Clinton Invokes Old Values of ‘New South’ : Campaign: He appeals to regional pride in an effort to woo conservatives during meeting of state legislators.

Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton appealed to his fellow Southerners’ sense of pride Tuesday, telling an assembly of the region’s state legislators that GOP entreaties to “traditional values” placed President Bush in the White House but produced little benefit to their states.

“We never got anywhere, anywhere, anywhere in our part of the country by being sucker-punched (with) appeals to our traditional values,” Clinton said in a speech to the Southern Legislative Conference meeting in Miami.

“Let us vote on our traditional values,” he said. “Let us live our traditional values. Let us lift up our whole country by starting in the South and saying, ‘Give us a new direction for our country.’ ”

Clinton’s remarks were intended to pry the region’s voters away from the GOP and to recapture the ballots of conservative Southerners. That strategy has been the linchpin of Clinton’s campaign because Democrats have won neither the region nor the White House since 1976--when Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter did so. Like Carter, who beat President Gerald R. Ford, Clinton is the governor of a Southern state: Arkansas.

Although Clinton seemed to play up his audience’s Southern pride, his comments also hinted at the sense of inferiority frequently directed at the region.

He acknowledged that education gaps, racial discord and economic production have held back advancement in states located below the Mason-Dixon line, but suggested the region has dealt with those problems with more candor and openness than other parts of the country.

“Don’t you think the South has come a long way in the last few years?” Clinton said, citing foreign investments, lessened racial tensions and improved student academic achievement. “It’s something I think most of us are pretty proud of. I know our region still has a higher percentage of poor folks than other regions of the country, but we’ve made a lot of progress.”

Appearing before the bipartisan organization of lawmakers and their staffs, Clinton rarely mentioned Bush by name. But he criticized the record of his Administration and his party--which has controlled the White House for the last 12 years--saying the GOP had failed to improve health care in the South and across the nation.

“You ask the people you represent not to throw their vote away on the kind of rhetoric the people have gotten those of us in the South to be a sucker for for decades,” he told the legislators. “Let’s show them there is a New South and we’re a lot smarter than they think we are, and that whoever gets our votes this time will have to respond to our hopes for our children.”

Clinton also discussed his health care proposals, including a so-called “play-or-pay” plan that aims to insure every American. Firms would either have to “play” by providing health insurance to their employees, or pay into a federal fund that would cover those without insurance.

His plan would also require insurance-company reforms and cuts in unnecessary paperwork that boost medical costs without improving benefits.

“Otherwise, you’re going to have more and more and these (insurance firms) dividing up the health insurance markets to where the very ideal thing (they) can do is to insure a group of 15- to 25-year-old women, who spend two hours a day in the gym, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t eat hamburgers, (and are) going to live forever. It’s their only way to save money.”

Clinton also attacked Bush’s proposal to give vouchers to the poor and tax breaks to the middle class to help buy health insurance. “The (President’s) benefits are completely consumed by cost increases in a year,” Clinton contended.

Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan also spoke to the group, defending Bush’s health care proposal. Sullivan, who preceded Clinton to the podium, gave the Democrat an opportunity to criticize White House policy without heaping abuse on the Cabinet’s only black.

“He’s a good fellow,” Clinton said of Sullivan. “He’s just got a heavy load to carry.”

Clinton elicited his only standing ovation when he described how Bush would try to link him to the Democrats’ past during the Republican Convention next week.

“You know as well as I do what’s about to happen,” he said, grinning broadly. “The other side is going to go down there to Houston and tell you (vice presidential nominee) Al Gore and I may have been born in Arkansas and Tennessee, but we’re just a bunch of crazy, wild-eyed liberals. They’re going to tell you that (Democrats) took us to New York City in a safe . . . and incubated us there for 20 years. We got their crazy ideas, came home and hid them for 20 years waiting for the opportunity to spring them on the rest of the country.”

As the audience roared with laughter and applause, Clinton continued mocking his opponents’ strategy:

“They’re going to say every speech I gave on the Fourth of July in northeast Arkansas was a deliberate attempt to conceal my radical impulses. And we just can’t wait to get into power in Washington, where we can take your guns away and trample family values and raise taxes on every poor, working person in America.

“I can hear them now.”

The Democratic campaign also swept through New England on Tuesday as Gore toured a leading computer firm in Cambridge, Mass., saying that high technology will create jobs and keep America competitive into the 21st Century.

“It translates into real jobs for real people,” Gore said, surrounded by colorful supercomputers capable of making computations at unprecedented speeds. “It sounds a little high-tech. And it is high-tech. . . . But in the competition we now face in the world marketplace, we’ve got to be willing to move ahead and create the jobs of the future.”

Gore delivered his remarks during a visit to Thinking Machines Corp., a nine-year-old firm that makes the most powerful computers in use today.

Times staff writer Edwin Chen contributed to this story.