By Land and Over the Air, No Escaping Campaign

So this is what we’re missing out in California. This is what it’s like game day, front row center in the belly of Green Bay Packers country.

We’re not talking football. These days, the big battle is on the presidential gridiron, as the candidates throw Hail Marys for the White House. A highlight reel:

* As the leaves turn orange in this scrubbed little city, the most frequent forward pass is political campaign mail being stuffed beside the sewer bills, endlessly extolling Al Gore or George W. Bush.

* That phone call, the one interrupting dinner, all too often is a political pollster tapping the hopes and fears of denizens here near the north shore of Lake Winnebago.

* Outside Kohl’s Department Store, an unsuspecting shopper huddled in a down vest is stopped by yet another out-of-state newspaper reporter asking pesky questions.

* Wisconsin’s airwaves are jammed with dueling campaign ads from America’s aspirants for the Oval Office, wedged into station breaks from Oprah to the late-night news and beyond.

* Television may rule the modern campaign, but folks in Appleton or Green Bay, 25 miles to the northeast, also get candidates in the flesh. Bush and Gore have each visited Wisconsin half a dozen times. So have their wives, their running mates and supporters.

In California, we rarely get such abundant attention. We’ve mostly been written off--at least by Democrats--as a done deal for Al Gore, 54 electoral votes in the bank for the vice president. Gore isn’t advertising, and the GOP only recently amped up its output of TV commercials in the Golden State.

The real presidential race is left to the battlegrounds of Campaign 2000, the swing states of the Great Lakes and Pennsylvania and Florida. The fight on TV and in the mailbox and among lawn signs is waged most fiercely in places like Scranton, Pa., or Flint, Mich., or Dayton, Ohio.

A Bush Backer Ready to Meet Her Man

In these targets of electoral opportunity, the campaign is nearly impossible to ignore. The near-mythic road to the White House goes right through such spots.

It rolled past Marilyn Ossian’s house just the other day.

Bush and his motorcade were scheduled to drive down Taft Avenue on the way to a campaign stop a block away at Appleton’s McKinley Elementary School.

Ossian, an ardent Bush backer, was ready.

She stowed her green and yellow Packers banner, the one that hangs on Sunday game days, and planted Bush/Cheney placards in the lawn. She plastered a Bush bumper sticker to her red shirt beneath the white windbreaker and just above the blue pants. She held two small American flags in one hand, a video camera in the other.

“It’s wonderful!” gushed Ossian. “The presidential campaign is coming right to my doorstep!”

Down the block, yellow police tape stretched along the sidewalk opposite the two-story schoolhouse. An armada of TV satellite trucks covered the playground.

The Bush brigades milled about. Fresh off a rally downtown at Harry Houdini Square, named after the most famous native son in this city of 70,000 astride the Fox River, they waited patiently with placards, 200 strong.

Among them, Sarah DeBruin hunkered in the gathering gloom of approaching rain clouds with her three towheaded toddlers. Once an 80-hour workweek attorney, DeBruin has downshifted for the kids. Her worries? Taxes and war.

DeBruin also has never seen a presidential election focus so sharply on Appleton and the half dozen other fast-growing suburban communities known collectively as the Fox Cities.

“There’s so much energy,” said DeBruin. “Everyone I know keeps talking about the election, probably because there’s been so much attention around here.”

A few dozen feet away, protesters started a chant.

More Trees! Less Bush!

Bush loyalists scurried over to go nose-to-nose.

We Want Bush! We Want Bush!

Amid the discordance was Dick Sampson. The retired librarian held a sign--”Don’t Bushwhack Working Families”--and hope in his heart that Al Gore somehow will win. But he can’t stand the commercials battering his hometown.

“You don’t have five minutes without them,” he said. “They’re even on the Weather Channel!”

This summer, in fact, only a couple of cities in hotly contested Pennsylvania and Michigan have been flooded with more political commercial minutes than Wisconsin. More pro-Gore ads ran in Green Bay over the summer than anywhere else in the United States.

But it isn’t just TV. Every 10th person hereabout seems to have been snagged by a pollster. Sampson has. So has Sue Kempfer.

