Corn Belt Is All Ears as Clinton Bus Brakes for Voters : Campaign: Rolling, rolling, rolling; keep those slogans growing. Democratic running mates hoist the hyperbole as Midwest crowds eat it up.

On Day Four of the rolling campaign commercial known as the Clinton-Gore “First 1,000 Miles” tour of Middle America, even the candidates can get a little punchy.

At a Monday morning rally in Columbus, Ohio, Democratic vice presidential nominee Al Gore told the crowd that “legions” of Republicans had come out in support of his running mate, presidential nominee Bill Clinton.

By the time he reached Wilmington, Ohio--the seat of Clinton County, lest anybody wonder why the Democrats headed to the farm town of 10,000--”millions” of Republicans had decided to switch sides.

Perhaps it was hyperbole. Perhaps it was just the effect of 90 more minutes on a bus.

The line between illusion and reality is hard enough to decipher in real life, and it is downright impossible when you have been hurtling west on a bus for four days, sleeping a few hours a night and dining on a steady diet of caffeine and cookies.

Have legions of Republicans come over to the Democratic side? Have millions? Have any? Does it matter?

What seems to matter to the Democratic baby boomer candidates is proving their resilience and burgeoning optimism to every living creature between New York and St. Louis, where the cavalcade mercifully ends on Wednesday.

Mercifully, at least, for the souls who have been staffing the trip and the 150 reporters trailing their heels. The candidates themselves seem to be having a blast.

“It’s a liftoff into a different orbit,” Tennessee Sen. Gore said the other day at a rest stop off the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Clinton, too, seems to have enjoyed the ride, so much so that terrible rumors are now circulating in the cramped quarters of the buscapade. Rumors of another bus trip in California. Rumors of another bus trip to California. Rumors of a trip by paddle wheel boat, just to experience the joys of another transportation system.

“He’s grooving on this,” said one senior staffer, sipping caffeine before the lumbering tour left Wilmington for Louisville.

The days have been daunting. The participants were walking out the hotel doors at 8 a.m. Monday, less than seven hours after they walked in.

First came a rally at a huge plaza in downtown Columbus. Then 90 minutes on a bus. Then a rally on the steps of the Clinton County Courthouse in Wilmington. Then 2 1/2 hours on a bus. Then a “leg stretch”--a device invented by the Clinton campaign--off Interstate 71 in Kentucky. Then another hour on the bus. Then a televised “town meeting” in Louisville. And then, blessedly, sleep.

Or maybe not. Things sometimes do not go as planned. There are running bets whether anyone’s luggage will arrive at his or her appointed room, if in fact a room has been secured at all. As for the carefully prepared agenda for the day, it is usually out of date before the notoriously late Clinton even leaves his room.

The other day in Wheeling, W. Va., Clinton walked up and down the street shaking hands, the nervous tics on his staff’s faces growing more pronounced as time flew by. He got back in his bus, traveled half a block and got out again to shake more hands.

“Is there anyone in this town he hasn’t met?” an exhausted photographer sighed.

But the truth rediscovered along the bus route has been this: Middle America eats it up. At nearly every turn of the wheel, crowds unseen since Clinton’s early surge in New Hampshire have gathered.

Late Sunday, the road show came to Utica, Ohio, more than an hour late as usual, to find people gathered in front of their houses by the hundreds to greet the newcomers as if they were veterans returning from a popular war.

They sat in their lawn chairs, waving American flags. They gathered on the corners where rural farmhouses merge into the cornfields. The last time anyone this big hit town, the mayor said later, was when William Howard Taft came by while running for President in 1908.

On Monday in Wilmington, thousands jammed the courthouse square to listen to Clinton, sending him on his way by cheering uninterrupted through the final few minutes of his speech.

“If you’ll give us a chance, if you’ll give us a chance, we’ll turn around in a new direction,” Clinton declared as they cheered. “It takes a lot of courage for people to change. It’s always easier to just stay in the rut you’re in, but our country’s going in the wrong direction.

“This is the greatest country in human history, and we always believed that tomorrow could be better than today. We also always thought each of us had to do our part . . . . Give us a chance and we’ll rebuild America. We’ll give your kids a future.”

For a few stunning minutes, it was as if Norman Rockwell had come back to life as a puppeteer, pulling all the perfect strings.

Which is not to say that this is entirely spontaneous. Campaign operatives fanned out to plan the tour the week before the Democratic Convention, and they have done their best to provide the sort of backdrops that convey a regular-guy image for Clinton and Gore on the television sets of America.

In Utica, for example, Clinton and Gore and their casually clad wives sat on hay bales, before what looked to be a freshly painted red barn, as they spoke to area farmers wearing baseball caps. Clinton chewed on a stalk of hay, and behind him stretched a vision of rolling green hills dotted with white farmhouses.

The only discordant note was the presence of a Secret Service agent who stood with his back to the group, facing a cornfield as if he were waiting for the ballplayers in “Field of Dreams” to return through the rows.

There is a fine line between establishing a rapport with people and pandering, and for long stretches of this tour, the Clinton operation has been a rolling pandermobile.

In Pennsylvania, Clinton continually reminded voters that he is the son-in-law and brother-in-law of Penn State football players, potentially angering the Pitt crowd but nevertheless drawing a cheer every time.

In Ohio, he was thankful to have spent a little time among the silos and the plowed fields.

“Folks, I have loved being in corn country today,” he said, before quickly noting that Arkansas is the nation’s No. 1 producer of rice and that Gore--at least when he is not in Washington--lives on a farm in Tennessee.

Most of the time, however, he has stuck to a spare version of his stump speech, pledging to provide national health care, boost education spending and restart the foundering economy.

“We’ll be there for you,” Clinton said. And “there,” in today’s terms, means Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri.