Clinton Setting Off for a West Coast Weekend : Democrats: Believing he is a mystery to California and Washington voters, he hopes to define himself.

Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton sets off today for a campaign whirl through the Pacific Northwest and California, where despite the brouhaha of the convention and a much-publicized bus tour across the Midwest he is still something of a mystery to voters.

Clinton acknowledged as much to supporters in Houston on Thursday night.

“For many Americans, I just sort of appeared in their life a day or two ago,” he said. “Not everyone’s known me for 20 years . . . and we’ve got a story to tell.”

The story the Arkansas governor will tell in his weekend visit to California and Washington is twofold: He will try to drive home the details of his life in a small town in the South, and he will attempt to give the Democratic Party a new image in the minds of suburban voters who have gone Republican in recent elections.

The stakes for Clinton are particularly high in California, where Democrats say that Clinton has been presented with a broad opening but has yet to give voters a firm impression of him.

California Democrats want the nominee there as much, and as soon, as possible.

“At the end of the year when they look at their calendar, there had better be more days in California than in any other state,” said Bob Mulholland, the California Democratic Party’s political director.

Clinton comes west in good position. He holds a wide lead in the polls over President Bush, who has never run strongly in the West and has had particular problems getting a handle on California.

The most recent Los Angeles Times Poll had Clinton ahead of Bush 61% to 23% in the five westernmost states of California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii. That was broader than Clinton’s lead nationally of 52% to 32% in the poll, released July 17.

Aides to the Democratic nominee believe that California’s precarious economic state has given Clinton a strong chance to become the first Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 to carry California.

“The disenchantment with George Bush in California is very high,” said Bruce Reed, Clinton’s issues director.

“California is the largest example of what’s gone wrong in the Bush presidency, with a half-million people in the defense industry out of work and a state government having to give out IOUs,” he said.

“With a million and a half people out of work, I think it’s fair to say that George Bush starts with no capital but the residual that comes with being a sitting President,” said Phil Angelides, the state Democratic Party chairman.

According to Democrats, Clinton’s biggest problem is his membership in a party that has an impressive record of losing the big ones in California. “Anytime you’ve lost six straight presidential elections and three straight gubernatorial elections you ought not to be cocky,” Angelides said.

The recipe for Clinton in California is as it has always been for Democrats--he must pull votes out of the party strongholds of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Alameda counties, among others, and extend his reach into the suburban households that have traditionally gone Republican.

Clinton’s itinerary in California shows that the governor hopes to burrow into Republican areas. Among his stops Sunday will be Riverside County, which has usually swung to the GOP, and the strongly Republican San Diego County. On Monday, he was scheduled to campaign in San Francisco and, tentatively, Cupertino. The trip begins today in Spokane and Seattle.

“We’re going to be campaigning in lots of places where Democrats haven’t campaigned before,” Reed said.

“We’re not just going after Reagan Democrats, we’re going after Clinton Republicans.”

Besides forwarding a message that he is a different, more centrist breed of Democrat, Clinton is expected to suggest to voters in the west that he has more cultural affinity with them than does Bush. Clinton has emphasized his small-town roots increasingly in recent days.

In Houston on Thursday, he called himself “living proof that the American dream works if you get a real shot to grab it.”

Mulholland, the state party’s political director, contends that Clinton “represents the aspirations of most families, yet most people don’t know it.”

Senior Clinton officials acknowledge that the Arkansas governor did not make his case to Californians during the primary season. That, they say, was because the candidate arranged his schedule around his fund-raising appointments.

“People will say, well, you had 12 days in California but if you really look at the time we had, maybe we only had seven days in California,” one senior Clinton official said. “Valuable time was used raising money and meeting with contributors.”

But Angelides, among others, sees a bright side.

“We do start, I think, with a relatively blank slate in California,” he said. “People don’t have a real good sense of our ticket. It allows us to say who we are and what we are.”

Clinton’s running mate, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, will not accompany the governor on his trip west, but his name is expected to be invoked regularly. Clinton is hoping that Gore, well-known as an environmentalist, will buttress Clinton’s credentials in states where the environment is an important issue.

Democratic Rep. Norman Y. Mineta of San Jose said that Gore will add cachet to the ticket in California. But, he added, the foundering economy will draw more attention than the environment.

“The biggest message is how to get the economy going,” he said. “One of the things the campaign has to do is hammer home that message.”