Clinton Races From City to City, Setting to Setting

MILWAUKEE —  In carefully selected settings and before frenzied crowds, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton on Saturday took his relentless campaign for the White House on a stroll through American cultural symbols.

In Atlanta, he dropped in on morning diners at a pancake house and greeted supporters at a nearby high school football stadium. In Davenport, Iowa, he shook hands along a street of barbershops and bakeries. In Milwaukee, he held a televised meeting with local residents.

The idea of the day was to see and be seen, particularly on all-important local television, in key states that the Democratic presidential nominee hopes will stack up in his column in just three days.

In his only formal address Saturday, Clinton assailed President Bush for what he called persistent misrepresentation of his positions.

“They’re trying to perform reverse plastic surgery,” Clinton complained hoarsely at the football stadium in Decatur, just outside Atlanta.

“In one state, he said we’re environmental radicals; the next time he goes to a state and says we pollute the environment. In one state, he says I’m too liberal; in another state, he says I’m a backwater redneck.”

He also sought to reinforce his major themes: that he and his running mate, Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee, represent a new style of Democrat, more moderate and pragmatic than those of the past, and that President Bush should be turned out of office because of his handling of the economy.

“This election in the end, in these last closing days, is the age-old American conflict between change and the status quo, between people having the courage to vote their hopes or falling back and voting their fears,” Clinton said.

“Listen to the charges and the countercharges and listen to what Al Gore and Bill Clinton hope to do with you, not for you, but with you to change America.”

Clinton’s rhetoric notwithstanding, Saturday was intended less for podium thumping than to demonstrate a kinship with Americans that might translate into support from those watching from the other side of the television screen.

In Atlanta, for example, he chatted with other breakfast diners, signed autographs and explained policy positions under the bright lights of television cameras as they were waited on by servers dressed as Catwoman, a green-faced witch and other Halloween figures.

A few hours later in Davenport, he walked slowly down 11th Street, shaking hands and visiting a barbershop, a doll store and a pottery store, where he was presented with a gift ceramic pig. Clad in a leather jacket and a red-and-black muffler against a chill rain, the governor made only a few quick remarks before his public address system shorted out.

“Thank you for waiting in the rain,” said Clinton, who was trailed by reporters for the entire block. “Look at it this way: You’ve only got two or three more days of trickle-down economics left to wait through.”

Clinton’s schedule had him in the sights of television cameras in Georgia, Iowa and Wisconsin and also under the eye of TV cameras from Illinois, which is on the border with the latter two states. Together, the four states represent 53 electoral votes that Clinton would desperately like to have on his side.

At this late stage, the campaign has evolved into a pitched battle for several key states, among them the ones Clinton appeared in Saturday and the ones he plans to visit today and Monday: Michigan, New Jersey, Georgia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania, for starters.

“In some ways it’s insurance,” said Clinton spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers. “We’re going to battleground states like Iowa and Wisconsin, where we’re strong but President Bush has been spending a lot of money.”

The Bush and Clinton campaigns were circling so tightly in the same orbits that in Atlanta, President Reagan was speaking at a shopping mall on behalf of Bush at the same time that Clinton was shaking hands and signing autographs at the Original House of Pancakes.

As Election Day neared, Clinton’s mood was upbeat, a reflection of his campaign’s belief that he is still holding a small but firm edge in public opinion polls.

In the Atlanta pancake house, Twinker Burton, a real estate agent, sipped coffee with Clinton and asked him if he was nervous about the outcome.

“Little bit,” Clinton said. “But I got to just keep working. My view is that nervousness is a form of energy that I’ve got to channel and just keep on going.”

Clinton added that “between now and then I won’t get much sleep.” The candidate campaigned for 20 hours Saturday, was due to repeat that today, and at dawn Monday plans to set off for a 30-hour marathon that will take him to at least 10 cities before he votes in Little Rock.

Little by little, as the hours tick away, Clinton is allowing himself to publicly ruminate about winning.

“Imagine how you will feel on Jan. 20, if instead of four more years of blame and denial, division and diversion, we are all locking hands walking down Pennsylvania Avenue to take our country back,” he told supporters in Georgia.

On Friday night in Detroit, he told guests at a town hall meeting that he wants to hold a “people’s inauguration” and had spent a great deal of time pondering how to organize an “accessible” White House.

“How do you organize the White House?” he said he had wondered. “What is the job of the people in the White House? How do they return phone calls? How do they bring in people from the grass-roots level? How do people get called and consulted before policy decisions are made?”

“There’s a whole open culture that I want to try to establish so that the American people feel that they have some kind of input into this government.”

Throughout Saturday, however, Clinton’s optimistic appeals alternated with those intended to instill a little doubt, a device meant to quash any complacency among the Democrat’s supporters.

“For over a year now, we’ve been out here working to change this country, to put the American people first, to end trickle-down economics, not to go back to tax-and-spend, but to invest in our own people,” Clinton told a knot of supporters as he arrived in Milwaukee. “We can do that with your help, but only with your help . . . . I need you.”

In Georgia, a state claimed by Republicans in every presidential election since 1976, the Democratic royalty of Georgia was arrayed behind Clinton: two U.S. senators, the mayor of Atlanta, members of Congress and former Atlanta Braves star Henry Aaron.

There, Clinton sketched the society he sees in America’s future, one where individuals will have to assume more responsibility for keeping up with progress, especially in the workplace.

“We want to say to the working people of America, we owe you affordable health care, a good education system and a growing economic environment.

“But nothing we can do for you will take up for what you must do for yourselves to continue to be productive. Every day in every way, we’ll all have to change.”

Clinton said that Bush’s charges against him “don’t amount to a hill of beans,” and he praised his own gubernatorial record in Arkansas.

“My record on taxes, on spending and on job growth is better than the Bush Administration,” he said.