Cities’ Ills Affect All, Clinton Says in O.C. : Campaign: Democratic candidate stresses unity during a speech to audience at Western Digital in Irvine.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton traveled to the Republican stronghold of Orange County on Friday and warned that suburban residents cannot ignore the problems of American cities.

Clinton has made several trips in recent months to GOP-leaning areas in hopes that the nation’s continuing economic problems might make suburban voters more receptive to his Democratic message.

The setting also allows Clinton to showcase a central theme of his campaign: that President Bush and the Republican Party have tried to divide Americans along lines of race and class, while he will try to unify the country.

“They ask me every time I come down here, ‘What’s that fool Democrat going to Orange County for?’ ” Clinton said. “I’ll tell you why: This is not about Republicans or Democrats, it’s about America being true to the American dream,” he told his audience at Western Digital Corp.

The company is run by Roger Johnson, a major Republican fund-raiser who gained national attention last December when he made critical remarks about Bush’s presidency and co-hosted a fund-raiser for Clinton.

“Look at Los Angeles County,” Clinton told his listeners. “When it doesn’t work up there, you pay,” he said, referring to riots that racked the Los Angeles area a month ago.

Clinton argued that the country as a whole is being dragged down by the high crime rates, poor education and despair bred by urban poverty.

“You pay when California builds more penitentiaries and has to explode the cost of college tuition,” or when people end up on the welfare rolls, he said. “Don’t mistake it, we all pay.”

Clinton played several variations on the theme of division during the course of the day. At a speech Friday morning in Sacramento, he accused Bush of seeking to divide the country on the emotional issue of abortion, citing the President’s threat to veto a bill providing money for the National Institutes of Health because it would allow fetal tissue to be used in medical research.

Also in Sacramento, he accused likely independent presidential candidate Ross Perot of divisiveness on issues of sexual orientation and conduct.

Clinton expressed strong disagreement with Perot’s statement--made in a television interview broadcast Friday night--that he would exclude homosexuals from top-level government posts and adulterers from any jobs in his White House Administration.

“I think we ought to use the most able people we can get in government, and I don’t think we ought to discriminate against people’s service.

“I don’t know how (Perot) is going to know about private behavior of married people who work for him,” Clinton added, asking if Perot planned to have “his own inspection force, or something like that.”

Perot sought Friday to explain away his remark, saying he did not want to pry into private behavior but would try to avoid appointing homosexuals to high office to protect them from having to undergo potentially difficult confirmation hearings.

During Clinton’s Orange County speech, the setting illustrated his theme of a divided America. On one side of the street, Clinton addressed an audience of highly trained white-collar workers in the plaza of Western Digital’s gleaming granite-and-glass office building. Across the way, scores of farm workers stooped in a strawberry field, picking fruit.

While Clinton challenged his listeners to concern themselves with the problems of poverty in Los Angeles, he said nothing about the stark division on display in front of them.

Clinton’s campaign day also was meant to attract attention to the theme of converting defense spending to other purposes, an issue he has tried to use to highlight his argument that the Bush Administration lacks an overall plan for restoring the American economy.

Clinton has called for taking money cut from defense and investing it in civilian high-technology projects, such as building high-speed rail networks. He has also called for expanding education benefits for military personnel to let those who leave the shrinking armed forces receive training in civilian fields.

Clinton hopes those sorts of specific policy proposals, which accounted for much of his early popularity last winter, will help revive his appeal, particularly in contrast to Perot, who has insistently avoided specifics.

Western Digital chief Johnson, for one, has signed on. Clinton, he said, is “the only candidate I know of who for seven or eight months has been saying exactly what he would do” as President.

After Clinton’s Orange County speech, Johnson hosted a fund-raising luncheon for him estimated to have generated $15,000.

Johnson co-hosted the event with Republican Orange County developer Kathryn Thompson, a major contributor to Bush’s 1988 campaign. The two Republicans first hosted Clinton last December at a breakfast event that stirred controversy when some GOP leaders charged the two with mutiny.

In introducing Clinton on Friday, Johnson said he and Thompson felt it was important to provide a forum for a range of ideas to solve the country’s economic problems. “If that’s disloyalty, so be it,” he said.