Riding high: the final weeks of the campaign may seem dull, but keep an eye on the coalition Bill Clinton is busily forging

National Review, Nov 11, 1996 by Kate O'Beirne

The final weeks of the campaign may seem dull, but keep an eye on the coalition

Bill Clinton is busily forging.

THE year's most wooed voter waited outside the Louisville Slugger Museum on a chilly Kentucky evening three weeks before the election. In front of this monument to baseball, she sported a blue sweatshirt that declared incongruously "Soccer Mom For Clinton." Still, her patience and clothing investment paid off. A delighted Bill Clinton greeted her with his biggest grin of the day as he worked the crowd following his speech.

Clinton supporters with that kind of dedication were thin on the ground. The President with a need to be loved was encountering crowds that mainly wanted to see a celebrity. On his 17-hour campaign trip to Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky -- to woo, respectively, partisan Democrats, blue-collar workers, and moderate suburbanites (especially those elusive Soccer Moms) -- most voters were friendly enough. But they had apparently turned out for the meetings without any particular enthusiasm for Mr. Clinton's politics, or indeed any politics. How they went home is quite another matter -- and an alarming one for the GOP.

The press was, well, too inert to really notice. On the media plane accompanying Air Force One, White House press secretary Mike McCurry cheerfully complained that he was unable "to raise a pulse" from the seventy or so regular passengers. "They just don't think it's a race," he explained, checking to make sure my heart wasn't pounding under the illusion that a real political fight might be under way. The seasoned Clinton-watchers balanced their checkbooks and talked baseball between stops.

Was there, indeed, a presidential race to be interested in? This campaign swing yielded little evidence of one. No local GOP forces bothered to show the flag -- an onlooker at the Knoxville airport whose cap was emblazoned "Busch" came near to expressing the only Republican sentiment of the long day. And though Clinton - Gore lawn signs were scattered along the motorcade route, not a single bumper sticker was evident for either ticket. Spirited opposition erupted only once, when people lining the sidewalk in Dayton booed the buses marked "Media" -- clearly a bipartisan sentiment.

Joe Lockhart, the campaign's press secretary, explained to the few reporters willing to listen that the day's trip was devoted to shoring up the President's lead. And Clinton is clearly energized by the crowds he wades into -- shaking hands, hugging the people closest to him. When it comes to speaking, he calibrates his message to his audience, barely glancing at notes during lengthy, detailed speeches. Judged technically, it is the performance of a professional politician at the top of his form. But does it "connect" with his audiences?

At the first stop, in Knoxville, a friendly audience of partisan Democrats waited more than two hours to hear Al Gore and Bill Clinton. The candidates were there ostensibly to announce an initiative to hook up every classroom in the country to the Internet (not to mention a $100-million subsidy to Silicon Valley) -- what Lockhart calls the "wonk stuff." A large banner on the stage proclaimed: "Building America's Bridge to the Twenty-First Century." Gore, oddly the more animated of the two, raised his arms and waved to the crowd in his awkward schoolboy way, while Clinton merely delivered a small, curt salute.

It was Gore's job that day to slam the Luddites in the Republican Party (a bold tactic from a foe of the internal-combustion engine). He duly warned against a "digital divide" between the haves and the have-nots if every classroom in the country is not on the Internet. He prophesied that nearby Oak Ridge Laboratory would be closed by the Democrats' congressional "opponents" who had attempted to cut the science and technology budget by a third. And he reminded the audience that he first started talking about the Information Superhighway twenty years ago. (It seems longer.) In those days he had "dreamed" of a girl in Carthage, Tennessee, who could plug into the Library of Congress from her home. (Poor Tipper -- married to the only man for whom a girl is merely a peripheral to a computer.)

Clinton wisely stuck to computer software, but he communicated real enthusiasm for the wonders of technology. "There is more computer power in a Ford Taurus you drive to the supermarket," he declared, "than there was in Apollo 11 when Neil Armstrong took it all the way to the Moon."

This was no innocent fascination with applied science -- the President's point was that government deserves the credit for such advances: "Of the 12 Americans who won the Nobel Prize last year, all 12 had received government support for their research," he said. His enthusiasm for technological advance was really an optimistic vision of what the future holds as long as government leads the way. "I know that you all believe in this," he told his Democratic listeners, advising them to fight the current antipathy to government by having at hand "three or four examples that people can identify with" of how their tax dollars are being profitably used.