Buffalo: For Clinton, the City Is a Place to Show His Stuff

Mary Kay Fantuzzo was one of several residents of this struggling rust-belt city with the same question about President Clinton’s planned visit here today: “Why would he pick Buffalo?”

While dozens of cities have sprung to life or undergone rebirths during the Clinton years, Buffalo is a city still waiting for its turn.

“Buffalo has a lot of problems--declining jobs, declining population--I would have thought he’d choose another area,” said Fantuzzo, 25, a researcher for the Erie County Legislature.

But it is the very fact that such challenges face this community that make it such a good destination for Clinton’s outing the day after his State of the Union address--even if the city is still digging out from one of its worst storms ever, piling up more than 50 inches of snow this month alone.

With an impeachment trial on his fate underway in the Senate, Clinton’s post-speech trip this year doubles as an appeal to keep his job. The difficulties facing Buffalo give the people of this community little patience for Washington’s months-long obsession with judging Clinton for his efforts to cover up his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.

“It’s daring for him to come to Buffalo,” said Mike Frisch, professor of history and American studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “It’s not the kind of place that Americans living in most of the country can identify with. They see it as a place that’s not like them. There’s too much snow and too many dead steel mills.”

It might have been easier for the president to argue his case in a city that had turned around during his tenure, but in Buffalo Clinton can make the case that his job is not finished.

“This is a place that thinks government has a role in” helping people, Frisch added. “The area is in great need of the kind of creativity that the president likes to think he’s offering.”

At the turn of the century, Buffalo was the nation’s eighth-largest city, boasting a thriving steel industry and serving as a busy transportation hub between New York City and the Midwest. The city’s grand but fading downtown architecture reflects its glory days.

Now the 54th largest city, with 330,000 people, Buffalo has suffered a painful collapse of its industrial economy and has yet to re-create itself as other rust-belt cities have.

But the community retains a deep sense of pride in its past and--with the economy finally holding its own after decades of free fall--a glimmer of hope for the future.

As it strives to find its niche in the service economy, Buffalo has found itself in great need of a more educated work force, so the president’s education proposals are popular here. A steady exodus of young people has left Buffalo with an increasingly elderly population. So the president’s initiatives to reform the Social Security retirement program and provide more funds for long-term care are also welcome.

“I’m a Republican, and you know what? I think he’s done a great job,” said Dave Sabatino, 25, a paralegal. “He’ll definitely live in infamy” for the Lewinsky matter, “but he’s no lame-duck president afraid of doing anything. He’s young and in tune with the people. I like that.”

Like many other people in Buffalo and across the country, Sabatino said that he has not been paying attention to the Senate trial.

“I’m really sick of hearing about it,” said Sabatino as he ate lunch in the food court of the Main Place Mall in downtown Buffalo on Tuesday.

At a table nearby, Chet Jandzinski, an urban planner for Erie County, struck a similar chord.

Two of his children are in college, and their tuition debt “scares” him, he said. With another child soon to be born, Jandzinski said that he believes government should be spending its time figuring out how to make higher education more affordable. He also worries about the looming problems facing the health care system and Social Security as the population ages.

“There’s too much attention being paid to the president’s personal problems, and as a result nothing is getting done in Washington,” Jandzinski said.

Clinton does have detractors in Buffalo, even among his former fans.

“I used to be a real avid supporter of him, but, personally, I’d rather he’d not show up,” said Thomas Perl, a community development representative for the federal department of Housing and Urban Development. “I’m a little tired of his arrogance and his inability to come to terms with what he’s done.”

Fantuzzo, the researcher, said that she believes the Senate should convict Clinton.

But Tuesday night, about a dozen Clinton supporters gathered at a downtown pub called Buffalo House, which has real stuffed buffalo heads on the wall, to denounce the impeachment process, watch the president’s State of the Union address and cheer on the president for the two local television crews who came to cover them.

The president’s speech kept the small crowd’s attention and won its applause--for a while.

But the president’s speech went on too long even for his ardent supporters.

“When you listen to him--the man is offering so much,” said Dianne McQuillen, a saleswoman and political activist who organized the gathering. “I’m so angry at Congress for working against him.”