‘92 REPUBLICAN CONVENTION : Clinton Camp Driving GOP to Distraction : Democrats: With interviews, ads and criticisms, campaign breaks tradition as it tries to steal some thunder from Republican Convention.

In a break with the political tradition of lying low during the other guy’s big moment, Democratic officials moved to engage their opponent and influence media coverage as the Republican Convention opened Monday.

They launched plans to air television advertisements tweaking President Bush in his own city, called on Bush to fire his campaign chairman--citing comments by Robert A. Mosbacher raising the issue of Clinton’s past marital problems--and took off after the no-longer-Teflon figure of former President Ronald Reagan.

Clinton even made himself available for an interview on CBS, repeating his theme that he would make America strong economically again, which he said is a key to being strong internationally.

By contrast, last month George Bush went fishing in Wyoming during the Democratic Convention.

“In the past we lay low, and it was a mistake,” Democratic National Chairman Ronald H. Brown said. “We don’t intend to make that mistake again.”

The advertising campaign, which Democratic strategists had planned to launch as a surprise today, apparently marks the first time that one party has aired advertising during the other party’s convention.

The two 15-second ads are designed to criticize Bush and rebut anticipated attacks against Clinton. One hits Bush for signing “the second-biggest tax increase in American history”--the 1990 increase that broke the President’s “Read my lips” pledge. (The largest tax increase was Reagan’s, in 1981.) It also notes that under Clinton, Arkansas has the second-lowest per-capita tax burden in the country.

The second Clinton ad points to statistics on losses of American jobs under Bush and contrasts those numbers with figures on job creation in Arkansas under Clinton.

Both spots, which will air during the prime time convention coverage, end with a tag line: “Those are the facts. Back to the show.”

The vast majority of Americans will not see the advertisements directly--the Democrats are airing them primarily in Houston--but Clinton strategists hope to discomfit the small circle of top Bush operatives here and remind journalists of the Democrats’ point of view.

Democratic strategists also hope to disrupt GOP plans with their attack Monday on the Bush campaign’s general chairman, Mosbacher, and another GOP figure, Catalina Vasquez Villalpando, Bush’s appointee as treasurer of the United States. Both made comments Sunday raising the issue of Clinton’s past marital problems, a topic that Bush says he has declared off limits.

Mosbacher, in a breakfast with reporters Sunday morning, said in answer to a question that Clinton’s past marital problems “should be one of the yardsticks” voters use to judge the two candidates.

Villalpando was blunter, saying in a talk to GOP delegates from New Jersey that Clinton and campaign adviser Henry G. Cisneros, a former mayor of San Antonio, are “two skirt chasers.”

Clinton and his aides eagerly seized on the comments, hoping to use an otherwise minor flap to portray Bush as an insincere politician who tries to “have it both ways.”

Clinton’s communication director, George Stephanopoulos, called on Bush to fire the two, saying that Bush had promised last week to fire aides who trafficked in what the President has called “sleazy stuff.” Asked recently in an interview with Time magazine whether he would fire aides who raised such issues, Bush said: “Yes, I think I would.”

Said Stephanopoulos: “Today we have to find out if George Bush is really a leader, if you can trust him to tell the truth, can you trust him to keep his word, or is he just a hollow man running a very hypocritical, very cynical campaign.”

The Bush campaign issued statements from both Mosbacher and Villalpando. Mosbacher said he regretted the misunderstanding; Villalpando apologized “deeply.” But, when asked about the charges later on CNN, the President refused to repudiate them. He said that he could not “control” what members of his campaign or his Administration say.

“There’s an awful lot of people who feel strongly one way or another on a wide variety of issues, and nobody is going to be able to control everything that everybody says. The program is to stay away from what I call the sleaze business. . . . But I’m not going to go around wringing my hands about it.”

He promised that in his own case, however, “I’m going to conduct myself above the board and on the issues.”

That comment brought Clinton himself into the fray. “He says this has no place in the campaign. Then his people come right back with it. That’s typical,” Clinton told reporters in Little Rock.

The Democrats also have sent a team to Houston to respond to the Republican depictions of Clinton, similar to the team the Republicans sent to New York during the Democratic Convention.

“This is not an in-your-face kind of effort on our part,” party Chairman Brown said. “This is an effort, as we indicated, to set the record straight, to respond, to indicate this is not 1988. We are not a turn-the-other-cheek party anymore.”

Betsey Wright, the deputy chairwoman of the Clinton campaign, said that, although “(we) did not come here to disrupt (the GOP) convention . . if it gets completely out of hand, we will reconsider how to handle it.”

The Clinton campaign’s new aggressiveness even reached to the most beloved Republican icon, Reagan.

Recent polls, including one by The Times, show that Monday night’s featured speaker, Reagan, has sharply dropped in popularity. Because of that, Clinton’s aides feel freer to criticize him.

“I think he’s going to give the Clinton campaign a bounce,” Stephanopoulos said. “He’s the perfect standard-bearer for the Republicans, the architect of Reaganomics, which raised taxes for middle-class people and brought the economy to a shambles.”

Lauter reported from Little Rock, Ark., and Rosenstiel from Houston.