OS ANGELES - Taking their campaigns to opposite ends of delegate-rich California, Vice President Al Gore and rival Bill Bradley yesterday sought to more sharply define their differences.
Speaking to employees at Digital Domain, a multimedia company in Venice, near Los Angeles, Gore talked about improving schools, and he repeated his refrain about the former New Jersey senator being a ''good man with a bad plan'' for providing universal health care.
Bradley, in San Francisco, said national health care ''has been a part of the Democratic platform for 50 years'' and is ''one of those issues in this campaign that distinguishes me from Al Gore.''
Gore, he said, ''doesn't have any plan to get to universal health care.''
During a question-and-answer session with employees at Digital, Gore indicated that his background made him better qualified to work with Congress than President Clinton was when he took office in 1992, after being governor of Arkansas.
In his speech to hundreds of supporters at Gabbiano's restaurant overlooking San Francisco Bay, Bradley also criticized Republican front-runner George W. Bush for speaking at a South Carolina university that he said racially discriminated in the 1970s and 1980s.
Bradley noted that the Supreme Court had weighed whether the institution, Bob Jones University, could keep its federal tax-exempt status given its policy.
''Bob Jones University was a university that explicitly discriminated on the basis of race throughout the '70s and into the '80s,'' Bradley said.
''And yet the Republican candidate for president yesterday goes to Bob Jones University to make a speech about what conservatism is in this country,'' Bradley added. ''Ladies and gentleman, that is what conservatism is about in this country.''
Gore is looking to California to help him knock Bradley out of the race, and he has spent an enormous amount of time and energy here raising money and cultivating support, particularly among minorities, organized labor, and women.
After a long day Wednesday that began in New York and included stops in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, Gore arrived at Burbank Airport that night and was greeted by about 400 supporters, including comedian Jay Leno, and a few protesters.
Then, he conducted town hall-style meeting of 3 hours and 18 minutes with undecided voters, unlike those in Iowa and New Hampshire. Not only was the audience more diverse, but voters' questions were more personal.
Are he and his wife Tipper born-again Christians? (They are, Gore said.) Does he support marriages of homosexuals? (He does not, but he also opposes the Knight amendment, a March 7 ballot initiative designed to invalidate gay marriages considered legal in another state.)
Gore plans to return to California next week. He also plans to hold at least one debate with Bradley in the state, said Gore's campaign chairman, Tony Coelho.
Gore has attributed his victories in the first caucus and primary states to a series of town hall-style meetings, usually with undecided voters, where he stays until the last question from the audience has been answered.
Coelho said Gore's strategy for California and the 14 other states that will hold primaries March 7 obviously will differ from the tactics in New Hampshire and Iowa, although he refused to be specific.
''Now the national campaign has started,'' Coelho said. Gore left Los Angeles for a campaign stop in Olympia, Wash., before returning to Washington, D.C., early today.
Material from the Associated Press and Reuters was used in this report.
