That was nearly a year ago. It seems like forever. The journey won a place in the lore of uplifting political travel-echoing a Harry Truman whistle-stop or a Kennedy pilgrimage to Appalachia. Now it’s a vanished Brigadoon. Clinton has never been more popular than he was when he arrived in St. Louis last summer; his 36 percent approval rating now is a record low for a new president in modern times. NEWSWEEK retraced the route last week-from 48th and Lexington in New York to 13th and Olive in St. Louis. Enthusiastic Clinton backers these days seem as rare as Cubs fans in St. Louis. There is disgust and cynical resignation. Yet the spectacle of a new president being chewed to pieces in the capital has produced a kind of solemn, bipartisan sympathy for Clinton, buying him time. No one wants to confront the disturbing possibility-this soon-that the young president can’t hack it. Some scenes and sounds from along the road:
York, Pa. David and Lois Gates-Republicans, baby boomers, owners of a successful plumbing business-reluctantly decided to drive downtown to see Clinton last year. Voting for Bush was out of the question-he’d blown the economy. Perot had just dropped out. So they stood with hundreds of others outside the old Yorktowne Hotel late into the sultry summer night to see a member of their own generation. David was unconvinced and later voted for Perot. Lois took a chance on Clinton. “It seemed initially like he was in touch with reality at the common-citizen level,” she recalls.
Now she worries about him for one simple, hardheaded reason: she keeps the books for the business, which has 11 employees. She’s concerned about the cost of the Clintons’ sweeping health-care plan-the one that wasn’t supposed to require new taxes but will. “There are so many people with so many diseases,” she says. “Why won’t we all go broke with a plan like that? We would like to like him. But we’re concerned that he’s going to sock it to small business-and that’s us.”
Carlisle, Pa. When the caravan rolled into the All-American Auto/Truck Plaza last year, it invaded one of the busiest truck stops in the country. Clinton, in chinos, and Gore, in jeans, played political “lot lizards,” climbing up into the big tractor cabs to chat with grizzled drivers. Good pictures with the Good Ole Boys.
Clinton would be best advised not to attempt that particular photo op again. There’s not a single commemorative picture, signed or otherwise, of him at the All-American. He’s a dirty word in that megamacho world. The reasons: gays in the military, the talk of taxing energy or fuel, Hillary’s prominent role in her husband’s business and Clinton’s famously legalistic use of language. “He’s too slick with words, too perfect,” says Gordon Alkire, a veteran trucker with a Clint Eastwood demeanor. “Like it says on the gimme cap you can buy down in Arkansas: ‘I didn’t vote for the dope from Hope.’ I don’t think you can find anyone here who would admit he did.”
Weirton, W. Va. The surest way to guarantee that the Clinton cavalcade would visit your town was to have welcomed a Kennedy in the ’60s. Weirton, a hardscrabble steel town nestled in a narrow reach of the Ohio River valley, is redolent of Kennedy history. JFK visited during the 1960 campaign; Bobby, sadly, visited in 1965 to dedicate a bust to his brother. The Clinton-Gore ticket passed through to invoke the Kennedys and to visit the Weirton Steel Corp. The mill has been employee-owned since 1984; its survival is a testament to the toughness of the locals -and to the $500 million the company has invested in high-tech improvements.
One of Clinton’s tour guides in the mill was Domenick Tonacchio, vice president of the union. Tonacchio is sticking with Clinton but is itching to see some coldrolled steel and savvy in the White House. He loved it when Clinton stood up to the press during the campaign, fending off accusations about his personal life. “He didn’t back off from the media, and I liked that,” says Tonacchio. He’s eager for Clinton to fight for health care, for the homeless, with the same zeal. He thinks a tougher staff would help. “I’m just a mill hunky, but it seems to me that he hasn’t had a team on board with jungle experience. He needs guys that got the moxie, not a lot of college kids with theory.” It’s not just staff. “I’ve heard the spiel,” says Tonacchio. “Now I want to see the size of his cojones.”
Wilmington, Ohio. The bus trip was mapped with the aim of luring back white “Reagan Democrats” in the southern, historically Democratic parts of key states along the Ohio River. It worked. Clinton won every state on the bus trip except Indiana. Many of the individual stops were picked by movie producer Mort Engelberg. Wilmington fit the bill: a model farm town of well-kept frame houses. It had the added virtue of being the seat of Clinton County.
By the time Clinton rolled into Wilmington, his caravan had become the talk of the Midwest, part roving rock concert, part political campaign. People were driving hundreds of miles to see Clinton and Gore and their wives. “What impressed me was that all four of them were strong people,” recalls Dick Babb, the former Democratic county chairman who was master of ceremonies for the rally on the steps of the courthouse. But Clinton has now gotten too caught up in the Washington media culture, he says. “He has to forget about the nightly news on TV and focus on the long haul,” says Babb. And why doesn’t Gore have a bigger role? he wonders. “Al Gore could be more of a guiding person,” Babb says.
Louisville, Ky. One of Clinton’s most enthusiastic supporters has been Louisville’s popular mayor, Jerry Abramson. He led Clinton and Gore on a tour of a job-training program and later helped secure a huge majority for them in the city and surrounding Jefferson County. But Abramson is worried-and later this month he becomes president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
“I’m still thinking about tomorrow,” he says dryly, referring to Clinton’s campaign theme song. But the “holistic” approach to urban problems-touted by Clinton and his cabinet-has yet to materialize, Abramson says. The administration botched the “stimulus” bill, he says, letting Republicans define it as pure pork. Decision making in the White House seems, from the outside, chaotic at best. “I can’t figure out who’s in the room when they decide something,” he says. “There’s real frustration, and real concern among the mayors that somebody doesn’t have a firm grasp of the steering wheel.”
Vandalia, Ill. Before the Civil War, Vandalia was the Illinois capital and the western terminus of the famed National Road. A young legislator him: named Abraham Lincoln first spoke out against slavery there. Though there was a far bigger Logue crowd in St. Louis the next day, people in the town and in the campaign remember Vandalia: on a muggy night, at the end of the old road west, they lit candles by the hundreds in a quietly spiritual ceremony.
A year later, townspeople are divided on the enduring meaning of that night. To Dave Bell, the manager of the local newspaper, it’s a reminder that Clinton, so full of promises of prompt and sweeping action, was all show. “Now we find that he is a campaigner instead of a leader,” he says. But Dianna Logue, a registered nurse who had never voted for a Democrat before Clinton, cherishes the night as proof of his good intentions-and her own. “I was raised a Baptist, and it felt like an oldfashioned revival meeting,” she recalls. “We’re real human people here, caring people. I think he’s one of us. I think he’s sincere. It’s the politics that have gotten ahold of him. You have to stand up for what you believe in, get’em behind you and go for it! I want to give him time to try.”
