Democratic presidential candidate Edmund "Jerry" Brown hosted a radio talk show in Pittsburgh Friday, while Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, Brown's chief rival, toured the neo-natal unit of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.
The Pennsylvania primary election is Tuesday.Brown took telephone calls from listeners for one hour on WTAE radio about a number of subjects, including one from a laid-off steelworker.
"Why is it that so many people are laid off, why is there so much crime and drugs and school dropouts and family breakups?" Brown asked. "You can trace it right back to the destruction of the social and moral fabric of America because of the ambition and power and greed of the few who are concentrating the wealth.
"My campaign is taking back what the founders of this country intended every American to have - democracy, power and weight in the decisions that affect their lives."
Clinton was accompanied on his tour of the hospital by Sen. Harris Wofford, D-Pa., whose campaign against former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh brought national focus to the issue of national health care. The hospital was founded in 1751 and is considered the nation's first such facility.
Clinton said Wofford's victory prompted President Bush to promise a health-care proposal before the 1992 election but, "Bush still hasn't sent Congress a draft of his health-care reform legislation."
Clinton said establishing a national health-care program would be expensive at first, but then would pay for itself.
"Half the children who come into this nursery at a cost of $1,500 a day would not be here if we had comprehensive prenatal care to all pregnant women," he said.
"There are lot of opportunities to cut back on bureacracy, paperwork, government regulation . . . "
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President Bush has gained ground over Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in the latest USA Today-CNN-Gallup poll released Friday, but both presidential candidates suffer when Texas billionaire Ross Perot is added to the survey.
The survey of 1,004 registered voters conducted April 20-22, showed 50 percent favoring Bush and 34 percent favoring Clinton, compared with an April 12 survey, which still showed Bush leading but by 48 percent to 41 percent.
However, when Perot, who has not yet announced his third-party bid, was added, Bush's lead slipped to 41 percent, Clinton's rating dropped to 26 percent and Perot received 25 percent.
The poll has a margin of error of 3 percent.