ELECTIONS ’92 : Clinton Peppers California Voters With Calls for Unity : Politics: The presumptive Democratic nominee attacks Bush as he travels across the state. He virtually ignores Brown’s candidacy.

Ignoring his last remaining rival and seeking to consolidate a still-divided party, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton wound up eight months of campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination Monday by criticizing President Bush and calling for unity.

“Most politicians in America today try to find ways of dividing us,” Clinton told a rally in Oakland. “I will never, never divide this country.

“I want you to know I am a pro-growth, pro-business and pro-labor, pro-education, pro-health care, pro-environment, pro-family, pro-choice Democrat,” he said.

Later, at an outdoor rally at UCLA, Clinton refined that point, telling an enthusiastic audience of several thousand people that the nation must reject “false choices” between growth and the environment, between family values and freedom of choice.

Still, some within his own party--particularly liberal activists--would say that Clinton’s litany of things he supports illustrates what they dislike about the candidate, a man whose desire for compromise has always struck his opponents as a lack of strong principles.

To Clinton’s supporters, by contrast, his desire to heal--and his ability to form a coalition of disparate groups--provides his greatest strength both as a candidate and as a potential President.

At least so far, that coalition-building has served Clinton well. His aides feel reasonably confident of winning California’s primary today--the result predicted by the latest published poll--and have no doubt of clinching the Democratic nomination in any case.

With 2,059 delegates already pledged to him, Clinton needs to win only 86 of the 700 delegates at stake in the six states voting today to have a first-ballot victory at next month’s Democratic convention in New York. When the polls close today, he will effectively have won the prize he has pursued through months of tribulations, a time when his political obituary was published on several occasions.

On Monday, with the nomination struggle almost over, Clinton campaigned for the general election. Flying from Los Angeles to Fresno to the small Central Valley town of Kerman to Oakland then back to Los Angeles, he sought to introduce himself to voters in a state crucial to his candidacy in the fall.

Although polls indicate that Clinton lags behind presumed independent candidate Ross Perot and Bush, voters who came to hear him seemed, if not uniformly enthusiastic, at least willing to hear him out. In Kerman, for example, Tom Rudolph said, “Right now, I guess I’m on the Perot bandwagon.” But he added that he needs far more information about Perot before he can be sure. And if Perot falters in his mind, Rudolph said, Clinton probably would get his vote.

“I voted for Bush last time, and I certainly won’t again,” said another voter, a woman who did not give her name. “I’m ready to take a risk,” she said, explaining why she planned to vote for Clinton. Asked about Perot, she smiled. “I’m ready to take a risk, but not that big a risk,” she said.

As he flew about the state, Clinton sought during the day to emphasize an issue that may be crucial for many undecided voters--the environment.

“In 10 days, George Bush will be flying down to Rio” for the signing of an international treaty on global warming, Clinton reminded his UCLA audience.

There, Clinton said, the President will be “going to do something he really worked hard on for a change.”

“He worked hard to gut it.”

Because of Administration opposition to stronger provisions, Clinton said, the final agreement will be “a watered-down treaty that’s hardly worth the trees that were cut down for the paper to make the treaty to be signed.”

Bush has refused to sign one treaty on wildlife conservation, and agreed to sign one on global warming only when its limits on emissions of ozone-destroying chemicals were made voluntary.

Bush’s position on the environment was a “terrible mistake,” Clinton said in Oakland. “There is no inherent conflict anymore between preserving our environment and a strong economy.” He argued that efforts to improve the environment will create new investments and new jobs.

Earlier in the day, in Fresno, Clinton defended the federal Endangered Species Act, which many Bush Administration officials would like to rewrite. “I don’t think that’s what we need,” Clinton said. In fact, one of the reasons Bush gave for refusing to sign the wildlife treaty was that it could require the United States to strengthen the Endangered Species Act.

Monday’s flying tour of California came as something of an exception in a week in which Clinton has followed a notably relaxed path, particularly when compared with his usual non-stop campaign mode. He has held relatively few public events, visited with friends, even taken a long walk along Santa Monica’s beachfront as aides have tried to provide him with some unaccustomed rest before the battle to come.

Clinton has been able to follow a schedule of that sort in part because the Perot candidacy has, for now, stolen most of the media attention away from his activities, leaving little reason for intensive campaigning. Clinton has also been able to relax because the result of the overall primary contest has long since become a foregone conclusion.

Even in California, where ex-Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. and his family have been dominant political figures for more than a generation, polls have shown Clinton with a small but steady lead over his sole remaining major Democratic opponent. In the latest California Poll, released Monday, Clinton led Brown, 35% to 28%, roughly the same margin he held in both a Los Angeles Times Poll and a California Poll taken earlier in May. The margin of error in the latest poll is plus or minus 5 percentage points--meaning, theoretically, that Clinton’s lead may not exist.

Clinton mentioned Brown only once during the course of the day, at UCLA, where he referred to him not as an opponent, but as “my co-contender,” quoting a quip Brown had made at the expense of Vice President Dan Quayle.