LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Basking in the cheers of a crowd of 3,000 foot-stomping Democrats, President Clinton became "get-out-the-vote Bill" on Tuesday, exhorting party loyalists to make sure their friends and neighbors and even strangers go to the polls on election day for a "national referendum on our dreams."
"Never before in our lifetime have we had this much prosperity," he told supporters who packed the gymnasium of DuPont Manual Magnet High School here. Another 500 people watched on closed-circuit television from an auditorium and several hundred more were outside the school, unable to get into the rally.
With the polls showing a virtual dead heat in the presidential race, Democrats need a big turnout from the party's cornerstone constituencies--blacks, Latinos, Jews, labor union members and their families. A personal appeal from the president can help do the job, according to Democratic strategists.
It is an assignment that Clinton, one of the nation's most natural politicians, has accepted with enthusiasm.
On Sunday, he went to church twice to exhort the faithful in the Washington area, and on Tuesday he spoke at the Kelly Temple Church of God in Christ in Harlem and at an Irish American fund-raising event for his wife, New York Senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
After returning to Washington today to continue working on a congressional budget deal and to headline two evening fund-raisers, Clinton will head west.
He flies to California Thursday for two days of intensive campaigning and fund-raising in the Los Angeles area and in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. He will appeal for votes at rallies and for cash for candidates at receptions.
Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic nominee for president, seems to have a solid lead in the state, but Democrats hope the president can help provide a winning margin in several close House races.
"He's working this very hard," said a Democratic campaign official, recounting how the president spent hour after hour on phone calls Saturday to Democratic loyalists across the country.
Greeted here Tuesday with a two-minute standing ovation, Clinton introduced himself as "a guy who's not running for anything" but simply working to get voters to the polls to elect Democratic candidates and sustain the nation's prosperity.
