O.C. Voters Rally Around Clinton : Campaign: In the heartland of the Republican Party, a crowd estimated at 18,000 overflows Pacific Amphitheatre to cheer prediction of Democratic victory.

Striding into the heartland of Republican politics, Democratic presidential contender Bill Clinton urged an Orange County crowd estimated at more than 18,000 to tell their neighbors to “hold their noses this one time and vote for a Democrat, because they’ll like what they get.”

During a 20-minute speech from the stage of the jampacked Pacific Amphitheatre, Clinton lashed out at President Bush and bluntly predicted that the Republican Administration would be bumped from office on Election Day.

Clinton told the enthusiastic crowd that when he first came to Orange County for a much-publicized fund-raiser hosted by local Republicans, people told him Democrats in the area “were an endangered species.” But, he said, he decided to “go tell them (county residents) there’s a new Democratic Party, an old Republican Party, and we’re going to help lift America up together.”

He trotted out a line that his aides hope will become the theme of the campaign’s waning days--one featured in Clinton’s latest television advertisements. President Bush, he said, had promised in 1988 to make things better for Americans. “So let me ask you a question in Orange County--how you doing?”

Clinton also deftly defused a heckler who briefly interrupted the start of the speech and, to a chorus of boos, waved a Bush sign.

Noting that the man was wearing a Clinton T-shirt, the candidate said the heckler had “got in here under false pretenses.” Then, referring to Bush and the “Read my lips, no new taxes” pledge that the President broke, Clinton said: “This whole crowd travels under false pretenses.”

After speaking for about 20 minutes, Clinton left the stage, walked outside the amphitheater and briefly greeted some of the hundreds of supporters who had arrived too late to get a seat at the rally.

Police reported one arrest outside the gates, of a man who said he had spit AIDS into the eyes of a woman identified as a Bush supporter. She reportedly was taken to Hoag Hospital and the man was jailed at the Costa Mesa police station. His name was not released.

Clinton may not actually carry Orange County, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 56 years. But polls taken last month showed him running virtually even with Bush among the county’s voters. Fueled in part by this strong showing, Clinton held a 21-percentage-point lead in two recent statewide voter surveys.

And the fact that at this stage in the campaign, a Democrat could stage a rally here and draw a crowd so large that the fire marshal shut off the entrances more than 90 minutes before Clinton arrived, was a stunning display of how the nation’s political map has changed this year.

Sensing that change, the crowd broke into chants of “12 more days” when they weren’t loudly cheering the entertainers that helped warm them up--who aside from Whoopi Goldberg included Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Hornsby and Paula Poundstone.

For the political half of the evening, the theme was putting the entire Democratic ticket over the top in California. “One is not enough,” Senate candidate Dianne Feinstein told the crowd. “An individual can make a difference, but a team can make a change.”

Barbara Boxer, the Democratic nominee in California’s other Senate race, spent 30 minutes doing satellite television interviews with Clinton that were beamed to other parts of the state before her brief appearance at the rally. “It’s tough out there. There’s been negative politics,” she told the crowd. “Stick with us these 12 more days.”

Clinton, too, stuck to that theme, telling the crowd: “I want you to help me be a better President by electing Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein to the United States Senate.”

As the Nov. 3 vote grows closer, Clinton has become bolder about trying to use his support to achieve goals other than his own election. That was clear not only at the Orange County rally, but at an appearance earlier in the day in Oregon.

Last month, for example, when Clinton visited the state, he avoided taking a strong stand on Measure 9, the anti-homosexual ballot initiative backed by fundamentalist groups. On Thursday, speaking before an enthusiastic crowd of several thousand packed into and around the University of Oregon gymnasium, Clinton unequivocally condemned it.

“This country has been divided too long and in too many ways,” he said.

Then, to growing cheers, he exhorted the crowd: “Many people look to the West and see tomorrow. They see the shape of tomorrow. I ask you to send a message to America by resoundingly defeating Resolution 9. Vote no.”

Similarly, as Clinton seeks to portray the race as a choice between “can do” Democrats and “can’t do” Republicans, between “the things-could-be-worse crowd and the things-can-be-better crowd,” he has begun making far more direct appeals to his supporters to vote for other Democratic candidates as well.

In recent weeks, Clinton briefly has asked his audiences to vote for local Democratic candidates. But Thursday, for the first time, he made an extended argument for a party victory, asking Oregonians to vote for Democratic Senate candidate Les AuCoin so that as President he would have a filibuster-proof 60-member majority in the Senate.

“If you elect me on Nov. 3,” he said, “I need help to implement that program for change.”

Amid the cheering crowds, Clinton aides do their best to keep their guard up. Having watched near-disaster overtake them repeatedly in the winter and spring, this group has learned at least one lesson clearly--yesterday’s dream can become today’s nightmare.

And Clinton advisers do worry about a voter backlash if they appear to be taking the election for granted. “What worries me more than anything is that voters will feel disenfranchised by a media that tells them this thing is over,” Clinton strategist Paul Begala said.

“I’m not concerned about our troops. The troops are rallied. They’ve been wanting this for 12 years. But I am worried about independents and swing voters--the kind of people we need to win.”

Because of that, Clinton aides have been busy trying to convince reporters or anyone else who will listen that they take nothing for granted, that they truly are worried about Ross Perot. And, yes, really, they truly think President Bush might stage a comeback. And, no, as Clinton tells his audiences over and over, “This election is not yet over.”

But even the most dedicated of the spin doctors have trouble concealing their grins. “We could still lose this,” one senior Clinton aide insisted. But, he added, “it does get harder each day to see how.”

On a day that would take him nearly the full length of the West Coast, Clinton woke up in Seattle, a city so turned off by the incumbent that even police vans sport bumper stickers proclaiming, “Say noe to Bush and Quayle.”

At the downtown Pike Place Market, on a typically drizzly morning, a huge and enthusiastic early morning crowd greeted him, cheering while the sound system blared out the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” as he stepped out of his limousine.

And Clinton--a candidate seldom at his best in the morning--responded with an enthusiastic rendition of his standard stump speech, blasting the Republicans as the “Washington insider Establishment” and telling his supporters that they face a “historic election that will shape the future of America well into the 21st Century.”

Good humor even suffused Clinton’s reaction to reports of a clumsy attempt by State Department officials to investigate his mother’s passport files. Clinton aides reacted to the story like a small child just handed a very large water balloon to throw, and the candidate himself mixed righteous indignation over the invasion of his mother’s privacy with glee over the likely political impact of the incident.

“Look at this Administration,” he told the crowd. “You’ve got the FBI investigating the Justice Department, and the Justice Department investigating the FBI. You’ve got the CIA and the Justice Department fighting over which one of them really lied to a federal judge about the Iraq scandal. And now it turns out that the State Department was not only rifling through my files but actually investigating my mother--a well-known subversive.

“It would be funny if it’s not so pathetic,” Clinton added. “This is a crowd so desperate to hold onto power they have forgotten that the purpose of power in a democratic government is to use it to help people and to lift them up.”

In Washington, Acting Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger ordered the State Department inspector general to investigate.

Later, as he flew from Washington to Oregon, Clinton joked with reporters about the incident. “Brezhnev was calling her to get tips on the third race at Oaklawn every night,” he said, referring to the late Soviet leader and to his mother’s well-known penchant for gambling on horse races. “She had a little shrine in the corner of our home to Joe Stalin,” he added with a mischievous smile.

Times staff writers Eric Bailey, Gebe Martinez, Dave Lesher and Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this story.