Clinton Steers Bus More Like a Bandwagon

Elvis showed up at a truck stop here Saturday morning. In what may have come as a bigger surprise, so did a Yalie and a Harvard man--Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

On Day Two of their bus trip across a third of America, the Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates walked across the frying-pan-hot asphalt of the All-American Auto/Truck Plaza, and communed with the people, the kind their caravan has been leaving in the traffic jams that have followed in their wake as they roll west.

The Democratic presidential nominee walked the working-class walk and talked the working-class talk. Grizzled truckers griped about speed limits and truck weights. Clinton nodded sympathetically.

Next to the truckers stood Ronnie Allyn, an Elvis impersonator who came to meet Clinton because Clinton likes Elvis--and, he added, because he supports abortion rights.

“Elvis was like a big brother to me,” said Allyn, his black pompadour neatly set off by a bright aqua shirt.

Clinton’s day also included a visit to a miniature golf course, where he played three holes, and an interlude at a Pennsylvania Turnpike rest stop, where he and his running mate threw a football around.

Asked what this middle-class decathlon was meant to show, Clinton said: “This is what America does. This is a campaign that’s aimed straight at the heart of America.”

When Clinton promised a campaign of action, no one quite figured that this was what he had in mind--a rambunctious, occasionally unnerving journey by bus that one of its participants likened to being drawn into a living episode of “Twin Peaks.”

At a length of 1,004 miles--a scout drove it the other day just to be sure--the Clinton-Gore tour began inauspiciously. Entering New Jersey, the first state on the itinerary, one bus nearly careened into another, the screech of brakes sending people flying down the aisles.

The journey is taking Clinton and Gore and their wives, Hillary and Mary Elizabeth (Tipper), on a tour of the nation’s disparate lives.

They hit Coatesville, Pa., a tableau of small town loveliness, where people sat out on their front porches and watched as a man who could be the next President shook hands with their neighbors, to the glow of distant lightning and occasional fireflies.

They hit York, Pa., where a crowd of nearly a thousand waited two hours in the humid night for Clinton and Gore to arrive, and, when they finally did, greeted them with cheers and screaming as if they were half of the Beatles.

And on Saturday night, for a jolt of reality, they hit McKeesport, the once-booming town brought to its knees by a decline of the American steel industry.

By the time it ends Wednesday in St. Louis, the Democratic nominee hopes his “First 1,000 Miles” bus tour will have earned him support among Republicans, independents and wayward Democrats, whom he has been courting with a vengeance.

Even if it plays against their personal backgrounds--a Rhodes scholar, Clinton went to Yale while Gore went to its arch-enemy Harvard--Clinton and Gore’s rhetoric and their activities have been unabashedly populist.

“If we take the elections away from the special interests and the government away from the lobbyists and give it back to you, America can be great again and we’re going to make it happen,” Clinton told more than 2,000 supporters and curious gathered in the sweltering heat of Carlisle.

“We believe that the sons and the daughters of stenographers and steelworkers and truck drivers should be able to go to college if they want to go and we’re going to make it possible for them to go,” he added, touting his support of a college loan program.

With a few exceptions like that one, the tour has been low on substance and high on style that is meant to appeal to the masses.

Clinton and Gore are traveling in a special bus, complete with kitchens, couches and a working table, but the entourage following them--seven other buses on Saturday--are regulation Greyhound, more in sync with the union halls and middle-class hangouts where the lumbering motorcade has stopped.

“It’s kind of like being on a rock tour, and, you know, Camden’s the first stop and it’s gonna be on the back of our T-shirt,” Hillary Clinton explained Friday to an assemblage of aerospace workers in New Jersey.

The spouses of the candidates have played a prominent role during the last two days, appearing on stage with their husbands and occasionally speaking to crowds.

Forging a quick relationship in the glare of publicity, the women have smiled and waved and been greeted with roars of applause wherever they have gone.

At the same time, the Arkansas governor and Tennessee senator have been comporting themselves like what they once were, the two big men on campus.

Gore has singed the crowds with blowtorch speeches, shouting angrily into the microphone at Friday night’s potluck dinner in Coatesville until his face reddened.

“How can we look our children in the eye and tell them that we are not willing to get involved and roll up our sleeves and get this country on the right track again?” he demanded with a revivalist’s flair.

Clinton took to the microphone a few moments later, and exhaled a dramatic sigh.

“Whoa!” he said. “Al’s gonna have to turn those speeches down or he’ll make me look bad.”

Each has put to use the jargon of their Southern roots.

“It’s hotter than a firecracker on the Fourth of July here right now,” Clinton said at one stop, “and it may get a little hotter before we get done.”

The tour is clearly intended to send forth an image that will make its way into American living rooms via the television cameras that record the candidates’ every move.

But beyond the political maneuvering, the overt appeals for votes, and the hokiness that is almost a constant component of road trips, there are also flashes of the yearning in towns small and large for someone, anyone to believe in.

The other night in York, where the bus tour arrived two hours behind schedule--about par for the trip thus far--Jean Plessett and her husband, David, were in the crowd as Clinton delivered a fiery address.

“What burns me up about this Administration is they deny the problems, divide the people, distract our attention and they’re driving us into the dirt,” said Clinton. “We’re going to lift America up again. I am tired of it.”

Afterward, Jean Plessett still wasn’t sure about Clinton, but she had her fingers crossed.

“I eyeballed him and he eyeballed me,” she said. “I hope what he says is what he can do if he wins.”