Whitewater Dogs First Lady on Road : Politics: Mrs. Clinton stumps for health care reform out West but she cannot avoid reminders about the controversy.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton resumed her campaign for health care reform Monday, but even this far from Washington, the First Lady could not escape jarring reminders of the Whitewater controversy.

At the end of a day of public appearances, she told reporters that she refuses to let the controversy detract from her mission to overhaul the nation’s $1-trillion health care system.

“I’ll talk as long or as hard as it takes to get health care reform passed in this country,” Mrs. Clinton said after emerging from a tour of a Colorado Army National Guard health clinic for the needy and homeless.

Asked by reporters about her comments over the weekend that she and the President are prepared to pay back taxes on their Whitewater real estate investment, which reportedly cost them almost $69,000, Mrs. Clinton smiled.

“Goodness knows what you all would be saying if we had made money on it,” she quipped. “We made a bad investment, we lost money and that’s really all there is to it.”

Earlier in the day, as she addressed several thousand University of Colorado students at a campaign-style rally in nearby Boulder, an airplane passed overhead trailing a banner that read: “Reveal Your S & L Income!”

In the middle of the university’s Dalton Trumbo Fountain area, not more than 100 feet in front of the First Lady, two young men held high a six-foot-long banner that asked: “What Did Vince Foster Know?”--a reference to the late White House attorney and former law partner of Mrs. Clinton who apparently committed suicide last year and whose death is now part of the Whitewater investigation. On the banner, red drops resembling blood appeared to drip from Foster’s name.

The only sign in the sea of young faces that Mrs. Clinton acknowledged was one promoting a single-payer health system, in which the government collects taxes to pay for insurance coverage for all. Mrs. Clinton praised such advocates for their honesty in proposing a new tax but said that approach was one the President has rejected.

For the most part, the First Lady focused on a new, simplified message in selling the President’s massive health reform plan, whose development she supervised.

Evidently reacting to recent polls and focus groups showing that much of the public is confused--and perhaps intimidated--by the complexities of the plan, the First Lady doggedly adhered to broad themes and goals, even when asked questions that had no short or simple answers.

Instead, she stressed both in Boulder and in her appearance at a “Colorado Health Care Summit” here that universal coverage is what she and the President care most about.

“When told about the principles in the President’s health care plan, the people are for it,” the First Lady told reporters later.

At the health summit, she signaled, perhaps more strongly than either she or the President has before, their willingness to go along with legislation that seeks less than total reform--if it promises universal coverage at some specified date.

When a questioner asked whether she and the President would settle for incremental reform, Mrs. Clinton replied:

“If you are asking me if we’re willing to look at different ways of reaching the President’s goal, the answer is, ‘yes.’ But if you are asking me if the President would be willing to sign a bill that did something but did not put us on a track to guaranteed health coverage for everybody, the answer is, ‘no.’ ”

Her response drew sustained applause from an audience of several thousand people at the city’s Boettcher Concert Hall. They also gave Mrs. Clinton a long, standing ovation when she entered the hall.

Throughout the day, at least in public, Mrs. Clinton appeared energized and upbeat, speaking passionately about the need for health reform. But some who saw her in private said she appeared fatigued.

Chen is a Times staff writer and Lindgren is a special correspondent.