Clinton’s 2nd Bus Tour Starts With Black Voters : Campaign: Crowd in East St. Louis is probably the most racially diverse candidates will encounter as they wend their way north to Minneapolis.

As the Bill Clinton-Al Gore campaign kicked off its second bus tour Wednesday and began its trek north along the Mississippi River, the first stop included what is likely to be conspicuously absent in the next two days:

Black people.

Along the campaign route, in the town squares and local meeting halls, relatively few black faces are expected to pop up in the mix of political support for the Democratic presidential ticket as it touches some of the small Midwest towns where campaign officials say Middle America lives.

Thus, the starting point of this second bus tour--economically hard-pressed, crime-besotted and overwhelmingly black East St. Louis--was no accidental campaign hit. The crowd of no more than 1,000 that gathered here at the East St. Louis High School gym was expected to be the most racially diverse group Clinton and Gore will see in the next few days, campaign aides sheepishly admitted. It was also, quite probably, the smallest.

Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s campaign spokeswoman, tried to downplay any racial reasons underlying the obvious lessened excitement among blacks for the campaign road show.

“This event (in East St. Louis) wasn’t meant to be a large crowd event,” she said as Clinton made his way by bus for his next scheduled stop. “Our focus wasn’t on the crowd, but the message.”

The next event drew an estimated 3,000 people--the vast majority of them white. They lined the streets and created a Norman Rockwell-like scene in Hannibal, Mo., where Mark Twain lived and wrote of American life. An evening stop in Burlington, Iowa, attracted even more: 6,000 to 10,000 enthusiastic supporters gathered for a riverfront rally in the town of 27,000 people.

This bus trip--dubbed “On the Road . . . to Change America” by campaign staffers--kicked off at East St. Louis, about 30 miles from where the first bus tour ended last month.

By Friday, the bandwagon will have carried the candidates, about 50 staffers and nearly 200 journalists to Cedar Rapids and Clayton County in Iowa; Prairie du Chien, La Crosse and Chippewa County in Wisconsin, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, where it will end. At most stops along the way, campaign officials concede--with a bit of irritation at the question--that black Americans will be few.

“You’ll see us go from urban America to rural America to suburban America on this trip,” said Rodney Slater, a Clinton campaign adviser and one of the few blacks accompanying the Democratic ticket on the bus trip. “One reason we have no problem doing that is that we’re taking the same message everywhere. That’s a message of jobs, economic growth and putting Americans first.”

But, the aides say, East St. Louis--so hard-pressed that its black-run town government replaced its traffic lights with four-way stop signs to save on electric bills--was carefully selected as a symbolic kickoff point because it perfectly matches the theme Clinton wanted on this bus trip. Simply stated, that message to East St. Louis and the rest of urban America is: If they will help send him to Washington, Clinton will direct the federal government to help the town help itself.

And that’s what he said from a makeshift stage under the basketball backboard in the school’s beloved gym. Pointing to the successes the school’s football team has had over the past decade, including banners that proclaimed the 1989 and 1985 teams national champions, Clinton said success could come in other areas in East St. Louis.

“The same kind of spirit that enables a football team to win is what enables people to win academically, what enables people to rid their streets, their blocks, their gyms of crime and violence,” he said.

“At some point all of us have to make decisions in our lives to take control, to take our lives back, to take our families back, to take our neighborhoods back, to take our futures back,” Clinton said to reverberating applause. “Believe you me, I don’t think you can do it alone. You need a President and a national government that’s caring, that works, that’s committed to helping you and investing in our people.”

Although Clinton will stress many of the same points over and over this week, the language of self-improvement--more often delivered by Clinton or his surrogates before largely black audiences--is unlikely to be as direct as this political caravan moves into progressively whiter and more economically well-off communities.

Many in the East St. Louis audience were pleased to hear and see the Democratic presidential nominee.

“I’m voting for him, come hell or high water,” said the Rev. Johnny Scott, pastor of Mt. Sinai Baptist Church and president of the local NAACP branch. “What other choice do I have? African-Americans have little or no choice about who they are going to support.”