Bill's Revival Hour

At the Topeka Foundry & Iron Works last week, the setting was new, but the set was familiar: klieg lights, blue-draped dais, place cards, Congressmen, a sprinkling of average Americans and the President, headlining another health- care forum. The audience of 150 Kansas business owners was treated to the spectacle of the nation's President, looking every bit the Accountant in Chief, doing business math for a Mexican-restaurant owner, a flower-shop owner, an architect, a construction-company owner and a farmer. Their chief concern was how much money they personally would fork over if his plan became law. Regina Jaramillo was worried about insuring the part-timers at her restaurant. "At 7.9%," Clinton patiently explained, "then the real cost -- additional cost -- of doing business would be one-third of that because the payroll is a third of total cost, or something less than 3%."

That kind of calculation was not exactly what the President's staff had in mind when they planned the week-long, multistate health-care blitz. The goal was to jump-start the Administration plan while Congress was out of session -- and in the process put the President back on offense after weeks of answering Whitewater charges. One group of Democratic lobbyists and public relations executives who "want action, not gridlock; problem solving, not partisan bashing" even announced the formation of the Back to Business Committee to make sure that crime and welfare reform and health care did not get drowned in Whitewater. By the end of the week there were signs that the strategy was working. A TIME/CNN poll found that just over half of those surveyed felt that the media are paying too much attention to Whitewater. As for health care, after weeks of indifference or actual distaste for the President's plan, some voters came on board. Whether it is the absence of any clear alternative or a renewed attention to the specifics of Clinton's proposal, the number of people saying they favor the President's package rose to 48% last week, up from 41% a month ago.

That progress may owe something to Clinton's artful exercise in euphemism and paraphrase, an effort to avoid some of the phrases that seem to conjure images of a sprawling, socialist nightmare. At town meetings and health forums in Charlotte, North Carolina; Topeka and Fairway, Kansas; and Minneapolis, Minnesota, the President rolled out a new script with five simpler talking points. "Universal coverage," for example, is now "permanent private health insurance." But the President was hard-pressed to avoid minutiae. Like Oz, he was faced with a new wish list from every American he met. At the foundry forum, he talked with only six people but encountered six idiosyncratic sets of concerns.