California, 5 Other States Go to Clinton : Campaign: Bush continues his unbroken string of victories. But polls indicate major-party candidates are again overshadowed by Perot.

Months of arduous and aggressive political struggle ended Tuesday when Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton clinched the Democratic presidential nomination with primary victories in California and five other states.

In California, Clinton rushed to an early lead over his last lingering competitor for the nomination, former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., and he held on to it as ballots were counted throughout the night. With 85% of the vote counted, Clinton led Brown 47.7% to 40%. Former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, who suspended his campaign two months ago, had 7.4%.

Besides California, Clinton racked up victories over Brown in New Jersey, Ohio, Montana, Alabama and New Mexico, grabbing hundreds more than the 86 delegates he had needed to ensure a first-ballot nomination at July’s Democratic National Convention in New York.

Among Republicans, President Bush kept alive his unbroken string of primary victories by defeating conservative challenger Patrick J. Buchanan in all six states. The results were anticlimactic, since the President had secured the GOP nomination six weeks ago, long after Buchanan had conceded his ultimate defeat. With 83.9% of the GOP vote tallied in California, Bush was ahead 73.7% to 26.3%.

Despite their sweeping victories, Clinton and Bush were once again overshadowed by strong support for probable independent candidate Ross Perot, as indicated in exit polls of voters in the primary states.

Perot was not on the ballot in any of the six states. In California, Secretary of State March Fong Eu said any write-in ballots cast for Perot would not be counted, since the maverick Texas businessman had not qualified as a legitimate write-in candidate.

Unofficially, exit polls determined that about 10% of Californians actually wrote in Perot’s name, with a slightly higher percentage of Republicans doing so.

But a stronger measure of the interest his potential candidacy has sparked came when California voters were asked what they would have done had Perot been on the ballot: The Los Angeles Times exit poll determined that Perot would have won both primaries.

His strength held up elsewhere--more than one in three voters in Tuesday’s other primaries would have voted for Perot had he been on the ballot, exit polls taken for the four major television networks concluded.

All told, the states voting Tuesday allotted 700 Democratic delegates, almost one-third of the 2,145 needed for nomination, and Clinton was poised to collect at least 458 of them. In California alone, Clinton was in line to win 197 of the 348 delegates.

His victories outside California were convincing. In New Jersey and Ohio, two traditional general election battlegrounds, Clinton won 59% and 61% of the vote, respectively. In Alabama, the state closest to his native Arkansas, he won 68% of the vote.

In the West, Clinton was doing less well--he received 47% in Montana, where 24% of the voters declared themselves uncommitted, and 53% in New Mexico. Brown’s tallies ranged from 7% in Alabama to 19% in Ohio.

On the Republican side, Bush was replicating the easy victories that have come his way since Buchanan’s challenge lost its steam. He won 83% of the vote in Ohio and New Jersey, and 75% in Alabama. In Montana, the President was the pick of 72% of the voters. He won 64% in New Mexico, where the day’s largest anti-Bush protest materialized when 27% voted for uncommitted.

With the close of the last major primary day, Clinton, once a national unknown, proved to have bested a field that at one time included two current U.S. senators, one former senator and a former governor of the nation’s largest state.

Buoyant, his voice cracking into hoarseness at times, Clinton accepted the nomination with relief and the promise that he would carry the standard for the less fortunate.

“For too long, Washington has rigged our system for the benefit of the few, the quick buck, the gimmick and the short run,” he declared to the cheers of hundreds gathered at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. “We have tried it that way and now we have to change.

“I am tired of seeing the people who work hard and play by the rules get the shaft. And tonight, with this delegate count, we want to put the forces of the status quo and short-term greed on notice--the party’s over. We’re in for a change. We want our country back.”

The man to whom Clinton in part directed his remarks--President Bush--also tried to make the case that he is the best candidate for change.

“As November approaches, I believe there will be two questions foremost in the minds of American voters,” the President said in a statement released by the White House. “Who has the best ideas for America? Who do you trust to lead this country?

“This November,” he said, in a gibe at his perennial foes in Congress, “we can break the Washington lawmaking gridlock and set a new course for the next American century.”

Perot, the man who has sent spasms of fear through the political organizations of the two major-party candidates even as he has entranced voters across the country, entered the fray himself with remarks delivered via satellite to local television stations in California.

The Texas businessman said voters were most concerned about “keeping the American dream alive for the next generation.”

“The people feel they have a government that comes at them,” he told KABC-TV in Los Angeles. “They want a government that comes from them. That’s what this effort is all about.”

Indirectly answering criticisms by political strategists for Clinton and Bush that his support will ebb as he gets better known, Perot said people “seem to know a great deal about me.”

“I’m not exactly a stranger to the ordinary citizen,” he said, recounting with his now-familiar twang the books, articles and a television miniseries that have detailed his life and business dealings.

While the election results and the exit surveys appeared to herald an aggressive three-way battle for the presidency, the emotions of the vanquished candidates on Tuesday night suggested that Bush and Clinton have their work cut out if they are to unify their own parties. Brown and Buchanan, the lone holdouts, pledged to make a fuss leading up to the Democratic convention and the Republican gathering in Houston.

