Back at the White House, Most Eyes Are on Arkansas : Politics: Cabinet members, aides attack Clinton’s record. But some are uncomfortable with focus on state.

Labor Secretary Lynn Martin has looked into the Arkansas economy and doesn’t like what she saw: a grim backwater of dead-end jobs and low living standards.

Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan has inspected Arkansas’ health care system and declares that it’s in woeful shape.

And Michael Deland, chairman of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, says Arkansas is “at the bottom of the heap” in environmental programs.

Why have President Bush’s Cabinet members and other top Administration figures suddenly focused their attention on Arkansas? The President’s reelection campaign, of course.

For several weeks, high-level Administration officials have been turning up at news conferences arranged by the Bush-Quayle campaign, taking shots at Democratic candidate Bill Clinton’s record as governor of Arkansas.

Clinton has contested the charges, arguing that his accomplishments during the gubernatorial Administration that began in 1982 compares favorably to the records of most other governors. And some of the attacks have missed their target. Martin, for example, found herself admitting last week that under Clinton, Arkansas has enjoyed both rapid job growth and rising family income.

“Arkansas’ growth is enormous. . . . It’s true,” she conceded. But she added: “It is starting from an extraordinarily low base.”

The anti-Arkansas campaign is unusual for two reasons. First, Cabinet members don’t normally single out individual states for criticism, even in election years.

And while Cabinet members and other top officials usually campaign on behalf of their boss, the Bush effort appears to have taken the practice to a new level. White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III has asked Bush’s Cabinet members to set aside at least one or two days a week between now and Election Day to campaign on the President’s behalf, an aide says. “With a few exceptions, that means every person, every week,” a White House official said.

“Since the Nixon years, the Cabinet has increasingly become an appurtenance of the White House media machine . . . but this may be exceptional,” says Samuel Kernell, a scholar of the presidency at UC San Diego.

Bush campaign spokeswoman Torie Clarke said several Cabinet secretaries are in line to deliver new attacks on Clinton’s tenure in Arkansas, including Education Secretary Lamar Alexander and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp.

“We will go through every bit of (Clinton’s) record--every bit,” Clarke says. “We will never run out of things to say about Arkansas.”

The strategy reflects an attempt to duplicate Bush’s success in attacking his 1988 opponent, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, for Massachusetts’ economic and environmental problems.

Dukakis had made the “Massachusetts Miracle” the centerpiece of his campaign. Clinton’s record has not been as central to his campaign, but he frequently has pointed to it with pride, especially in the areas of economic development and education.

The use of federal officials and agencies to grill one state makes some Cabinet officers uncomfortable. “The people of Arkansas and the state of Arkansas are terrific places,” Martin proclaimed, even as she aired her attack on the state’s economic condition.

Atty. Gen. William P. Barr has said he does not want to look too partisan because he has to work with Democratic state governments, sheriffs and police chiefs in his job--an argument that applies to most other Cabinet secretaries and some top Administration officials.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William K. Reilly, who has frequently clashed with the White House on policy issues, has reportedly told Bush advisers that he does not think the head of a regulatory agency should criticize the Democratic ticket. Indeed, Reilly has even applauded some of Clinton’s environmental positions, saying they were borrowed from the Bush agenda.

There are no hard and fast standards about how much time Cabinet members can spend campaigning, as long as they are careful not to spend government money doing it.

“As a moral issue, I think there’s an argument for saying it’s OK to have Cabinet officers take part in campaigns,” said Kernell, the UC San Diego scholar. “It’s healthy for government to think of itself as a team, and it gives us a better sense of what the team looks like. Who is Lynn Martin or Lamar Alexander? What kind of leaders are they? This is a way to find out.”

Still, tradition dictates that the secretary of state, defense secretary and attorney general stay out of the campaign, and they have.

Baker gave up his job as secretary of state to run the campaign as chief of staff; Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, once a fiercely partisan GOP congressman, now turns political questions away with a wry smile.

Barr recently described Arkansas as having a rising crime rate and “very low investment in law enforcement.” But he raised those issues only when a reporter repeatedly pressed, and he did not attend the Republican National Convention last month in order to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

Asked how much political activity was proper for a Cabinet officer, Barr said: “It’s not always an easy line to draw. Things like direct participation in fund raising . . . you don’t do that. (But) I think it’s appropriate to speak out on the Administration’s record on policies and to respond to attacks.”

But others have taken to the campaign trail with a vengeance, especially secretaries Alexander, Martin and Kemp--all of whom have higher political ambitions, and Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr., an oft-criticized figure who many observers believe could be in danger of losing his post in a second term.

Lujan, a former New Mexico congressman, has been stumping the Southwest praising Bush in both English and Spanish. Last week, he announced the formation of “Hispanics for Bush-Quayle.”

Some Cabinet secretaries apparently are not in demand. Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, whose off-the-cuff remarks on the economy have sometimes misfired, has not been asked by the campaign to do much, and that is unlikely to change, one official said.

Times staff writers Douglas Jehl and Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.