While the hubbub raged at McKinley school, Kempfer headed into Kohl’s for some shopping. Nearby, construction workers were trying to beat the seasons to build a Wal-Mart. Kempfer, a mother of four, likes the direction of her hometown and her country. She will vote Gore.

She believes people in the Fox Cities, puffed up by some suggestions that the area’s nearly 200,000 residents are the most important swing bloc in the nation, feel a patriotic duty to get it right.

“There’s a feeling we could help decide the race,” said Kempfer. “People are taking their vote to heart.”

Kim Freimuth is solidly undecided but predicted Bush’s appearance would play well in this region of Dutch and German immigrants and strict traditions.

“People think George W. will be just like his dad, so if they voted for the dad they’ll vote for him,” Freimuth said. “Around here, it’s traditional; you don’t buck your mom or dad.”

Democrat locals certainly understand such family allegiances.

In the days before Bush arrives, Gore backers distributed buttons: “I Didn’t Vote for His Dad, Either.”

State Prides Itself on Independent Streak

But many in these parts remain decidedly on the fence, just like Freimuth. For Wisconsin, this is normal. The state long has displayed a stoic independence, a split personality on politics.

Wisconsin backed Democrats the last three presidential races, but also helped elect Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

During the Clinton years, the state has fared handsomely, its $40-billion dairy and agricultural industry powering the economy. Unemployment is a statistically irrelevant 3.5%. Wisconsin sits 42nd on the FBI Crime Index.

In Appleton, every house seems freshly painted. Community pride is abundant.

“People here are pretty happy, pretty content,” said Dave Baehnman, a department store manager and father of two daughters. “Paying for your kid’s college, saving Social Security, those are the big issues around here.”

With polls showing the race in Wisconsin neck and neck, Bush and Gore have haunted America’s Dairyland.

Gore, Bush Pay Their Respects

Bush recently tossed footballs with quarterback Brett Favre and other Packers. Both candidates spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August; Bush appeared at the American Legion meeting in Milwaukee. Gore and running mate Joseph I. Lieberman launched their post-convention steamboat tour down the Mississippi from La Crosse. The vice president barnstormed the state again just last week.

When the candidates can’t make it, high-profile stand-ins fill the bill. Dick Cheney’s wife made headlines. So did Gore’s oldest daughter. Even his Democratic rival, former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, came to Green Bay to endorse the vice president.

Bush’s most able aid has come from longtime Wisconsin Gov. Tommy G. Thompson. To offset Thompson’s political punch, Gore is counting on Wisconsin’s powerful teachers union, which has been energized by an ongoing battle over GOP support of school vouchers.

Many here believe Bush can’t win the presidency if he doesn’t take the Fox Cities, which join Green Bay to act as a counterweight to the more liberal downstate vote.

“The trouble is Madison and Milwaukee,” said C.A. “Kelly” Wieckert, a pillar of Appleton’s Republican business community. “Madison--man oh man. They’re all a bunch of socialists and environmentalists down there.”

Ads Everywhere, Even During Packer Games

Standing in front of McKinley school in coat and tie, thick white hair a tad tousled, Wieckert was the picture of conservative success. He owns gravel pits and helped develop a new regional mall. His son is “110% conservative Republican” and represents the area in the statehouse.

But even this die-hard shudders at the TV campaign, appalled by the incessant commercial appeals. Wisconsin long has been a swing state, he said, but folks can’t recall an ad inundation like this.

Clifford “Chip” Cohen, a local business executive and a GOP stalwart, said locals are particularly miffed by ad buys smack in the middle of Packer football games. But he understands.

“This state right now is absolutely a dead heat,” Cohen said. “They’ve got to do all they can to win it.”

Just then Bush’s motorcade pulled up, a parade of limousines and sport-utility vehicles bristling with Secret Service agents.

The Texas governor emerged with a wave. Laura, his wife, followed with a fixed red-lipstick smile. For the next 15 minutes, the couple strolled down a funnel of squealing kids leading to the school front door.

Cohen, standing nearby, smiled and snapped a picture when the Bushes emerged after the rally.

“No matter what side of the fence you’re on, it does rally civic pride,” Cohen said.