“We’ve done what the experts said was impossible,” said Brown, referring to the tight contest in California. He said his campaign was “a miracle, a revolution, and it’s going to challenge the leadership of the Democratic Party to get back to the roots.”

Earlier, in an interview with CNN, Brown refused to give up hope that the upcoming convention could provide some surprises to nominee Clinton.

“Keep your powder dry; this is going to be an exciting creative convention,” said Brown, who has pledged to keep his much-maligned “We the People” movement intact for future elections.

Although Brown was in no mood to praise Clinton, grudging acceptance of the Arkansas governor’s success came from another former candidate who had withheld his support until Tuesday night. After Clinton’s nomination became a fact, Tsongas acknowledged that he would support Clinton.

Buchanan gathered 4,000 supporters during a sentimental return to New Hampshire, where his campaign had hit its apex. And he sounded much the same as he did last Feb. 18, when he pulled 37% of the vote against Bush and made legitimate this year’s protest movement.

“We go to Houston, my friends, not to swear fealty to King George. We go to Houston to tell them that the little rebellion that started here has turned into a revolution,” Buchanan said.

“New Hampshire was our beginning. Houston is not the end,” said Buchanan, who is pondering a 1996 bid for the Republican nomination.

Technically, there is one primary left--in North Dakota next Tuesday, where 17 GOP delegates are at stake and where Democrats will conduct a non-binding “beauty contest.” The party’s delegates were selected through a caucus process.

But, for all but the purists, the primary season ended Tuesday. Clinton and Bush were hoping to finish it with sweeping victories that would brush aside gnawing concerns about the future strength of their candidacies.

Even that simple wish, however, was held captive to Perot, who has emerged as the most powerful presence on the current political scene despite not having appeared on a single ballot.

Surveys in many of the major electoral states--including California--had shown even before the primary that Perot had gathered support unprecedented for an independent candidate, even in his case an unannounced independent candidate. And the exit polls taken Tuesday served to bolster that perception.

In Ohio, for example, surveys taken for the four television networks showed that Perot was favored by 46% of Democrats to Clinton’s 34%. Among Republicans, 59% said they would vote for Bush and 33% sided with Perot.

Indicating the seriousness with which he greets the probable Perot challenge, Clinton took aim at Perot and Bush equally in his primary night remarks.

“I got one opponent who says he’ll do whatever it takes to hold onto the White House,” said Clinton, drawing boos from the hundreds of his supporters. “Then there’s another person running who says he’ll spend whatever it takes to get the White House.”

Although Perot’s surge in popularity may have dampened the celebrations by Bush and Clinton, the two veteran politicians could exult in having survived the tumult of the first half of the campaign year.

For Clinton, victory was hard-won, coming after a struggle that he survived on the strength of personal resiliency and a never-say-die campaign organization. His campaign came close to ending in the snows of New Hampshire when he was buffeted by allegations of womanizing and of evading the draft during the Vietnam War.

Just days before the Feb. 18 primary, with his presidential dream on the verge of collapse, Clinton fought back. He pressed his message during 30-minute televised sessions with New Hampshire voters, flooded the state with surrogates, pleaded with voters day and night--and managed to finish second to Tsongas, declaring himself “the Comeback Kid.”

The campaign moved to the South, where Clinton’s organization and cultural affinity tripped up Tsongas in a vitriolic clash in Florida, widely viewed as a bellwether state for the former senator, and in a host of Southern states.

Two candidates--Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin and Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey--fell out of the race. Tsongas stuck it out long enough to endure crushing defeats in Michigan and Illinois on March 17. Two days later, dispirited and broke, Tsongas announced that he was suspending his campaign.

Brown’s Connecticut victory in late March raised new doubts about Clinton, however, and set up New York’s April 7 primary as the crucial showdown between the two. When Clinton emerged from the predictably brutal campaign there as the victor, Brown’s hopes of derailing him were doomed.

Although he has won the nomination, Clinton continues to struggle to frame a general election message sufficient to take on both Bush and the increasingly prominent Perot. He is hoping that, with the end of the primaries, voters will start to home in on his message.

“The primary season is winding to a close, and all the American people will begin to focus on this election,” he said recently. “It won’t be just something that’s going on in other states that grabs intermittent attention.”

Democrats and Republicans alike are girding for a general election campaign played out in very different form than either Clinton or Bush could have predicted when their campaigns began. And the full ramifications of Perot’s probable entrance have yet to be fully understood by strategists for either of the two major political parties.

For Clinton, there is an added complication--he closes the primary season in debt, having far exceeded his fund raising with the expenditures needed to win the nomination.

That problem aside, there is the overarching problem of voter disenchantment with traditional politicians.

“We’re going to have to fight cynicism,” Clinton said. “We’re going to have to fight people who are justifiably angry but aren’t quite sure how to manifest that anger yet. Some may not vote; some may not think they should vote for anybody associated with any political party.”

For Bush, much the same challenge exists, despite his success in beating back a challenge from the right wing of his party, personified by former television commentator Buchanan.

Even since he clinched his renomination in late April, the President has been beset by criticism that his campaign organization is in disarray and by voter perceptions that he is out of touch with the concerns of everyday Americans.