First Lady Sounds Clinton’s Message During Iowa Visit

Despite reports of the first lady’s plummeting popularity, an enthusiastic crowd shrugged off subzero temperatures Saturday to see Hillary Rodham Clinton, who came to this college town to campaign for her husband’s reelection.

As the president pressed the flesh in New Hampshire, site of the nation’s first primary Feb. 20, the first lady used her appearance here to sound the themes of personal responsibility and community effort from her husband’s recent State of the Union address. She also urged voters to turn out for the state’s influential caucuses, which are little more than a week away.

“Every four years people come to Iowa, and they’re running for president, and they say, ‘This is a watershed election. This is a turning point,’ ” the first lady told the crowd of 450 gathered on the Iowa State University campus.

“I’m here to say, this is a watershed election”--one that will determine “what kind of community, what kind of people we will have going into the next century,” she said.

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It was a speech very much like the remarks delivered by the president to voters in New Hampshire, where he wrapped up a two-day visit Saturday to snatch some of the spotlight trained on the Republican contenders competing for a shot at replacing him.

Standing before a group of police officers at the St. Cecilia Social Hall in a downtrodden Manchester neighborhood, Clinton claimed credit for the nation’s falling crime rate, which he attributed partly to his administration’s efforts to fund the hiring of 100,000 new police officers nationwide and other crime-prevention measures.

But he reminded the audience that the job of reclaiming America’s streets is not complete.

“You can’t eliminate the darkness that lurks in human nature,” he told the several hundred people in the church hall. “But we can go back to the time when crime was the exception and not the rule.”

The two-pronged visits by the Clintons marked the informal kickoff of the president’s reelection campaign. For weeks, Clinton, the first Democratic president in half a century to run unopposed for the nomination, was content to let the GOP hopefuls duke it out among themselves in an increasingly acrimonious contest.

But his staff coordinated the quick-hit Iowa and New Hampshire appearances to make sure “we were part of the debate,” Ann Lewis, deputy campaign manager, said at the Ames event. “We take their votes seriously. We don’t take them for granted.”

The adulation from a mostly partisan crowd that greeted Hillary Clinton here stood in sharp contrast to a recent poll casting her as a giant handicap to her husband among Midwestern voters.

The first lady outlined a vision of a society where “self-reliance and teamwork are not opposing virtues,” where self-help is buttressed by the assistance of others and the government in education, economic stability and health care.

In addition to the 450 students and local residents who assembled to hear her 30-minute speech in ISU’s Great Hall, several hundred more were forced to wait in the corridors, campaign officials said.

Andrew Chebuhar, a junior at the university, made it inside after hopping on a city bus and arriving an hour early, braving a cold snap that threatens to keep temperatures below zero for the longest uninterrupted spell in local history.

“I think she’s a great first lady. I like Hillary more than Bill,” said Chebuhar, 21, a registered independent who voted for George Bush over Clinton four years ago. “She comes across pretty well. Maybe she’s fooling me.”

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For the president, the day began with a sentimental visit to a Manchester, N.H., diner where he’d stopped twice during the 1992 campaign and again in 1993 after he moved into the White House.

“Here’s where it all started,” he said as 50 customers crowded around him at the Chez Vachon coffee shop. “It’s good to be back in this place. I had a wonderful time here.”

But even as Clinton basked in the warmth of his supporters, New Hampshire Republican Gov. Steve Merrill excoriated him on the airwaves for breaking his 1992 campaign promises to the people of the Granite State.

In his response to Clinton’s weekly radio address, Merrill said that Clinton promised a balanced federal budget, a tax cut to working families, an end to the current welfare system and a “new Democrat” approach to governing.

“Today, the biggest challenges facing President Clinton running for reelection in 1996 are the promises made by Bill Clinton the candidate in 1992,” said Merrill, who is national chairman of the presidential campaign of Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

“Sadly, for the people of New Hampshire, and for citizens all across this nation, Bill Clinton has talked right and governed left,” Merrill added, echoing a line that Dole uses regularly on the stump.

The president is expected to visit Iowa next weekend, before the state’s caucuses on Feb. 12.

Chu reported from Iowa and Broder from New Hampshire.