Presidents Clean Up Mean Streets New Era Of Community Service Pledged At Volunteer Summit

President Clinton said Sunday that volunteers can transcend partisan politics and touch lives in ways that government cannot. He joined two of his predecessors to help clean up a graffiti-smeared neighborhood here.

Clinton pledged to inaugurate a new era of community service.

“I am here because I want to redefine the meaning of citizenship in America,” Clinton told a T-shirt-clad crowd of 5,000 volunteers at the opening ceremony of the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future that he is leading with Ret. Gen. Colin L. Powell as the general chairman.

It is not enough to simply do your job and pay your taxes, the president said, “You have to serve in your community to help make it a better place.” He said that government can nudge volunteerism along and outlined plans to reach a million young people by expanding mentoring programs.

Insisting that this was a day for dirty hands, not lofty speeches, the president, two former presidents and two potential presidential candidates kept their remarks short, then hit the street. Clinton and former presidents George Bush, the honorary co-chairman, and Jimmy Carter, as well as Powell and Vice President Al Gore, fanned out along eight miles of Germantown Avenue - a street that snakes through some of the toughest and most run-down neighborhoods in Philadelphia.

Clinton shucked the crutches he has used for his injured knee, and picked up a long-handled paint roller to cover graffiti on the walls around a community pool.

Powell, who had begun the day by telling volunteers, “It’s good to have an army again!” supervised the clean-up of a vacant lot that smelled of excrement and that, as of Saturday, had been an open-air crack market. The lot was at the base of a Revolutionary War cemetery, where crack and heroin addicts habitually sleep on top of graves.

This exotic tableau was just one in a long day of incongruous images.

Democrat Gore and Republican Powell, two leading prospects for their respective parties’ presidential nomination in 2000, bathed each other in praise, briefly embraced and helped assemble an outdoor jungle gym. “We are just two guys trying to put a playground together,” said Powell, dismissing a suggestion that the day had any political significance.

While all the politicians were at pains to keep their remarks short and apolitical, it was plain they had sharply divergent notions about whether the United States is a socially just society, and what volunteerism can do about it.

“I don’t think there is much doubt that in this country we do not yet have equality,” Carter said, describing what he said were “two Americas,” one of them with decent homes, good jobs and a fair judicial system.

“Those are the rich people,” Carter said, “but we have a lot of neighbors who don’t have any of those things.”

Bush painted a sunnier picture of a united country where volunteerism was not intended to redress social grievances but to “give something back.”

“Today, we’re just Americans,” Bush said. “Not Republican, not Democrat; not Jew or gentile; not rich or poor; not black or white.”

Clinton seemed to take an approach somewhere between Bush and Carter. While he won re-election last year proclaiming the “era of big government is over,” he wants to preserve a role for the federal government in his era of volunteerism.

Powell said the issue of how much government should do to remedy society’s ills was beside the point of the three-day summit. “For those who say, ‘how far can you get,’ the answer is: ‘not sure yet,”’ Powell said. “There are 15 million young Americans in need, and we should not be satisfied until we have touched the life of every one.”

In the stadium Sunday morning, residents of Philadelphia seemed to pay little attention to the philosophical differences among the current and former leaders. Mostly, they said, they were thrilled that the problems of their troubled city were getting so much top-level attention.

Out on Germantown Avenue, Powell was questioned by Lynthia Barnes, a 17-year-old from the neighborhood, who asked him if he was raking up garbage “for the community or to make the politics?”

“For the community,” Powell replied. “I don’t have any politics. I just want you all to live in a nice community.”

Philadelphia Mayor Edward G. Rendell has committed city government to follow up on the cleanup work of the 5,000 or so volunteers who Sunday painted and picked up trash along Germantown Avenue.