L.A. Unrest Moderates Clinton Strategy : Campaign: Arkansas governor balances statesmanship, political advantage in his gentle gibes at Bush. Brown accents social concerns.

BECKLEY W. Va. —  For Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton, these have been days of careful calibrations, of trying to hit just the right tone of statesmanship in responding to the Los Angeles riots--and of exacting just the right amount of political advantage.

On Wednesday, for example, with President Bush heading to Los Angeles for a personal inspection of the devastated areas, Clinton was gently gibing him for what the Arkansas governor suggested was a lack of action.

At the same time, he was making his points softly, so as not to be construed as taking advantage of the situation for political benefit. And, for the third straight day, he played off his plan of action against the Administration’s attempt to blame liberal social programs for the destruction.

His remaining rival for the Democratic nomination, Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., also campaigned on the urban unrest theme--and he spared neither Bush nor Clinton. During an interview on his campaign plane on the way to Nebraska, Brown said that, despite his three primary losses Tuesday, he was remaining in the race because neither Clinton nor Bush is addressing the causes of decay, poverty and racial polarization approaching “volcanic” levels in the nation’s cities.

“What is affecting those areas is a lack of public and private investment that is sanctioned by an ultra-conservative ideology and mirrored in a milder way in the Clinton program. . . . That’s the tragedy of the Democratic Party today,” he said.

Clinton’s reaction to Bush’s Los Angeles trip illustrated the tentative nature of his approach. Although Clinton has not been shy about blasting the President in the past, his partisanship on this issue was well-contained.

“I think he should go (to Los Angeles). I think they need the President. I think that these small business people need to be put back in business, as soon as possible,” he told reporters.

Later, when told that Bush had implicitly criticized the Great Society social programs of the 1960s, which have been central to Democratic orthodoxy for a generation, Clinton’s response was again measured. The President said: “I think we can do better.” And Clinton agreed--to a point.

“I think we can do better than the Great Society, but my point is now we’re doing nothing--so we’re doing worse than the Great Society,” Clinton said.

Specifically, Clinton argues that the root causes of the violence that devastated Los Angeles can be salved with greater investment in minority communities, particularly by minority business owners, and a host of social incentives, such as education and training for welfare recipients, an earned income tax credit for the working poor and more spending for education.

In the evening, Clinton was to head home to hear clemency pleas from a condemned killer who is scheduled to die tonight for the 1984 slaying of a state police investigator.

But during the day Wednesday, Clinton contrasted his ideas and Bush’s thus-far vague proposals, portraying himself as ready for action and Bush as an out-of-touch Cold War warrior.

The unrest and its aftermath also have presented Clinton with an opportunity to underscore the image with which he entered the race--as a breed apart from not only Republican thinking but also from traditional Democratic approaches.

He has argued, for example, that the breakdown of the family and other institutions in economically depressed areas has spurred a cycle of dependency that the framers of the Great Society programs did not predict.

“The truth is, there has been a big increase in poverty in our cities, there has been a huge increase in an urban underclass,” Clinton told reporters in Charlotte, N.C., before he traveled to West Virginia.

“Now, I have been very careful to say that that is not entirely the government’s fault and we don’t entirely need a government responsibility for it. But just to pretend it doesn’t exist or that it only exists at riot time, I think is in error.”

Brown took a more mainline liberal approach. The former California governor reiterated the major themes of his campaign--that money has corrupted the political process, that democracy has been “subverted” by the concentration of 90% of the nation’s wealth in the top 1% of the population, that the racial rage that exploded in Los Angeles last week will “erupt like a volcano” in other American cities unless the nation redirects its resources to create jobs and arrest urban decay.

“Our rulers have figured out how to take a Tomahawk missile off a ship and move it 40 miles, right down an air conditioning shaft in Baghdad. . . . But they haven’t figured out how to take a kid out of South-Central Los Angeles and put him in college,” Brown told about 1,000 teen-agers at Lincoln East High School.

Brown, whose traveling entourage has shrunk to one aide and two journalists, concedes that his themes have not resonated as deeply with voters as he believes they should. Asked why, he said that “maybe voters just need more time” to listen to his message.

Time is the one thing that ran out on Jerry Brown on Wednesday.

He had just finished addressing the students and was answering a question when the bell rang, signaling the end of school.

The candidate, midway through his answer, was struck speechless as the students rose en masse and began to walk out on him.

Decker reported from West Virginia and Ross from Nebraska.