Bill Barnstorms Asheboro

When I came to work last Monday, I thought I had my week outlined. But over my first cup of coffee I was asked “what did they mean on TV last night that President Clinton was coming to Asheboro?” I said it must be a mistake—as county party chair, I was sure I’d know if a former President was going to visit. But low and behold, it was not only on TV, it was in the newspaper, and back in my office, newspaper reporters and numerous local officials were calling me for more information. At 9AM I called the contacts I we had for the Clinton campaign, and evidently got both of them out of bed. Someone would be in touch with me, they said. They weren’t authorized to say more. (“That information/ decision/ authorization is above my pay grade” – was soon to become a familiar refrain, indicating the top-down hierarchy of the Clinton campaign.) But gradually it became clear: the unthinkable was going to happen. President Bill Clinton was actually coming to speak in Asheboro, population under 25,000, situated smack in the middle of Randolph County, traditional home of 42,000 registered Republicans outnumbering Democrats by two to one.

At 11:30 I got a call asking me to meet with a Clinton Campaign Advance Man ASAP, and the fun house ride began. Within a half an hour I was riding around with an affable fellow named Scott, looking for his ideal “front porch.” Why a front porch? He volunteered no real reason. After showing him the best the town had to offer, we settled on my first choice, the tiny wrap-around porch of The Gatekeeper’s House, restored 1883 home of the hundred year old Asheboro Woman’s Club. It is situated near downtown just across Lanier Street from the City’s Memorial Park swimming pool and tennis courts, so there were open lawn, parking, and bathrooms—all vital. Scott liked it. A lot. Within minutes we were joined by two secret service agents, a Major from the police department, the city manager, public works director, and recreation director, and minutes after that, we had a green light on the site and the visit.

That was the fastest decision made all week, the only one where I had any real influence, and turned out to be the one that nobody locally could understand. Why not at the high school gym? (Actually, that was the backup site, and given the monsoon that extended from Tuesday to Wednesday afternoon, it could easily have been the real site). But a gym was to be the President’s location in Statesville, the last town on the tour. And an auditorium was the place at Davidson Community College in Thomasville, as a baseball stadium was the spot in Hillsborough, and a courtyard the venue in Elon. So I figured the campaign just wanted to mix up the sites, so they weren’t all the same.

I didn’t understand that this was a carefully thought-out strategy until the very end; actually until I greeted President Clinton (an hour and 45 minutes late). “Thanks for coming to Randolph County, Mr. President,” I said. We’re happy to have you; we appreciate all the help we can get. But I’m not sure how much help we can be to you-- you do realize this is a majority Republican county, don’t you?” “Well, you know,” he said, “Hillary’s always done really well in these majority Republican counties. Look at Pennsylvania last night, or Texas, and Ohio. And she always wins upstate New York in her senate races. We love places like this.”

He went on to shake hands and have photo ops with our small group of assembled Democrats (including my mother, representing the Woman’s Club); then he spoke for over an hour, extemporaneously, reading no more than questions submitted off the Ask Hilliary website, and had the crowd eating out of his hand. A crowd of over one thousand, the largest group of Democrats (and many Republicans) assembled for a political rally in living memory, and most of whom had been waiting for about 3 hours. And Bill Clinton became their new best friend from high school. He told funny stories, he was folksy, charming and self-deprecating; and suddenly he could become the wonky policy nerd, with facts and figures available off the cuff to answer any question. It was a virtuoso performance, perhaps the best I’ve ever seen a politician give. It was obvious that he was very comfortable in the setting, a small southern front porch, the crowd only five feet away, hands to shake, babies and little old ladies to kiss, and voters to persuade. The Clinton people later told me that the President loved it, said Hilliary would love it too, that it was his favorite spot all day.

An article in The New Yorker says that Bill Clinton is frustrated that the only national reporters whose attention he seems to gather are those on gaffe patrol. The New Republic agrees that the media has somehow developed an overt hostility toward a man “who after all left the White House with the highest approval ratings of any departing president in Gallup polling history.” Another writer this week have made a case that Bill Clinton has been keep in political Purgatory by his wife’s campaign, banished to “remote areas that don't make the cut for Hillary's itinerary.” Monday a friend emailed me an article from the Huffington Post, where his Asheboro speech was analyzed in snarky depth as typical of the Clinton campaign’s small town strategy. “In some ways it's astonishing that places like Asheboro still exist in America; on the other hand, as Election 2008 unfolds, these Asheboros are having their say,” the author concludes.

Yes, Asheboro does exist, and it regularly confounds and irritates its few Democrats. We’ve always wanted big names to visit, but never before has anyone actually been interested. Looking back, it’s like reliving the tornado: the whirlwind is gone but the landscape isn’t quite the same anymore. I really didn’t know why they wanted to come; didn’t understand till it was all over that the “front porch” I picked out was actually part of someone’s winning strategy (it turned out to look great on TV in contrast to all the others). And it was cool to be in the center of the hurricane, once it started, and cool to think that this was a part of history, these were pictures that would be in our local history books after all the people in them have gone. And there I had a something of a sense of time-travelling, because that day was so NOT modern American politics as usual, yet it USED to be standard operating procedure. To have a President of the United States on a porch, in Asheboro, speaking and answering questions from voters… it was 2008 but it could have been Harry Truman, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Abraham Lincoln, or Thomas Jefferson… That’s the way it always used to be, and it’s something we’ve lost. But at least we got it back for a little while last week. And I was just happy to be there.