Charms and Maledictions

By LANCE MORROW

After Louisville, a national pageant takes on new possibilities

Searching for a street-level reading of the nation 's political mood, and the nuances of its shifts, Senior Writer Lance Morrow traveled with the Reagan and Mondale campaigns for 2 1/2 weeks, before and after the presidential debate. His report:

The atrium of the Hyatt Regency in Louisville is a bright interior shaft that rises up 16 stories from the lobby-an impressive effect. It makes the inside of the hotel look Like a shopping mall that has ambitions to become a cathedral. Or, on the night of the presidential debate, like a sort of gala high-rise tenement. Tiers of balconies, one on every floor, overlook the lobby. They were festooned that night with American flags and sheets emblazoned with Republican slogans, and the faithful leaned out over each ledge to cheer Ronald Reagan when he returned from the debate: "Four more years! Four more years!"

Reagan, mounting a stage in the lobby, down at the bottom of this festive well, may have been relieved to be working with a script again. In the soft and almost purring voice that he can direct with such intimacy at a crowd, the President gave a short talk, part inspiration ("Fly as high as you can!"), part politics as manly game ("Come November, we're gonna tell Coach Tax Hike [Walter Mondale] to head for the showers"). The Republicans hollered and whooped. It had been a long night. Ronald and Nancy Reagan made their way to one of the glass elevators that run up one wall of the atrium. The Reagans walked inside and turned and waved through the transparent doors.

And then, an astonishing apparition: the glass capsule abruptly whooshed the Reagans-still waving-skyward, as if it were speeding them back up into the clouds, back into the fleecy, mythic realm from which they had come. A hallucination out of Erich Von Daniken: Elevators of the Gods.

Louisville can only have left the President wishing that he could so easily sail back into his magic. Until the debate, the presidential campaign had been a disengaged and ghostly pageant, on either side a kind of somnambulation: Reagan working under a charm, Mondale under some sour malediction. After Louisville, the campaign began to develop, Like a Polaroid picture in one's hand as the images start to come clear.

One sometimes thought that the author of the Mondale curse was Mondale. He seemed somehow to be psychically disconnected from his own passions, to be neutralized by an internal maze of deflectors and scruples. He displayed a genius for undoing his successes. In any case, he had no political traction. For some reason, people heard not so much the substance of his words as his voice, an instrument that tended to reduce his strongest convictions to a whine. Maybe it was the upper Midwest talking, the boyhood as a Norwegian minister's son. In the vibrations of his voice, like wind through fence wire on a gray day, one heard the coming of a Minnesota winter.

If Mondale seemed at a psychic remove, Reagan worked at a physical remove, not talking to reporters, heading out perhaps twice a week to address rallies of his believers, to congratulate Americans for acting American and to dismiss the opposition-and, indeed, most complexity in the world-as being archaic, depressive and implicitly unmanly.

So the campaign proceeded across the weeks and months with an air of inevitability, of history on cruise control. No one paid a great deal of attention. It was like an argument going on in another part of the house. Reagan was so far ahead, nearly everyone agreed, that he would carry something close to 50 states, maybe even all of them.

It was not merely that Mondale was something of a lusterless and dispiriting alternative to a personally popular sitting President in a period of peace and economic recovery. A more mysterious and complex process was occurring in the American psyche. Americans considered Mondale with a merciless objectivity. But many of them came to absorb Ronald Reagan in an entirely different and subjective manner. They internalized him. In recent months, Reagan found his way onto a different plane of the American mind, a mythic plane. He became not just a politician, not just a President, but very nearly an American apotheosis. The Gipper as Sun King.

A dispassionate witness may say that it was all done with mirrors and manipulation, with artfully patriotic rhetoric and Olympic imagery, the Wizard of Oz working the illusion machine. But that does not entirely do credit to the phenomenon. In an extraordinary way, Reagan came in some subconscious realms to be not just the leader of America but the embodiment of it. "America is back," he announced with a bright, triumphant eye. Back from where? Back from Viet Nam, perhaps, and Watergate and the sexual revolution and all the other tarnishing historical uncleannesses that deprived America of her virtue and innocence.

Partly by accident of timing, partly by a kind of simple genius of his being, Reagan managed to return to Americans something extremely precious to them: a sense of their own virtue. Reagan-completely American, uncomplicated, forward-looking, honest, self-deprecating- became American innocence in a 73-year-old body. (The American sense of innocence and virtue does not always strike the world as a shining and benign quality, of course.)

Whatever the reasons, the campaign of 1984 did not stack up exactly as an equitable contest. Until last week, Reagan's aura purchased him surprising immunities. The polls showed a majority of Americans disagreeing with him on specific issues but planning to vote for him anyway.

Not long ago, Reagan went to Bowling Green State University for a political appearance that looked and sounded like every Big Ten pep rally of the past 20 years compacted into an instant. Reagan's helicopter, deus ex machina again, fluttered down onto the grass outside, visible to the waiting crowd through a great window, and the students erupted in an ear-splitting roar, waving their Greek fraternity letters on placards. REBUILDING AN AMERICA THAT ONCE WAS, said one sign. The young these days seem prone to a kind of aching nostalgia for some American prehistory that they cannot quite define, but sense in Reagan. The chant of "We Want Ron!" elided into the Olympic chant, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" To some extent, they were merely exuberant kids making noise, but their identification with, their passion for, a 73-year-old President was startling. And so was their equation of the man with the nation he leads. Who would have thought that an aged movie actor would be, for so many of the young, the man for the '80s?

