Nation: Cruisin' Down the River

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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!"