Clinton’s Image Rating Improves After Picking Gore : Politics: Public now views the Arkansas governor more favorably than Perot or Bush, a new poll finds.

Bill Clinton’s personal image, helped in part by the selection of Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee as his running mate, has improved dramatically and the public now views him more favorably than either independent Ross Perot or President Bush, according to a new Times Mirror poll released Friday.

The nationwide survey, conducted on Wednesday and Thursday evening, shows the Arkansas governor with a 59% favorable rating and a 34% unfavorable rating. That compares to ratios of 48% to 35% for Perot, whose own image has been battered by Bush campaign attacks and recent press disclosures, and 45% to 52% for Bush, whose negative ratings rose several points despite foreign travel, which normally gives a President’s popularity at least a temporary boost.

Clinton’s public image has improved in all parts of the nation and among all demographic groups, but his positive ratings have shown the greatest increases among whites and people under 50.

Forty percent of the respondents called Gore an excellent or good choice as Clinton’s running mate, while 22% rated him only fair and 5% poor. Thirty-three percent were undecided.

Clinton seemed to get a boost from Gore’s selection. On Wednesday, before the Tennessee senator had joined the ticket, Clinton’s ratings were 57% favorable and 37% unfavorable. The next evening, after the Gore announcement, Clinton’s ratio improved to 63% to 30%--leading to an overall rating of 59% to 34%.

Vice President Dan Quayle, who has earned high marks from the Republican right wing for his recent high-profile campaign on “family values,” remained extraordinarily unpopular with ratings of 64% unfavorable and only 29% favorable. In contrast, Gore was rated favorably by 47% and unfavorably by 19%. In the South, Gore’s ratings were 59% and 15%; outside the South, they were 42% and 20%.

The poll of 1,053 voting-age citizens, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, was conducted by the Times Mirror Center for People and the Press, which is intended to track Americans’ response to the news. Times Mirror Co. owns the Los Angeles Times and several other newspapers.

The poll showed that 32% of the respondents approved of Bush’s handling of his job, while 56% disapproved, a ratio virtually unchanged since a June Times Mirror survey.

With Perot making numerous television appearances and coming under increasing press scrutiny and Republican attack, 47% of the poll’s respondents said they had heard more in the media about him in “the last week or so” than about either Clinton or Bush. Thirty percent had heard more about Clinton. Only 11% said they had heard more about Bush, despite news reports of his visit to Munich, Germany, to attend an economic summit of seven industrialized nations.

As Perot has become better known in the last month, his favorable rating has improved from 43% to 48%, according to Times Mirror polls, but his unfavorable rating has increased even more--from 26% to 35%.

The latest survey is especially good news for Clinton, whose chief mission in recent weeks has been to repair his badly tarnished image before next week’s Democratic convention in New York.

The latest poll marks the first time in more than four months that Clinton’s negative rating has dropped below 40%. Some analysts had suggested that the governor’s reputation had been so severely damaged by a continuing series of negative news reports about his personal and professional conduct that it might permanently cripple his candidacy.

Campaign strategists still see the character issue as a major problem for Clinton, and they view the convention as an important forum for him to neutralize the issue, establish a favorable image and perhaps surge into a lead in national polls that recently have shown him in a virtual dead heat with Bush and Perot.

While taking the lead might energize the Clinton campaign, it also undoubtedly will spark attacks from Bush campaign aides, who have made it clear they still consider character a dominant issue but have been so busy recently trying to undermine Perot and answer his charges against Bush that they have paid relatively little attention to Clinton.

Clinton aides say the governor’s recent announcement of a program to attack the nation’s economic problems has helped his image and could well neutralize the character issue, but they fully expect the Bush campaign to revive it.