Bush, Reagan Join Forces at Rally in Orange County : Politics: President harks back to GOP heyday during campaign stop. Speakers target Clinton’s draft record.

As if trying to recapture the magic of bygone days, President Bush surrounded himself with time-tested Republican trappings Sunday as he ventured into recession-embittered California for the first time since his party’s convention.

From a poolside brunch with comedian Bob Hope, Bush was at Ronald Reagan’s side as he moved on to Orange County to reassert the claim that his agenda, not that of Democratic nominee Bill Clinton, would best lift the state from its economic doldrums.

Sounding a cautious but conscious echo of “The Gipper,” Bush assured a modest-sized rally from a sun-splashed Anaheim stage that “the lights in the shining city will still shine, if we make the right choices today.”

In a scene that replicated almost exactly those staged here by Bush four years ago, not only Reagan but also Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) and country music’s Gatlin Brothers preceded Bush to the podium in Yorba Regional Park, near the symbolic center of American conservatism.

But a Dornan-led chorus of sneers at “Chicken Little from Little Rock” made it increasingly clear that Clinton’s avoidance of the Vietnam War-era draft had emerged as the Bush campaign’s favorite Democratic demon.

As volunteers led bitter chants of “Where Was Bill?” Dornan asked the crowd: “Does Bill Clinton have the moral authority to send fathers’ and mothers’ sons into combat? Does he have the authority to tell the Army band to strike up ‘The Star Spangled Banner?’ ”

The Orange County congressman, whose remarks served as the bluntest Republican attack to date on Clinton’s draft record, spoke to the crowd before Bush arrived.

“Everyone speaks for themselves,” White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said later, “and he’s free to say what he wants.”

With familiar faces on the stage having grown more creased with time, the event also bore other signs of the degree to which four years of economic turbulence have altered the political rhythms of a state that helped carry Bush to victory in 1988.

Even before pledging to keep faith with the “Reagan Revolution,” Bush felt compelled to assure the crowd that he recognized that “no state . . . more than California” and its defense industries had borne the brunt of a transition from a Cold War economy.

But a sign on a nearby single-family home read “Republicans for Clinton,” and some of Bush’s remarks were met with boos from Clinton supporters that at times drowned out the larger Bush contingent.

After depicting himself to Californians four years ago as the “environmental President,” Bush was expected to sound a rather different theme beginning this morning as he emphasizes the need to strike a balance between environmental priorities and jobs.

At a morning appearance in the Rancho Penasquitos neighborhood of San Diego, he will appear with developers who have resisted a federal proposal to grant protection to the California gnatcatcher under the Endangered Species Act. Officials traveling with Bush said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would almost certainly act later this week to postpone that decision until after the election.

Bush himself was not expected to take a public side in the controversy over the small songbird, which is found in parts of Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties.

But Steve Goldstein, an Interior Department official, described the issue as a symbol of trade-offs between conservation and the economy, and he noted that an analysis by the home-building industry concluded that federal protection of the sagebrush-nesting bird could cost 100,000 jobs.

Later in the day, Bush will travel to Washington state and Oregon, where the threatened forest habitat of the spotted owl poses even sharper questions about national priorities. The President is expected to demand anew that Congress permit federal agencies to add weight to economic considerations in deciding how much protection should be afforded to endangered species.

Even if the economic unease gave Bush’s message a different cast, however, he was able to draw flag-waving acclamation from a crowd that packed a local ball field and seemed to delight in each of the 10 different times the President mentioned Reagan’s name.

So intent was Bush on paying tribute to his predecessor that he even acknowledged that if weren’t for the 22nd Amendment, Reagan would “now be well into the 12th year of his presidency, and I’d be going to some funeral halfway around the world.”

He mocked Clinton for recently confusing the Patriot missile with a laser-guided smart bomb, suggesting that although the Democratic candidate “may be a Rhodes Scholar, he’s no rocket scientist.”

Bush began his day with a visit to Hope’s Burbank home, where he attended a $275,000 fund-raiser that included actors Cesar Romero and Robert Stack. Although the most recent statewide polls show Bush still trailing Clinton by 10 percentage points, he professed to be unconcerned.

“I’m not discouraged,” he was overheard telling the 110 supporters who attended the brunch at a cost of $2,500 a head. The money was targeted for the Republican Party; Bush’s campaign can spend only the money allotted to it in federal funds--about $55 million.

At the rally later, a relentless sun and temperatures in the upper 80s left some members of the crowd faint. Others began to shuffle toward their waiting bicycles and cars after Reagan wound up his introductory remarks and long before Bush finished speaking.

The fiercest of the rhetoric had come earlier, as Dornan, known for his acid tongue, asked the crowd to count out the number of Hot Springs, Ark., men who had been drafted in Clinton’s place (three) and the number of combat missions Bush flew in World War II (58).

Instead of serving in Vietnam, Dornan suggested, Clinton had been “in a pub in London, drinking ale, throwing darts . . . organizing demonstrations in London where they shouted, ‘Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh; Viet Cong is gonna win.’ ”

A top Bush campaign official, Mary Matalin, later bounded to the stage to give Dornan a congratulatory salute. But she said she had not heard Dornan’s remarks.

Bush himself made no mention of Clinton’s draft record. But even Reagan got into the act, noting pointedly that “George Bush fought his way into the military, gave true service to America and became a war hero.”

The crowd responded again by chanting: “Where was Bill?”