Clinton, Hastert Vow to Unite to Aid Poor

The tomatoes at the processing plant were stacked in neat boxes, colorfully accentuating President Clinton’s message Friday: Private industry, the government and struggling communities, aligning themselves in just such a balance, can flush out the remaining pockets of poverty as the nation revels in an economic expansion.

Yet, as the president and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) announced agreement at the end of the day to seek common ground on a plan to help some of the nation’s poorest communities, the centerpiece of the president’s most recent economic campaign remains one whose successes have been established largely by anecdote.

Clinton on Friday completed a second multi-state tour to downtrodden communities rarely visited by a president, attempting to spotlight relatively small programs that have established badly needed rays of economic hope.

And at the end of the tour, in the southside Chicago community of Englewood, he and Hastert offered a rare display of policy comity: They said that they would try to produce bipartisan legislation to encourage investment in urban and rural settings where unemployment rates are often significantly higher than the national jobless figure of 4.1% that was announced Friday.

In side-by-side speeches to a community group, the president and the speaker offered barely the slightest hint of the politically poisonous atmosphere in Washington.

“We had two choices here,” Clinton said. “We can say, ‘Well, they’ve got an idea, we’ve got an idea. Let’s have a fight.’ ”

Or, he said, they could seek compromise.

“We’re here to commit to you and to the American people to work in good faith, to merge our proposals into a historic bipartisan effort to renew our communities, to open new markets and new doors of opportunity,” the president said.

Following Clinton to the lectern, Hastert said: “These communities deserve our support and our help as they strive to expand their economic base. What we’re trying to do is create a climate that encourages people to try and help themselves, that encourages investment . . . and sometimes communities require a little help from outside.

“Sometimes Democrats and Republicans do fight a lot,” he continued. “But, you know what? People of different political beliefs can also agree. It’s time to come together and make things happen.”

The president’s New Markets Initiative is built around the idea that job-creating investments, encouraged by tax credits and loan guarantees, will bring wages and potential consumers to rural villages and inner cities where welfare and unemployment payments have been the norm.

The Republican congressional leadership has favored an approach built around eliminating certain taxes for real estate gains in low-income areas, tailoring the attack toward individual communities’ needs and offering a significant role for so-called faith-based institutions, such as religious groups.

But will either approach meet the goal of creating jobs where market mechanisms so far have left them sorely lacking?

“I tend to be a bit skeptical about putting all the emphasis on creating business in urban communities. There are plenty of jobs available,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “The problem is matching the people with the jobs.”

Jobs today are going begging, Sawhill said. “We don’t need so much to create jobs as to educate and train people to take the jobs and make sure they have adequate support--transportation, child care, health care, adequate wages” to make it possible to keep those jobs.

But for Clinton, the proof is in the tomatoes.

In Hermitage, a town of 639 near the Louisiana border, farmers--a number of them facing bankruptcy--banded together and formed a tomato processing and selling cooperative in 1996. They have doubled their sales over four years to about $4 million worth of tomatoes a year, largely because they are now selling to Burger King in the summer and autumn.

The fast-food franchiser was encouraged under a U.S. Department of Agriculture program to seek local suppliers for produce, and the cooperative received government-guaranteed financing to purchase processing and packaging equipment and develop the capacity to supply large customers.

Clinton spent the morning in the town and recalled an earlier visit in 1980.

“It was not a good year for me,” he said. “That’s the year I got beat for governor and I lost the tomato-eating contest.”

By one account, he came in fourth, gobbling 3.8 pounds of tomatoes in five minutes.

“I was sick for three days,” Clinton said. “It took me a whole week before I wanted to eat tomatoes again.”

As for the boxes of tomatoes that framed his lectern on Friday, they were rock-hard and pink, rather than red and juicy and begging to be bitten. The growing and processing season is over, the operations have been shut down, and the fruits were trucked in for the occasion.

They were props.