DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich
made a rare joint appearance Thursday in Atlanta to crusade against illegal
drug use, even as their parties are preparing to club each other with that
issue in the congressional campaigns this fall.

Before flying here to console the families and praise the firefighters who
are grappling with Florida's fires, Clinton stopped in Atlanta to unveil a
new advertising campaign against drugs that he said was designed to "knock
America upside the head."

Displaying a bipartisan front -- if a rather cool one -- before hundreds of
schoolchildren in a conference center auditorium, Gingrich and Clinton
described how drugs had affected them. The speaker said that the sister of
one of his aides was left in a coma by a drug slipped into her drink; the
president said that his brother, Roger, "nearly died from a cocaine habit."

But with the congressional elections bearing down, the sense of shared
purpose did not last. Immediately after Gingrich finished his remarks
hailing the commercials' "bipartisan basis," an aide to Sen. Paul
Coverdell, R-Ga., handed a statement to reporters in the auditorium that
sharply assailed Clinton's drug policy.

And after the anti-drug event, Clinton moved on to a $500,000 fund-raising
lunch for Michael Coles, a Democrat who is challenging Coverdell for his
Senate seat. He mocked Republicans as misrepresenting Democratic policies
on the budget, guns and foreign policy. "They still milk that old cow every
chance they get," Clinton said.

Here in Florida, the president visited with families who lost most of their
possessions to fire. Several people wept as they told Clinton their stories.

Then the president spoke under a tent to several hundred firefighters and
other emergency workers gathered at the Daytona International Speedway,
which has served as a staging area.

"I'm here," he said, "because I think it's important that every American
knows that this summer, notwithstanding the great movies, the real
American heroes are not up in space fighting asteroids, they're in Florida
fighting fires."

After driving the short distance to the speedway from the airport, Clinton
and his motorcade took a stately quarter-lap on the 2.5-mile oval. The last
car of the three-dozen-vehicle motorcade had barely reached the track as
the first vehicle left it.

As in Georgia, Clinton combined his official duties in Florida with
political ones. He flew to Miami for an $800,000 dinner on behalf of
congressional candidates at the home of the actor Sylvester Stallone.

Presenting Clinton with the boxing gloves he wore in "Rocky," Stallone
compared him to the title character, saying he "has an uphill battle but
doggedly asks for one more round just to keep punching, keep punching, keep
punching until finally he gets his point across."

Stallone concluded: "It's been a grand evening. I shan't forget it."

The president thanked Stallone for the gift and said: "I think I've
established that I can take a punch. Now the time has come for me to
deliver a few."

The new advertising campaign, supervised by the Campaign for a Drug-Free
America, is financed this year with $195 million in federal money that
organizers expect to be matched by media organizations. Some commercials,
tailored to different racial and age groups, have already been broadcast in
test markets; the national campaign began Thursday night.

In Atlanta, the president and speaker sat with several people between them,
but they were careful to compliment each other's work against drugs. Both
seemed to capture the children's attention with their stories.

Clinton described learning from his brother that he had started drinking
beer and smoking marijuana in high school. "I said, 'How often?"' he said.
"He said, 'Every day.' And I thought to myself, 'What kind of family member
was I?"'

He told the audience: "There's somebody like my brother back at your school
who is a good kid, just a little lost," adding: "You can save them."

"The challenge of intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the
status quo at a time when the struggle on behalf of underrepresented and
disadvantaged groups seems so unfairly weighted against them."

- - Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, xvii.