OUISVILLE - Eleanor Jordan, the Democratic candidate for Congress in Kentucky's third district, made President Clinton's day when she introduced him as ''the main event'' to a cheering, stomping, sign-waving audience that filled a high school gymnasium here yesterday.
Mostly left on the sidelines in his wife's New York Senate bid and bluntly told ''no, thanks'' for months when he offered to campaign for Vice President Al Gore, Clinton yesterday began what must seem to him the lamest-duck assignment: stumping for congressional candidates in states where his presence won't have any impact on the presidential race.
''I have some passing experience in these kinds of events,'' Clinton began after Jordan, an African-American state legislator and a stemwinding speaker, had revved up the partisan crowd. ''And I was thinking, `This girl is good!'''
If he was melancholy or longing for the real main event, the president didn't mention it. He forcefully recounted how the country was better off than it had been eight years before - with lower unemployment, less crime, improved education, better health care, fewer teen pregnancies, a smaller federal bureaucracy - and insisted that the best way to keep the good times rolling and the American dream growing was to extend the Clinton-Gore legacy by electing Democrats next week.
''You've got seven days, seven days to find somebody and tell them you want to build on the progress of the last eight years. We don't want to abandon it,'' Clinton said, urging the audience to heed the advice of ''a guy who's not running for anything.''
As the duPont Manual High School band played ''Hail to the Chief,'' some people in the audience raised signs that said, ''Thank you, Mr. President.'' William Wilson hung over a railing, declared Clinton ''charismatic,'' and said he wished the president could run for a third term. ''He should be campaigning for Gore. He should have done it sooner,'' said Wilson, who is retired and lives in Louisville.
That is not what Gore's strategists think. Based on their internal polling and focus groups, Clinton is not admired by many Americans, particularly suburban women who make up a sought-after segment of the undecided vote.
Consequently, Gore's top advisers agreed that Clinton should campaign in the week before election day only in places like Kentucky, which Texas Governor George W. Bush is expected to carry easily, and in California and New York, where polls put Gore comfortably ahead.
''It's not a moral decision; it's a strategic question,'' said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Newton, who has been campaigning in battleground states for Gore and congressional candidates. ''In any district, you balance how he might affect the vote.''
Clinton can energize the Democratic base, and to that end he is being deployed to places where turnout among black voters could make a critical difference for the party. The president carried Kentucky's third district, which comprises downtown and suburban Louisville, in both 1992 and 1996. He came yesterday to help Jordan oust Representative Anne M. Northup, a well-funded, two-term Republican high on the Democrats' target-for-defeat list.
The president, however, had his work cut out for him here: A Bluegrass State poll, published yesterday in the Louisville Courier-Journal, had Northup leading Jordan by 10 points and growing in strength in the city as well as suburbs. Jordan, who was once a teenage, unwed mother and welfare recipient, would be the first black female elected to the House from Kentucky.
''I don't think people here believe they made a mistake in the past,'' said Northup, noting that Clinton campaigned unsuccessfully for her opponents in both 1992 and 1996, ''and I don't think people here will let outsiders make up their minds for them.''
One Kentucky Republican, US Senator Mitch McConnell, said he was elated to see Clinton in the state. At a noontime rally for Northup at the Louisville Slugger baseball stadium, McConnell called it a good omen.
''Every time the president comes, Anne Northup wins,'' he said.
