideas across to voters.

Attacking Bush on education, Clinton noted that the President has repeatedly promised to fully fund Head Start but that “we still have fewer than 40% of our kids who are eligible for Head Start in the program.” In addition, Clinton charged, Bush has cut funds for adult literacy programs despite the Administration’s pledge to ensure that all Americans can read by the year 2000.

Bush’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year would eliminate several adult literacy programs, the Clinton campaign noted. In addition, the budget would “cut about 400,000 students from Pell grants,” the chief federal aid program for college students.

Clinton has made education the hallmark of his five terms as governor of Arkansas, increasing state spending on schools and student aid programs and making a number of reforms that have drawn considerable praise from outside education experts. During Clinton’s years as governor, the percentage of Arkansas high school students attending college has risen to the national average for the first time. But the state continues to rank near the bottom on many measures of student achievement.

Clinton all but ignored his remaining rival in the Tuesday primary, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. Clinton solidified his support from the Democratic Party Establishment in the state Thursday, winning endorsement from Phil Angelides, who succeeded Brown as state party chairman.

He has also received endorsements from Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and the Democratic mayors of San Francisco and San Jose, among others.

But as he seeks to shift the campaign debate onto issues on which he feels he has an advantage, Clinton continues to have to answer questions on the character issues that have dogged him all year. In an interview with David Frost taped Wednesday and scheduled to be aired today for example, Clinton conceded the obvious--that he had been “dumb as a post” in trying to evade questions about whether he had smoked marijuana in his student days.

Clinton insisted, however, that the response did not reflect any fundamental lack of integrity.