Clinton Takes Sentimental Detour to Political Roots : Democrats: Candidate visits heavily Republican region of Arkansas where he suffered his first defeat.

Eighteen years ago, a young man fresh out of law school set out to start a Democratic political career by challenging an entrenched Republican congressional incumbent in the most Republican region of his state.

He almost won. To this day, he can rattle off the vote totals from nearly every county in that long-ago contest.

Now, the man who won that election has retired. And the man who lost is now the front-runner in the race for the nation’s ultimate political prize.

Friday, as he flew from Nevada to Missouri to Wisconsin in pursuit of that prize, Bill Clinton took a short detour to return to the scene of that first defeat to try to help another young Democrat, congressional candidate John Vanwinkle, over the top.

“This is where it all began for me,” Clinton told reporters as his plane flew within sight of the university campus here. Here is where Clinton first taught law when he returned to Arkansas from Yale. And here, he bought his first home, a small, $21,000 brick house with a high ceiling. A few weeks later, he drove a law school classmate named Hillary Rodham up to the house and made her a proposal.

“I bought that house you liked,” he told her. “So you’d better marry me, because I don’t want to live there alone.”

As his plane flew low over the university campus, Clinton excitedly pointed out landmarks below, explaining to reporters the history of campus buildings. And when he landed, he literally reached his arm through barbed wire to shake hands with friends pressing against the runway fence.

“It’s kind of a sentimental thing,” said Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. “This is his political home.”

Speaking to an enthusiastic crowd of students, faculty members and townspeople gathered on the university’s campus, Clinton told his audience he had come to “ask you in a very heartfelt way to help me finish something I started way back in 1974” by sending a Democrat to Congress from the state’s only Republican district.

At the same time, the visit provided Clinton an opportunity to once again boost his Arkansas record before a friendly home-state crowd. As he rattled off the now-familiar litany of job growth and educational improvements, Clinton used a pro-Bush heckler as a foil.

“How inconvenient the truth is. That’s why they try to shout me down, but they can’t do it anymore after 10 more days,” he said.

“There are a lot of people out there in America who have taken notice of Arkansas and what we tried to do together, and they like it and America will, too.

“We know there is no such thing as miracles in public life, but there is such a thing as making progress,” he said. “Unlike the United States, things are going in the right direction in Arkansas, and that’s what’s going to happen in the country if you give me a chance to serve.”

Referring to his three-day swing through normally Republican areas of the West, Clinton told the crowd his campaign had developed “enormous resonance with a lot of Americans who never voted for a Democrat before.”

“It kind of hurts them to do it, but a lot of those Republicans know they need to shed old Bush. They’re going to help us,” he said.

Clinton’s Western swing ended earlier in the day with a rally at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Under a bright blue sky, Clinton told supporters he wants to take the country in a “new direction” and touted his proposals for reform of the nation’s health care system and for a national service trust fund that would allow college students to borrow funds for school and work off part of the bill with two years of public-service work.

Clinton also ratcheted up his criticism of independent candidate Ross Perot, who appears to be siphoning some votes away from the Democratic ticket in Western and some Midwestern states.

Still not mentioning Perot by name, Clinton told the crowd that some candidates offer economic plans that would try to cut the federal deficit by causing “more unemployment” and would end up causing “more deficits and more trouble” by harming the economy.

While the deficit is important, “you have got to grow your way out of this crisis,” he said. Those words--reminiscent of remarks made in earlier campaigns by Republican Ronald Reagan-- were a significant nuance in the continuing debate in the Clinton camp about the relative priorities of deficit reduction and economic stimulus.

Although Clinton continues to talk of the importance of reducing the deficit over the next four years, he increasingly seems to be siding with those among his advisers who argue that the top priority for the first year of a new Administration must be to stimulate economic growth.

Economists on the pro-stimulus side argue that steps to cut the deficit immediately, by reducing spending or raising taxes, would backfire. The measures would plunge the economy back into recession and thereby increase the red ink, they argue.

Other Clinton advisers worry that economic stimulus policies inevitably would raise spending and increase the deficit and thereby cause an increase in interest rates that would hurt growth.

In his speeches, and also in satellite television interviews beamed to stations in Florida, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Ohio, Clinton continued to ridicule the Bush Administration for its attempt to investigate his mother’s passport files.

“That whole thing has been turned into a sham,” Clinton told a television interviewer from Cleveland. “This is just a vicious attempt at fear mongering and lying by the Bush Administration and, again, an attempt to distract the American people from the urgent problems of the economy.”

Although professing outrage at the investigation--and particularly the direct involvement of Administration political appointees in searching the files--Clinton and his aides have been gleeful about the political impact of an incident that, they believe, shows the Administration looking not only devious, but inept.

Republican officials, Clinton laughingly told his Las Vegas audience, must have thought that “she was giving the communist leaders tips on races,” a reference to her well-known penchant for gambling at the track.

“Let them worry about what happened 23 years ago,” he added. “I’m worried about the 23-year-olds of today.”