On July 5, 1999, Bill Clinton sat on the porch of a dilapidated rental home in Tyner, Kentucky, the first stop on a four-day, nationwide tour. As he crisscrossed the country over the next few days, Clinton touched down in places with some of the highest rates of unemployment and persistent poverty in the US: Clarksdale, Mississippi; East St Louis; the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; South Phoenix, Arizona; and Watts, California.

These sites couldn’t have been more different from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, Clinton’s usual stops on his jaunts around the country extolling the New Economy and his administration’s pro-growth agenda. And that was the point. As Clinton explained to audiences along the way: “I am making this tour of America for one simple reason: I want everybody in America to know that while our country has been blessed with this economic recovery, not all Americans have been blessed by it.”

Clinton’s trip prompted immediate comparisons to Lyndon Johnson’s tour of Appalachia in 1964 to build support for the War on Poverty and Robert Kennedy’s high-profile visits to Kentucky, Mississippi, Pine Ridge, and several urban areas in the mid-1960s. But while Clinton traversed much of the same ground as his Democratic predecessors, his larger purpose diverged in significant ways. The tour’s aim wasn’t to expose the problems of the “Other America,” but to draw attention to these places’ potential as “New Markets.”