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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 38

HILLARY CLINTON

Bellwether in a Storm


Ohio's Montgomery County, where the candidates are running neck

JON D. HULL/DAYTON


    Downtown Dayton may not be quite dead yet, but by dusk
Ohio's sixth largest city is pretty much out cold for the night.
With office vacancies at 22%, the evening rush hour is largely
a function of urgency rather than congestion: nobody wants to be
caught downtown after dark. By 6 Elder-Beerman, the last big
department store since Lazarus closed its doors in January, is
nearly empty. Outside a few remaining stragglers hurry to catch
buses for the outlying suburbs and strip malls, leaving behind
an uneasy mix of panhandlers, police and security guards. The
only other substantial signs of life on a recent Monday night
-- besides a few business travelers huddled in hotel bars -- are
the homeless hanging around outside the St. Vincent de Paul
shelter and the dozens of agitated voters gathered just across
the street at the local Democratic headquarters to blow off some
steam.

    Pass out a few torches, and the crowd just might march on
the nearest castle. "I've never seen things so bad in Dayton,"
says Garry Smith, 43, an unemployed autoworker and former Bush
supporter. "Clinton makes me nervous, but I feel desperate, and
I'm about willing to try anything." Gail Seman, 51, a temporary
office worker and registered Republican for 26 years, was first
shaken by Anita Hill's treatment during the Clarence Thomas
hearings. Then she watched the Republican Convention on TV last
month. "They showed someone from the Kansas delegation wearing
a T-shirt that had Clinton smoking dope with two babes and
Hillary hustling cookies," she says contemptuously. "Well, that
did it. That really did it." Like many small-town
Midwesterners, Seman is so polite she seems awkward when angry.
"Look how upset I am," she says, visibly quaking. Catching her
breath, she fires one last salvo: "Bush had four years, and now
he talks about change? Hah! Just how dumb does he think I am?"

    M.K. Maue, head Clinton volunteer for Montgomery County,
stands before a faded, gold-framed picture of F.D.R. and
addresses her newly inducted shock troops. "There are 125,000
unregistered voters in this county that we need to reach," she
says solemnly. The crowd cheers as she introduces a young
volunteer who has already registered 200 voters at his booth in
front of a Wal-Mart store. Maue asks, "Did anyone go to the
German Festival?" Embarrassed silence. "Too bad. That would have
been a good place to wear your buttons and T-shirts."

    Not exactly a rousing call to arms, but the battle is
critical nonetheless. Enough of those Bill and Al T-shirts among
the 97,000 registered Democrats, 66,000 Republicans and 136,000
independents scattered across this swatch of gently rolling
southwestern Ohio, and Clinton may get his hands on those White
House curtains after all. When it comes to choosing Presidents,
Montgomery County (pop. 574,000) tends to pick a winner. Only
once since 1968 has the region failed to vote for the
victorious candidate. In 1988 it gave Bush a 57% majority. Now
both the Bush and Clinton campaigns are targeting Montgomery as
a critical swing county in a critical state -- and the latest
TIME poll shows both candidates in a virtual dead heat, with
Clinton ahead of Bush 41% to 40%.

    Though unemployment stands at 6.8%, almost a full point
below the national average, voters have grappled with an eroding
industrial base since the 1970s, when NCR Corp. -- the town's
main employer for nearly a century -- shed 14,000 workers.
Subsequently, Dayton Tire and Rubber Co., Frigidaire and Dayton
Press all pulled out or closed down. "Dayton just got knocked
on its butt," says Steve Sidlo, managing editor of the Dayton
Daily News (circ. 182,000). "We were losing 2,000 jobs here,
4,000 there and 5,000 there. It was just bang, bang, bang, one
body blow after another."

    The beating hasn't stopped. Last December the Department
of Energy announced the closure of the EG&G Mound Applied
Technologies nuclear-weapons facility in Miamisburg (pop.
18,000), which employs 1,600 and pumps millions into the
community. In January USAir closed most of its hub at Dayton
International Airport. Heavy dependence on the auto industry
gives residents the jitters: with eight plants employing about
20,000 workers, Montgomery County has the largest concentration
of domestic GM jobs outside Michigan.

    Last month autoworkers got their first good news in years,
when GM announced plans to build a $155 million paint facility
at its Moraine assembly plant. But the real key to Montgomery's
economic endurance is the nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force
Base, the largest in the nation, with 28,000 employees and a
payroll of $968 million a year. As part of its post-cold war
consolidation, the Pentagon in July officially merged the Air
Force Systems Command and the Logistics Command into a new Air
Force Material Command, headquartered at Wright-Patterson.

    Straddling the intersection between the Great Miami, the
Mad and the Stillwater rivers, Dayton is the kind of town
where locals still thank travelers for visiting and really mean
it. "We're so white bread," chuckles Sidlo, referring to the
regional temperament rather than skin color. Though modest,
residents are still demonstrably jealous of the fact that Kitty
Hawk, North Carolina, gets all the glory for the first Wright
brothers flight, even though the inventors lived and worked in
Dayton. "Hell, we deserve the credit," says Thomas Heine,
president of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce. But he admits
that name recognition is not one of Dayton's greater assets: "If
you ask most people about Dayton, they won't say yuck, and they
won't say yeah! They'll say, `Huh?' "

    The city's population has plummeted 30% since 1960,
largely because of white flight that reached supersonic speeds
in 1976, when the public schools started court-ordered busing.
The county's black population has held steady at about 18%, but
Montgomery County remains so segregated that activists hold
annual rallies at the "peace bridge" that spans the Great Miami
River, which runs like a racial moat between very black West
Dayton and very white East Dayton. Where blacks and whites do
coexist, it's often a case of what Dayton Mayor Richard Dixon
calls "temporary integration" -- meaning that whites simply
haven't had time to pack their bags yet.

