From a black church rocking to gospel music to a pierogi restaurant to a county fair, Bill Clinton and Al Gore are working this weekend to stitch back together the old Democratic majority.
With polls showing a narrowing of the presidential race after the Republican convention, the Democratic ticket wants to limit President Bush`s gains to solidifying the GOP base.
The Democrats rolled out of Cleveland on their third bus tour Saturday, stopping in places like Parma, a working-class suburb of white, ethnic voters that Bush visited in May; Youngstown, Ohio, a faded steel town where as many as 10,000 people showed up for a rally; and New Castle, Pa., for an old-fashioned county fair.
Clinton`s focus is on swing voters like Mary Weaver, a softspoken bakery clerk in Parma.
Proclaiming herself a lifelong Democrat though sheepishly admitting, ”I strayed,” and voted for Bush in 1988 and Reagan twice before that, Weaver blamed the Republicans for not helping working people like herself.
”People are hurting now. Even my own family. They are laid off,” said Weaver, 54, as she stood behind a glass counter filled with pastries at Rudy`s Strudel Shop.
While appealing to such so-called Reagan Democrats in places like Parma and New Castle, Clinton also has to energize voters who never strayed from the Democratic fold.
For nearly three hours Friday night, he and Gore sweated and swayed along with hundreds of others in the steamy Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland listening to speeches and the 50-voice choir. When it was finally his turn, Clinton said, ”I`ve never been so close to heaven and still been so hot.”
At both places, Clinton`s message was much the same, touching on crime, jobs, health care and education, and vilifying the GOP.
”There was a method to the madness of all the rock-throwing and mudslinging at the Republican convention,” he said from the pulpit. ”They want to rob you or some of your neighbors of hope. They want to divide us race against race, income against income.”
Saturday morning, the buses first rolled through Cleveland neighborhoods of empty factories, boarded-up public housing and graffiti-painted walls.
Asking the question that Labor Secretary Lynn Martin put to the GOP convention last week when she nominated Bush, Gore told a town meeting in a neighborhood gymnasium, ”We`re doing a little spot check around the country” to answer ”Are you better off?” The crowd shouted, ”No.”
”Is crime reduced here? Is the level of drugs reduced here? Is unemployment down here?” To each question, a loud ”No” roared through the audience.
As the caravan arrived for lunch at the Parma Pieroges Restaurant, hundreds of people lined the streets, and Clinton told them of his stops in the black neighborhoods earlier.
Not one person asked about race or to raise welfare payments, he said.
”Do you know what they asked me for? Jobs, education, health care.”
Riding around Lake Erie, the Democratic team`s third bus tour has a different audience from the first two, concentrating more on voters in economically depressed urban areas, including African-Americans, instead of the small towns and rural areas that dominated the first two trips.
At the National Association of Black Journalists convention on Friday in Detroit, Clinton bristled at a question about how he would generate a large turnout among blacks if he is putting so much emphasis on white voters.
”Because I have also reached out to people who haven`t been voting for the Democrats, some people have criticized me for trying to broaden the base of the party,” he said. ”Broadening the base is how you win elections. It`s also how you govern the country.”
All the Republican efforts to keep the conservative white Democrats by portraying Clinton and Gore as liberals who have no family values was not persuasive for bakery clerk Weaver, who said she is more concerned with finding a full-time job with health benefits.
The competition for the blue-collar vote is cutthroat. To blunt the Democratic message, the Bush campaign ran a newspaper ad Saturday saying that Clinton`s support for higher fuel emissions standards would cost 20,000 Ohio auto workers their jobs.
”It`s wrong,” said Marla Romash, Gore`s press secretary. ”We`re going to have to raise the mileage, but there are ways to do it where it won`t cost jobs.”
