The 21st Century Express lumbers through the heartland’s cities, towns and countryside like an iron horse of Democratic politics, a rolling campaign commercial for President Clinton.
Four days from Huntington, W.Va., to Michigan City, Ind., sets no speed record for a 500-mile rail trip, but the trip is crucial in building momentum toward Clinton’s renomination and his drive toward re-election.
The 13-car, three-locomotive train conjures up legendary whistle-stop campaigns in a more innocent, small-town America, but there is nothing politically innocent about this journey.
The sleek train cars teem with modern electronic equipment to beam Clinton’s campaign appearances to the United Center, with carefully staged announcements of presidential initiatives, with 150 news-hungry members of the press.
Thus far, the trip is the most effective bit of stagecraft at this convention, and while it’s taking place across a great lake it is carefully choreographed to echo the words and images resonating from the stage in Chicago.
On Monday, Clinton unveiled a crime proposal at a whistle-stop as convention hall speakers detailed gun injuries and called for tighter weapons control.
On Tuesday, Clinton unveiled a six-year, $2.75 billion literacy plan to ensure every child can read by the end of the 3rd grade. The messages of family and children and opportunity emanated from the lectern of the United Center.
Clinton’s arrival in Chicago Wednesday will end the penultimate act of this traveling campaign play and set the stage for the finale: Thursday’s victorious entry into the coronation hall to accept his party’s presidential nomination.
To a greater degree than ever, Republicans and Democrats are admitting that what they are doing in their national conventions is putting on theater.
And given the demands of political public relations, which shrink from such traditional dramatic values as debate, conflict and surprise, the test becomes the degree to which convention planners can create reasonable facsimiles of those things, even something as contrived as a slow ride toward a crowded meeting hall.
What Clinton has had to say on the trip hasn’t mattered so much as the images, irresistible to evening news directors, of the youngish president waving to West Virginians from a caboose or having two Michigan children read aloud to him “The Little Engine That Could.”
Clinton and his handlers have seized the powerful iconography of the rails to suggest a candidate at once on the move and traditional, and the satellite reports from his train tour beamed into the convention hall each night are a sly sidestep around the conventions’ convention: that the candidate doesn’t appear until the concluding night.
By contrast, at the Republican convention in San Diego two weeks ago, Bob Dole, awaiting the night when protocol would finally let him enter the meeting hall, looked a little forlorn in news reports from various locales around that city, a man waiting for something to happen.
But no matter how clever the staging, the images only look like theater and only approximate drama.
“The question has to become how well are they doing at stage-managing, directing an event for the camera to manipulate us,” said Robert Falls, Goodman Theatre’s artistic director. “Judged on a very sort of pure level, they are doing it very well. But I can’t imagine watching these conventions unless you’re already predisposed toward what one or the other have to say.”
The television viewership numbers support his idea: Nielsen ratings for the Democratic convention Monday night were down substantially from 1992 and, though PBS numbers weren’t available Tuesday, looked to be about on a par with the Republicans’ first night.
Still, the surge in the polls by Dole, post-San Diego, suggests that the message gets out even if the TV show isn’t watched like a Super Bowl.
The Democrats have a fistful of storytelling advantages, and they’re using most of them.
Thus First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech Tuesday was anticipated with what passes at a convention for dramatic anticipation: Would she be warm enough to bely her opponents’ cold careerist stereotype? How would she respond to Bob Dole’s direct attack on her book, “It Takes a Village”?
The answers: Yes, invoking the term “my husband” repeatedly and with an intelligent defense of the significance of community.
That the parties have found ways to milk drama from a dry cow doesn’t mean the conventions have been great TV. But great images mean everything to the campaigns.
But relentless pushing of images can draw mixed reviews, as well. In Chicago at the convention Monday, the image-makers focused on two men in wheelchairs who have tenuous or non-existent connections to the party: paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve and former Reagan press secretary James Brady, whose wife, Sarah, has become a leading anti-gun advocate since he was shot and paralyzed in the 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan.
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Some television observers broke ranks and raised substantive questions about their lasting effectiveness.
The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, on PBS, wondered about the modern technique of anecdote supplanting oratory.
“The problem with personal stories,” she said, “is that it doesn’t form a collective will. . . . I don’t think those stories do that as much as move and entertain us.”
And John Hockenberry, the MSNBC host who is paralyzed and himself uses a wheelchair, was particularly sharp-tongued, all but asking if the Democrats weren’t vying to become the Pity Party.
On his train, Clinton remains a lead actor in this play, at a safe distance from the convention-hall pathos. The sight of the train moving its way westward toward Chicago and stopping in unlikely places for a presidential pause seemed to work a kind of magic. White House staffers and those on board say they were struck by the number of people who gathered at crossing points, in farmyards and fields to see the 21st Century Express roll by.
They came not merely to see a candidate but the person occcupying the presidency. That’s the image Clinton wants people to remember when his campaign special rolls into the station Wednesday. He’ll await November’s reviews.