Cruisin' Down the River

A water-borne version of the old whistle-stop tour

A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force--the one which can't bear to be outside the pale, can't bear to be in disfavor, can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder, wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome.--Mark Twain

The chronicler of life on the Mississippi might have had a premonition about Jimmy Carter's descent on the Father of Waters last week. From the averted faces and cold shoulders of the poll readers in Washington, the President escaped by steamboat to the smiles and welcomes of Middle America. His seven-day, 660-mile journey from St. Paul to St. Louis was a vacation both officially and in the sense that many politicians find campaigning a vacation from the cares of the office. Unmistakably, Carter was campaigning for reelection.

It was an exercise in nostalgia of several sorts. The vessel was the Delta Queen, a four-deck, wooden, stern-wheel steamer fitted out with Tiffany lamps and polished hardwood floors to remind tourists of the riverboats of Mark Twain's day.* Its progress down the river was a water-borne version of the whistle-stop tour of fond memory (to politicians anyway). The President's manner was a throwback to the campaigner's style of 1976, as he worked some of the same territory--notably Iowa, where his earlier triumph in district caucuses gave the first hint that he would have to be taken seriously as a candidate.

At 47 stops along the river, including some obscure hamlets and locks, Carter leaped ashore to shake hands and kiss babies; in the first 200 miles alone, he caused the Delta Queen to make nine unscheduled stops so that he could press more flesh. "Hi, I love you," he said over and over. Nobody who saw Carter's scratched and swollen hands or the lines of fatigue etching his face in the dawn at places like rain-drenched Lynxville Lock, Wis., could doubt that he was working at least as hard on this vacation as at the White House. But Carter obviously found the journey invigorating. On the bow deck as the Delta Queen paddled down the river, mostly at a stately 3 m.p.h., the President bobbed up at each toot from the flotilla of pleasure craft that escorted the Queen. Many times he restlessly scanned the tree-lined green bluffs through binoculars; whenever he detected something that might be a waving arm, he lifted his arm in instant response. One afternoon he leaped atop a rickety deck chair to wave, and almost catapulted himself into a swan dive over the rail.

Between the stops, scheduled and unscheduled, Rosalynn mostly stayed out of sight. But Amy, free for once from the formality of the White House, delightedly engaged four other girls on board in a game of hide-and-seek with her security agent, and picked out Mary Had a Little Lamb on the Delta Queen's calliope. Amy has developed into something of a campaigner; at some stops she worked her own sections of the crowd. One night, when Carter was speaking from the boat to a riverbank audience, several young boys standing knee-deep in the water shouted, "Let Amy talk!"

The 150 other passengers--mostly comfortable, retired and Republican--generally remained shyly aloof from the presidential party and seemed bewildered by the uproar of a campaign swing. Some complained that they were awakened at 6:30 a.m. the first day by the pounding of Carter's feet as he jogged 22 laps around the deck; thereafter the President did his running ashore. Security was agreeably loose, however; Secret Service agents, clad in jeans and T shirts, lounged in deck chairs and smiled amiably at the few nervous passengers who strolled hesitantly past the President's rear cabin. Carter roamed on board freely, but generally alone, though he and Rosalynn viewed the vessel's mild entertainments--a card-sharping exhibition and the movie Showboat--and shared drinks in the lounge one night with a group of Catholic retirees. Lois Paskett, a widow from St. Paul, bubbled, "I have a hard time getting to sleep just thinking I am on the same boat with the President." Nonetheless, by journey's end many passengers were grumbling about the noisy goings on.

The White House did not bother to disguise the fact that the trip was at least partly a campaign tour but insisted that it was "not a partisan campaign for Democrats or me," in Carter's words, but a journey to promote the President's energy program. At every stop, while the calliope tooted God Bless America, Carter preached a new energy ethic, in simplistic terms. Saving energy, he insisted over and over, is "exciting" and "enjoyable," not "inconvenient" or "painful." In folksy, fervent lectures, he urged people to insulate their houses, drive less, observe the 55-m.p.h. speed limit, join car pools.

Everywhere, Carter turned the trip into a revivalist gathering down by the riverside. The standard line, which never failed to win roars of approval: "How many of you believe we live in the greatest nation on earth? . . . If you will help me, we can make the greatest nation on earth even greater."

Of course, not even in the middle of the Mississippi can a President entirely escape controversy. After he disclosed that he had approved the sale of 1.5 million bbl. of U.S. heating oil to Iran, he got into a shouting match at Quincy, Ill., with critics of the move. Carter said testily: "You want me to tell them not to ship us any more [crude] oil?" As for charges that the President was drifting far from the demands of his job, Press Secretary Jody Powell hotly retorted, "What he has been doing here is the single most important thing he could be doing."

Carter unbent enough to join reporters, including TIME Correspondent Johanna McGeary, on the bow deck one evening for an unaccustomed hour of chitchat. He gave a peculiarly detailed recital of the horsepower ratings of tugboats passing through Lock 26 on the Mississippi. He also offered some personal glimpses. He reads literary potboilers, he said. When? "I read in the bathroom." He disclosed that when in Washington he keeps a diary: "It's amazing how detailed mine is." When a reporter recalled that Mark Twain had called Congress the only "distinctly native criminal class," Carter joked that the remark was "very perceptive--but remember, it was Mark Twain who said it, not me."

All along the river, the crowds were large--close to 4,000 in tiny Wabasha, Minn., 100 even in a dense fog at Genoa, Wis., at 3:15 a.m.--and friendly too. Many shouted, "We're for you, Jimmy!" White House aides believe that the sight on TV of admiring crowds mobbing the President will improve his standing.

But Carter ruefully admitted to several audiences that "people don't come to see me; they come to see the President." How many votes he won remains to be seen. In Mark Twain's home town of Hannibal, Mo., Rosemary Pachzkowski waited for several hours at the corner of Hill and Main streets for a glimpse of the President, then hoisted high a hand-lettered sign proclaiming, I VOTED FOR JIMMY. Would she vote for him again? Don't know, she said: "It depends on who runs against him."

*Though it was fabricated in Scotland in 1926 and originally ferried passengers between San Francisco and Sacramento.

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