    Life in Montgomery is still steeped in Midwestern
tradition, but with much less optimism and much more fear. The
entire county is like a huge Norman Rockwell painting
dramatically retouched for the 1990s. During the Mountain Days
Festival last month, the county celebrated the Appalachian roots
of thousands of families lured to Dayton decades ago to work in
the automobile factories. With a rapidly eroding industrial
identity, rising crime, health-care fears and hoarse debates
over abortion, Montgomery offers an uncanny reflection of the
worried nation itself -- a miniature American theme park ready
to be plunked down in the next World Expo.

    Crack houses? Head due west just a few minutes from
downtown Dayton. (And lock the car doors.) Says Mayor Dixon: "We
have a tremendous crack problem and very few resources from the
Federal Government." Which partly explains why the Montgomery
County jail is undergoing a $20 million expansion despite a
budget crunch.

    Looking for country-club Republicans? Drive straight south
from the city center to the enclave of Oakwood (pop. 9,000).
"They call me the token Democrat," says James Sullivan, deputy
director of the county board of elections and Oakwood resident.
"When you die here, people don't say you won an Academy Award
or whatever; they just say you lived in Oakwood."

    Reagan Democrats? Head due east a few minutes from
downtown, and pull over alongside the tidy, one-story wood and
brick starter homes sporting American flags. White, patriotic
and religious, East Dayton is the hinge that will determine
whether Montgomery County swings left to Clinton or right to
Bush. Politicians prowl these neighborhoods at their own risk.
"I think we should throw them all out," growls Charles Balger,
66, a retired real estate agent and Navy vet. Balger remains
bitterly undecided about how he'll vote in November. "I've
always voted Republican, but Bush hasn't done anything," he
says. "I would have voted for Perot just to put someone new in
to shake things up."

    Congressional challenger Pete Davis, a 36-year-old
Republican running against incumbent Tony Hall, displays a map
of Montgomery County in his office. East Dayton is highlighted
in yellow. "Those are the people I need to win," he says
confidently. Davis hopes to unseat Hall, a popular seven-term
Congressman who has made his mark on hunger and human-rights
issues, by riding the anti-incumbent bandwagon. At every
campaign stop he bashes Hall for living in a nice "custom-built"
house in Virginia rather than in the district, for spending too
much time on foreign affairs and for voting against the Gulf
War.

    Hall is unrepentant. "Hell's bells," he says, reacting to
his opponent's charges. "Look at my record. Look at what I've
done for the district." He stands by his vote against the Gulf
War resolution and explains his home in Virginia by saying,
"I'm a family man. I work in Washington five days a week, and
when I come home I want to eat with my family." (He travels to
Dayton every other weekend, staying with his mother.) Davis has
a tougher time attacking Hall on so-called family-value issues:
Hall is a pro-life, born-again Christian. Nonetheless, Davis is
loath to concede moral issues in a district as traditional as
Montgomery County. After some thought he suggests that "Hall is
anti-family because he is anti-choice in schools."

    The Republicans are hoping their stress on family values
will give them an edge in Montgomery County. "Family values
play exceptionally well here," says Mayor Dixon, who is black.
"Even the African Americans are somewhat conservative." Still,
moral questions can be a two-edged sword, even for the
Republicans. The Montgomery County Republican Party has had four
chairmen in three years because of a struggle over abortion
between religious conservatives and moderates. "Abortion is this
generation's Vietnam," says Vicki Pegg, the pro-choice
Republican county recorder. Pegg was harassed for her stance
during an unsuccessful bid for county auditor two years ago. "I
had some mail that would turn your stomach," she says.

    For now, it is much easier to find Republicans for Clinton
in Montgomery County than Democrats for Bush. Still, the more
affluent suburbs remain heavily Republican. Among these Bush
loyalists, fear of higher taxes carries far more weight than
so-called family values. "What it gets down to here is which
candidate is going to affect voters' pocketbooks the least,"
says Sherwin Eisman, the Republican mayor of the middle-class
suburb of Huber Heights (pop. 40,000). Eisman is one of the few
local politicians who enthusiastically endorse Bush. Pegg, one
of the county's top elected Republicans, won't even comment on
Bush or his record. Heine admits, "I'm hearing a lot of business
people say they are disappointed with Bush but they just can't
vote for a Democrat."

    When the vote comes in, James Sullivan will help tally the
results. A mechanical engineer by trade, he helped design parts
for the P-51 Mustang fighter in Dayton during World War II. He
won his first office in 1952, when he was elected ward
committeeman, and he's been wrapped up in local politics ever
since. But among Dayton's old-timers, Sullivan is best known for
the ordeal he faced in 1973, when his 24-year-old son
disappeared while hiking alone on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
Though overweight, Sullivan hit the track, got in shape,
journeyed to Africa and retrieved the body.

    Now 65 and overweight again, Sullivan sits in his tiny
green office at the board of elections, surrounded by mementos
of his and Dayton's past. "The difference between now and then
is that we had hope, and now people don't," he says. "You used
to be able to get out of high school, get a job at GM and buy
two cars and a boat. Now a lot of people are out on the street,
jobless, and the courts are clogged with drug cases." He picks
up a small model of a P-51 he keeps on display. "Boy, we could
really build 'em back then," he says with a shake of his head.
Unwilling to linger on nostalgia, he quickly returns to
politics and the region's future. "Look, we got problems, but
I'll tell you, people in this town are ready to go," he says.
"It's like we're all dressed up and just waiting for the band
to start." Only problem is, most voters in Montgomery haven't
heard the sound of music in years.