Off the bus: blue-collar Democrats ditch Clinton.

• Author: Nichols, John

For a full third of this century, Larry Solomon has worked at a Caterpillar tractor plant in southern Illinois. Through the years, he has maintained a loyalty to his church, his family, and his union. It used to be that Solomon maintained a loyalty to the Democratic Party, too. But Bill Clinton has changed that.

"There's something like 127 billionaires in this country, and as far as I can tell, Bill Clinton has spent his entire Presidency catering to them," says Solomon, who proudly wears a United Auto Workers Union T-shirt. "I counted on Clinton to deliver on a few things for working folks in this country, but he let us down. He threw in with the billionaires, and he told the rest of us to go to hell."

As the Clinton camp gears up for the 1996 reelection campaign, the President and his advisers are still counting on Larry Solomon and other core working-class constituents. But the Clinton folks better watch out.

In working-class communities along the routes of his fabled 1992 bus trips, the Clinton record is not playing well, and there is a growing uncertainty about whether reelecting Bill Clinton really matters.

"You have a lot of diehard Democrats who thought, `This is the man, he's going to deliver,'" says Todd Loyd, a sewer-plant worker in the hard-scrabble southern Illinois town of Sandoval, where Clinton campaigned after earning the Democratic nomination in July 1992. "Now that he hasn't delivered, they're doubly disappointed."

While Washington commentators continue to mumble that Clinton won the Presidency as some kind of "new Democrat," his 1992 campaign was in fact powered by the rhetoric of economic populism, including attacks on Wall Street and the insurance industry and a promise to protect the vanishing American dreams of "folks who work hard and play by the rules but can't seem to get ahead."

Clinton's stump speeches in places like Wheeling, West Virginia, and Vandalia, Illinois, were thick with class-warfare rhetoric. Blue-collar crowds that frequently numbered in the tens of thousands answered Clinton with cheers and later with votes.

There's this mistaken assumption that Clinton won on a conservative message in 1992," says Robert Brenner, director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at the University of Southern California. "Clinton won because he talked about creating a national healthcare system, about protecting American jobs, and all the other issues that working-class Americans were concerned about. He didn't say everything he could have, but he clearly sent signals that he was on the side of working people, and that was vital to his success, especially in the Midwest."

Pundits often portray blue-collar America as a constituency that begins in Detroit and ends around Cleveland, but the rivers of working-class consciousness run wide and long, through towns like Camden, York, Youngstown, Evansville, and St. Louis. Clinton recognized this in 1992, targeting a substantial portion of his campaign on nooks and crannies of industrial America that had not been visited by a Democratic Presidential candidate since Harry Truman's...