Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., speaks during a rally at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Ky., Sunday, May 18, 2008. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

In terms of attracting big-ticket political leaders to the city, 1988 was a bellwether year for Bowling Green.

In October of that year, then-President Ronald Reagan, basking in high approval ratings as he made a farewell tour of sorts, spoke before an overflow crowd of about 13,000 at Western Kentucky University’s E.A. Diddle Arena.

Reagan was there to stump for his vice president, George H.W. Bush, the 1988 Republican nominee for president, and also to subtly tweak Bush’s opponent, Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis.

“Reagan was at his rhetorical best, rarely varying from a prepared text in which he linked Dukakis with the Democratic Party’s liberal past and painted Bush as a competent vice president who handled his job well,” the Oct. 23, 1988, edition of the Daily News reported, going on to say that Reagan “brought the biggest laugh of the day” when he improvised a line referencing the 1981 attempt on his life.

“ ‘You missed me,’ Reagan said less than a second after a nearby balloon burst,” the Daily News reported.

That day’s newspaper reported that several thousand more people, including some ticket holders who were apparent victims of an excess printing of tickets for the event, stood outside the arena during the president’s remarks, and another story covered the scrum of national media at Diddle Arena who had spent the year traveling and covering the presidential campaign.

Dukakis might have had few fans in the arena that night, but the former Massachusetts governor found a friendly audience when he visited Bowling Green in September 1988.

The Democratic candidate visited the city, first giving a short campaign speech at Bowling Green-Warren County Regional Airport in front of about 200 people before traveling to WKU for an invitation-only event at Van Meter Auditorium.

The Sept. 20, 1988, Daily News reported that Dukakis’ speech laying out his health care plan for employees “blend(ed) new ideas and old-fashioned politicking.”

“The Democrat’s talk played well to a generally partisan house,” the Daily News said. “His comments were particularly well-received by the 200-300 nurses and nursing students in the auditorium.”

Local coverage of Dukakis’ visit also included an interview with the candidate after his speech in which he outlined his stances on other issues and a light moment in which a group of the high school students at the airport enthusiastically cheered for ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson before Dukakis arrived for his speech, chanting “Sam! Sam! Sam!” as Donaldson tried vainly to remain unruffled.

Reagan’s message carried the day, however, as Bush won Warren County and the nation in that year’s election. In fact, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of Warren County votes since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

A visit from a sitting U.S. president and a major-party presidential candidate in the same election year was unprecedented in Bowling Green’s history and has not been duplicated since.

Until fairly recently, presidential candidates seldom appeared in Bowling Green.

The earliest recorded instance of a sitting president visiting Bowling Green happened in 1819, when President James Monroe traveled through here on the way to South Union.

This visit was documented in a Louisiana newspaper, which also noted in an odd coincidence that Andrew Jackson, who would be elected president nine years later, was in Bowling Green that same day.

“There’s a good chance that (Jackson) was just making his way home (to Tennessee),” said Jonathan Jeffrey, manuscripts/Folklife archives coordinator at the Kentucky Library on Western Kentucky University’s campus.

The limits of transportation in the 19th century made it unfeasible for presidential candidates to conduct coast-to-coast campaigning.

“It’s not really until after the 1920s that you’ve got presidential candidates who go out on the campaign trail,” Jeffrey said.

After Monroe and Jackson, the next known political figure of that stature to visit the city was Vice President Adlai Stevenson in 1896.

A native Kentuckian, Stevenson was welcomed by members of Masonic Lodge No. 73 in Bowling Green, giving a two-hour speech.

In 1912, Thomas Marshall, a Democratic Indiana governor, gave a speech and ate dinner at what is now WKU. Later that year, he won the vice presidency in the election that saw Woodrow Wilson become president.

When Bowling Green has entertained an American president, it has gotten some of the most well-known chief executives.

In addition to hosting arguably the iconic modern-day Republican president in Reagan, Bowling Green was visited by three of the most popular Democratic presidents of the past 100 years.

President Franklin Roosevelt arrived in the city by train from Louisville in 1938, giving a 20-minute address. His visit prompted city leaders to declare the day a holiday, and downtown businesses closed early to allow as many people as possible to see and hear the popular president.

John F. Kennedy came to the city as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1960, giving a policy speech stating his positions supporting American efforts to ensure that developing African nations, newly independent from Europe, are led by democracies.

“Today, Africa and America, black men and white men, new nations and old, are bound together. Our challenges rush to meet us,” Kennedy said, according to a transcript of his Oct. 8, 1960, speech outside City Hall. “If we are to achieve our goals, if we are to fulfill man’s eternal quest for peace and freedom, we must do it together – and together we can and will succeed.”

President Bill Clinton is the most recent chief executive to come to Bowling Green while in office, arriving in 1994 to attend and speak at Rep. William Natcher’s funeral.

Other noteworthy political figures who have paid a visit here over the years have included:

•Then-Vice President Bush in 1985, when he delivered an address before about 8,000 people at Diddle Arena.

•Bush’s son, George W. Bush, who visited the General Motors Bowling Green Assembly Plant in 2000 while campaigning for president, according to news accounts.

•Current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 at WKU.

•Former senator and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, who campaigned here in 1998 for Jim Bunning’s successful U.S. Senate bid.

