They all have their reasons for turning out to see the buses.
Despite the stage-managed and increasingly artificial nature of his buscapades, it`s evident that Democrat Bill Clinton`s convoy has touched a nerve with voters.
In an era when few like politics and fewer like politicians, the Democratic presidential nominee continues to lure large crowds to unlikely locales.
Excitement is a rare and precious commodity in American politics these days, but Clinton has found a way to generate a surprising amount on the road. Reasons vary. At shopping malls and interstate exit ramps people show up for a look at faces from the cover of People magazine, faces like Hillary Clinton`s and Tipper Gore`s.
Some in the crowds are driven by a dose of small-town civic pride or because the TV cameras are on hand.
Others show up with their camcorders and their kids because a motorcade and a half-dozen buses rolling off the interstate is the biggest thing that`s happened in town since the state prep football championship.
Talking to faces in the crowd, you find some show up because they like Clinton, or because they don`t like George Bush, or even because they don`t like Clinton and want to let him know it.
At every stop, there are anti-abortion demonstrators and Republican loyalists sporting Bush-Quayle signs and, sometimes, Pat Buchanan buttons.
Some of the connections are personal, reaching back to an era when politics and politicians were in better odor with their constituents.
At a small rally last week at a shopping mall in Georgetown, Texas, Virgil and Fran Carlson were patiently waiting for a chance to shake Clinton`s hand.
They are older voters, their party loyalty steeped in family tradition. As such, they`re about the most dependable element in the Democratic base.
”We`re here because we`re Democrats,” said Virgil Carlson, tugging at his suspenders. ”We asked our neighbors to come out and see these boys.”
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”We saw Harry Truman here on his whistle-stop in 1948,” Fran Carlson said, smiling. ”We were college students here at the time.”
At this point in the campaign, the fourth Clinton-Gore bus trip is about as spontaneous as grand opera. It`s managed by Frank Capra wannabes with cellular phones, by propagandists who see political campaigns as a series of celluloid backdrops.
The film-school types are backed up by campaign aides whose mission appears to be to inflate crowd counts and reorder reality.
A crowd of teenagers let out of high school near New Braunfels, for example, is offered as evidence that the Clinton-Gore ticket is running strong in a Republican county.
An overheated and overlong rally at the University of Texas on Thursday is highlighted by suggestions from campaign aides that 50,000 Clinton fanatics are settled on the lawn outside the Lyndon B. Johnson Library.
As it turns out, the crowd is about a third of the campaign estimate.
Campaign aides have been lying about the size of crowds since candidates found press agents. But Clinton`s well-orchestrated road show is fraught with peril for anyone trying to keep the TV ethic at bay.
Some of the collisions between voter spontaneity and campaign planning are amusing.
In Georgetown last Thursday, a woman with two small children in strollers extolled Clinton`s political virtues, then went on to explain that her husband went to college with one of the candidate`s media consultants.
”We put the signs up out on the highway,” she said.
Throughout the Texas bus tour, the campaign has been determined to set down in mediagenic places such as Tyler, the self-proclaimed Rose Capital of America, and in Corsicana, ancestral home of the Christmas fruitcake.
For all the show-biz, however, reality intrudes in compelling ways.
On Thursday night, Clinton and Al Gore entertained a crowd of about 8,000 at a rally in Waco.
Roy Hardin, an independent trucker, stared at the crowd.
”You know, this is the Bible Belt,” he told a visitor. ”Truth is, it`s the buckle of the Bible Belt. Lots of folks here don`t care much about anything but abortion in this election.”
Hardin says he doesn`t share that view, that he`s worried about the country`s economic future and his own.
He isn`t sure for whom he`s voting but thought it made sense to fight the traffic to get a look at Clinton.
”I know I`m supposed to think it doesn`t matter who gets elected,”
Hardin said. ”But I grew up on the idea that voting was a way to get your point across, to let people know what you were thinking.”