Clinton and Brown Appeal to Voter Dissatisfaction in New York Debates : Campaign: Both seek the role of outsider. Arkansas governor tries to shed front-runner status he says has hurt him.

NEW YORK —  The two remaining Democratic candidates sparred face-to-face in two New York debates on Tuesday as each tried to claim the mantle of outsider in an appeal to voters’ discontent.

The head-on exchanges represented politics at its most basic and came as Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton did his best to cast aside the front-runner’s status he said has hurt him in these anti-Establishment times.

Coming after he first sought to ignore his remaining rival, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., Clinton’s decision to confront him directly marked an attempt to capture some of his challenger’s insurgent appeal in advance of the presidential primary here next Tuesday.

Forced to shift roles from that of nominee-apparent to a candidate running scared in the face of Brown’s surprising challenge, Clinton said he had become the undeserving victim of a voter rebellion aimed at anyone at the top.

“All of a sudden I was the front-runner,” he said here Tuesday morning, calling it a “psychologically dangerous position.” He added: “I didn’t like it.”

For his part, Brown wasn’t ready to let Clinton dodge the front-runner label just yet. Grinning broadly as he sat at Clinton’s side in a Lehman College forum televised nationally on C-SPAN in the evening, he thanked those who had made it possible for him “to even be in this debate next to what has been the front-runner.”

Earlier in the day, Clinton sought to shore up his support among Jewish voters. Appealing to Jewish leaders for the third time in as many days, he used his strongest language to date to portray himself as a friend of Israel and to attack the Bush Administration as its foe.

“This Administration has ever so subtly broken down the taboo against overt anti-Semitism,” he said as he criticized its “strident rhetoric, public and private” used against Israel and its friends.

“They took this forbearance on the Gulf War and stuck it to you,” he told the Jewish Community Relations Council. “This is not an Administration you can trust when the chips are down.”

At a time when polls suggest, however, that his biggest obstacle may be voters’ doubts about his character, he also used the occasion to issue the plea for forgiveness he used throughout a campaign troubled by allegations of personal misconduct.

“If I had to meet a standard of perfection,” he said without elaboration, “I could not meet that standard. But if you had to do that, you might as well elect a President by lottery because you’re not going to be able to get anybody to do that either.”

The two debates, including a forum earlier in the day at Gracie Mansion, the home of Mayor David N. Dinkins, were marked for their absence of personal attacks. But Clinton’s uneasiness at being tarred by voters as a creature of the Establishment was evident in his renewed efforts to cast himself as an instrument of reform.

Taking on what he called the “political problems in Washington in both parties,” Clinton used his closing statement in the evening debate to attack “an absence of political leadership” in “a country coming apart at the seams.”

As Brown even more vigorously assailed “the crisis in this country,” the battle between the two Democratic contenders was fought most sharply over the proposal for a 13% flat tax that has been a centerpiece of the former California governor’s campaign.

Brown would replace the entire federal tax system--including income, estate, corporate and Social Security taxes--with a 13% flat income tax and a 13% value-added tax.

Under questioning by a panel of U.S. mayors in the Gracie Mansion debate, Brown touted the plan as a visionary way to rid the nation of a tax code that has been “a wet blanket, a ball and chain on the economy.”

But Clinton charged again that its effect would be to increase the burden on the poor and to benefit the rich, and suggested that it was no more than an echo of the Ronald Reagan tax cuts of the mid-1980s.

“We’ve tried that,” he said. “It is another one of those simple-sounding ideas that will make things worse.”

In the evening debate, one questioner asked Brown if the 13% tax would bring in enough money to finance all of his promises, including a national health care system.

“You’re going to have to phase it in,” Brown said, adding that if the tax did not bring in enough money, he would “then add to the tax and we understand that. People have to make that choice. We’re going to have to pay for it.”

Clinton jumped in to say that Brown would need a 16% flat tax and an accompanying 16% national sales tax “to get as much money as you’re raising now. . . . If people want it they can have it but it is a rip-off.”

The 2 1/2 hours of face-to-face exchanges between the two men also underscored more distinctly than before the differences between them. While Clinton’s answers were sharp and consistently detailed, Brown’s were less precise but perhaps better hammered home his liberal-populist themes.

In debates that focused largely on urban issues, the two candidates also left no doubt that their prescriptions would be rather different. Brown opposed a free-trade agreement with Mexico on grounds that it would take away American jobs; Clinton said the agreement would be beneficial.

Brown said cities should receive direct aid from the federal government and should be permitted to spend it any way they choose; Clinton said that some guidelines would be necessary.

Brown said he “can’t wait” to impose caps on doctors’ salaries; Clinton said such a restriction would not be necessary under the health care plan he favors.

But the maverick Brown appeared far more restrained than in earlier debates in what seemed an attempt to avoid offending voters who might be put off by his brashness. And Clinton departed from what has sometimes been a narrow focus to counter his rival’s slashing rhetoric with language that struck the same themes.

At Gracie Mansion, where Brown described his campaign as a “battering ram” and said he intended to change the “whole center of gravity of contemporary politics,” Clinton confronted the mayors with his own anti-Establishment attack.

“We’re in the grip of economic decline and social disintegration,” Clinton complained, “and we’re saddled with a system that believes the only job of politics is to keep taxes low and get out of the way.”

Earlier in the day, Brown said the fact that Clinton had invited him to debate showed that his rival had turned “desperate.”

“It shows that this race is volatile, it’s close,” he said, adding: “Maybe Mr. Clinton peaked too soon.”

And a flap that began Monday spread into another day when Patrick Caddell, an informal adviser to Brown, said Tuesday he may join the campaign full time because of his anger at Clinton’s recent attacks on him and Brown.

Clinton aides had leaked a fiction manuscript that Caddell wrote; the Washington Post wrote a story highlighting parallels between the script and Brown’s kickoff speech. Then Clinton cited the article on the campaign trail, saying that Brown “just re-created himself for this campaign. We now know he even had to lift his announcement speech so somebody could tell him what he believes in this campaign.”

Caddell, whose credits include the Jimmy Carter and Gary Hart campaigns and who has described himself as permanently retired from politics, was not amused. “For some reason they want to provoke me into this campaign,” he said. “I’ll be glad to take on that role--I’ve got a lot to say.”

Caddell said he would not come in as campaign manager, but as “a humble volunteer.”

“I feel sort of like Shane: I’m retired, but now I’ve got to strap on my guns and do it all again,” he said.

Clinton’s political troubles dogged him much of the day. As he walked out of a Manhattan pharmacy during a quick noontime campaign stop, he met the kind of hostility that makes his advisers wince.

A man who was walking his dog recognized the Democratic candidate and shouted: “Do you pardon all drug dealers or just the ones who contribute to your campaign?”

The reference was to a disclosure that Clinton granted a pardon in the late 1980s to Dan R. Lasater, a political supporter convicted of possessing and distributing cocaine. The Arkansas governor bristled.

Times staff writers Sam Fulwood III in New York and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this story.