•Joan Mondale, the wife of 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, who came to WKU’s University Downing Center that year.

•Tipper Gore, wife of former Vice President Al Gore, who gave a speech less than a week before Election Day in 1996 at the Jaycees Pavilion.

•Vice President Gore’s father, Al Gore Sr., came to Bowling Green in 1992 ahead of the presidential election.

•William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate, spoke at what is now WKU in 1911, beginning an 11-stop tour in Kentucky to raise funds for the YMCA.

•Jerry Falwell, the late evangelist and conservative advocate, gave a speech at the Holidome in 1984 that was interrupted after 45 minutes by a woman who disagreed with his stance on abortion and went up on stage to confront him.

“She was grabbed in a bear hug by a member of Falwell’s traveling party and removed from the room,” the Oct. 30, 1984, Daily News reported, going on to say that she continued “loudly cursing Falwell” as he left.

Hot-button topics

Bowling Green’s early years were marked by colorful, sometimes rambunctious demonstrations of political support for certain candidates or issues.

In 1840, William Harrison ran for the presidency against incumbent President Martin Van Buren.

Harrison, running as a member of the Whig party, had an appeal to the common man of the time and in Bowling Green, Harrison supporters held a “boisterous parade in which four white horses pulled a log cabin draped with coon skins around the town square, while celebrants overindulged in drinking cider,” according to “Bowling Green and Warren County: A Bicentennial History,” written by Nancy Baird and Carol Carraco.

A picnic on property owned by Whig congressman Joseph Underwood followed the parade, and the sight of revelers overserving themselves on food and drink prompted him to liken the campaign to the “buffoonery of the circus.”

Underwood played a part in a more serious political issue in 1860, by which time he had already served in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.

An abolitionist, Underwood, spoke in a calm manner against secession. Although two of his sons would serve in the Confederacy, Underwood believed seceding from the Union would ruin the country and have lasting harmful effects on the South.

Perhaps Warren County voters saw the reasoning behind Underwood’s arguments, because a large majority supported John Bell, a slave-owning Tennessee legislator whose Constitutional Union Party urged support for the union and argued strongly against secession while taking no position on slavery.

Many of the political battles of the 20th century were waged over alcohol.

Though the federal constitutional amendment mandating Prohibition rendered moot any question of the legality of alcohol from 1920 to 1933, the years before and after prohibition were marked by frequent local option elections in Bowling Green to either allow or prohibit alcohol sales in the city.

Thanks to an 1874 state law, local municipalities were allowed to have a local option referendum on matters such as whether to go wet or dry.

With those elections came demonstrations from groups on either side of the issue.

The first wet-dry vote occurred in 1893 and the drys won the election, but the issue was far from settled, with a vote for going wet happening in 1896 and vote to bring back local prohibition in 1907.

A 1910 local option election resulted in Bowling Green going wet by 107 votes – three years after a vote in favor of going dry.

During the 1910 campaign, an evangelist named Mordecai Ham was one of the loudest voices in favor of prohibition.

“Erecting a tent on Center Street, Ham conducted a revival throughout the crucial election month of June, offering a five-dollar bill to anyone who could sincerely claim to have benefited by doing business with a saloon,” according to Baird and Carraco’s book.

A local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was also demonstrative against alcohol, holding marches around Fountain Square Park.

When Prohibition was ratified in 1920, Patrick Henry “Patsy” Fitzpatrick converted his bar on Main Avenue into an ice cream shop and called his saloon the Fountain of Youth.

“I believe he probably did that several times,” said Jonathan Jeffrey, manuscripts/Folklife archives coordinator at the Kentucky Library on Western Kentucky University’s campus.

The most recent wet-dry vote, in which voters elected to make Bowling Green wet, occurred in 1960.

Interest groups representing either side sprang into action, with the Citizens Committee for United Action framing their support for legal alcohol sales as an economic and ethical issue.

The committee passed out fliers with a picture depicting what appeared to be white and black bar patrons illegally enjoying beer at a purported speakeasy.

The back of the flier argued that underground alcohol sales caused a loss of tax revenue, fostered sales of alcohol to minors and created an environment for bootleggers to exploit.

The Warren County Anti-Liquor Association called out their opponents for the staged nature of the picture, and passed out its own literature during the campaign urging for a grand jury to be called to investigate the people behind the picture – which the anti-liquor group called “the blackest lie that their crowd can conceive.”

Though unable to vote until 1920, women were heard in Bowling Green as political advocates.

The local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union is a prime example, but another prominent early supporter of women’s rights was Bowling Green author Lida Obenchain.

Better known to her readers by her pen name, Eliza Calvert Hall, Obenchain was a mother of four children, and she wrote a number of essays in defense of women’s rights and in support of women’s right to vote. In 1907, her “Aunt Jane of Kentucky,” a collection of short stories, was published.

“That book was probably more effective than all the name-calling, marching and stomping,” Baird said in an interview.

In the stories, Aunt Jane was what Baird called “an outspoken gal” who was not afraid to speak truth to power.

“She would stand up in church and call out the sins of all the people in the congregation who were acting so pious all the time,” Baird said.

The earliest recorded instance of a sitting president visiting Bowling Green happened in 1819, when President

James Monroe traveled through here on the way to South Union.