His critics speak of Reagan scathingly as an empty man, and yet he is a man with, sometimes, a dramatic gift of self-presentation. He conducts himself with a remarkably amiable dignity and sense of discretion, a sort of perfect American gravitas. In Milwaukee one day, after he spoke at the city's Oktoberfest, a small, seraphically lovely little blond girl in a peasant dress came up hesitatingly to give him a bouquet of flowers. Politicians are often oafs around little children, overdoing it. With an exquisite sense of tenderness and courtesy, Reagan took the flowers, bent slightly, talked to the girl, then gently picked her up for a moment. He talked some more, set her down, and, head bobbing slightly, waved the flowers over his head in a gesture that was simultaneously self-deprecating and triumphal.

The debate with Mondale may have broken the spell somewhat, but many Americans are inclined to be curiously protective of Reagan. Perhaps, after so many failed presidencies since the assassination of John Kennedy, an amazing number of Americans are eager to see Reagan succeed. Or, at least many Americans are. Many are not. One of the accomplishments of Reagan's campaign up until Louisville was to create a sense not only of inevitability but of unanimity as well. Reagan's managers accomplished this by crafting his campaign not as a political argument but as a traveling ceremony of patriotic inspiration.

A presidential campaign is a phenomenon of surreal trajectories. The plane rises up out of the weather, out of the mess and scurry of one campaign stop, and breaks up into pure sunshine. One flies through the blue altitudes, over the abstract, tumbling snowfields of cumulus, then plunges down again, into the weather, into another part of America. The nation ceases to be a geographic continuum. It becomes, instead, a sequence of fragmented locales, discrete and (except for hurriedly noticed details of local color) interchangeable, like particles in Einstein's physics. The gods ascend and descend, with their entourages and motorcades. They sweep to the event and sweep back to the plane and away. It is always touching, a little haunting, to see the people waiting on the access roads for the motorcade to hurry by, waiting for an hour or two in little clusters, holding signs of support or hostility, waiting for a glimpse that lasts a few seconds. The sight is haunting because those people, receding in the distance, always look as if they have just been abandoned there by the roadside.

Time is minutely scheduled, and yet, as experienced, weirdly elastic. Yesterday seems like last month. The memory of everything but the past hour or so vanishes. The campaign, the long march, often goes on in a kind of twilight. There are sudden bright bursts of light and color and balloons and rhetoric, and then the twilight descends again. If one is flying with the White House press, the most reliable thread of continuity is ABC's Sam Donaldson, who prowls buses and planes with the air of an amused and vaguely irate large dog, sleekly alert but inner-directed, snout in the wind, picking up scents, eyes manically abstracted. Every so often he loudly barks out some strange witticism to no one in particular.

The day after the Louisville debate, the White House "spinners" were hard at work on the press plane, on the buses. The President was heading to Charlotte, N.C., for an appearance with Senator Jesse Helms and then to Baltimore. The spinners, a patrol of top White House staff members, have the task of chatting with the press and trying to get a favorable spin on stories. They were working that day at damage control.

The debate was a sudden deflation. One could hear the air rushing into the vacuum. Now Reagan seemed flat and disconcerted and, weirdly, somehow a stranger to himself. In Charlotte, a city that takes pride in having made its busing program a model for the rest of the country, Reagan denounced the practice of busing and was greeted with silence. The Baltimore event was curiously disheveled. Reagan was there to unveil a statue of Christopher Columbus at the Inner Harbor. The crowd was dotted with protesters ("No More Years! No More Years!") and anti-Reagan signs (DEAD MARINES FOR REAGAN.) Back on the press bus, Donaldson bellowed to his constituency: "Big Mo ain't here today!"

Louisville, at least for the moment, set certain reversals in motion. Mondale had frequently been the spiritless candidate before. A few days earlier, he flew to Little Rock, Ark., to address a meeting of the Rural Electric Cooperative. Introduced in a not-very-charismatic line as a "longterm friend of rural electrification," Mondale looked out at the crowd with a weary countenance, with his hawk's beak and the hooded eyes that at certain moments give him the look of a middle-aged prince of the House of Saud. Mondale's delivery was dismal. His sentences sounded like great labor, as if his voice were being forced to carry an unwieldy armful of words, staggering toward the door under their weight, and then dropping the last two or three syllables just before the period. Laboring and pleading. A few farmers got up and walked out.

But after Louisville, Mondale was transfigured. His eyes shone. His voice took color. The debate legitimized him as a candidate, gave him plausibility and stature. An extraordinary though usually buried theme of this campaign is manhood. There is a bizarre testosterone factor at work. Reagan was tough. Mondale was a wimp. The debate in some senses reversed that too. Reagan seemed weak and lost and old. Mondale, in the eyes of the electorate, was granted his manhood.

So at Pittsburgh a couple of days after the debate, Mondale fired up a huge rally at Market Square. The band played the theme from Rocky. Hard-hatted steelworkers cheered him on. His rhetoric even began to swagger, to grow looser and more colloquial. In Cincinnati, he talked about sending criminals to "the slammer." Fighting Fritz.

All was not, as Yeats wrote, "changed, changed utterly." But the campaign was changed, pitched into new possibilities, or at least the possibility of possibilities. If Reagan remained the probability, the debate introduced that new shadow of age, the specter of presidential brownouts. On the press bus, one entertained fantasies of an Autumn of the Gipper, of Reagan winning in a moment of culminating splendor in 1984, then, over the next four years, fading off to become a merely ceremonial presence, the emeritus of the American dream.

The campaign planes arc back and forth across the landscape. The pilot breaks into a little public-address rhapsody about the brilliant foliage underneath. One afternoon the shadow of the Mondale plane upon the clouds below is surrounded by a brilliant yellow halo. Why? Has Mondale acquired an aura too? Everywhere in the plane is the little insect click of the lap-riding portable computer: information in bits and bytes pollinating the nation, a part of nature now.

Land in another city. The motorcade hurtles toward the people yet again. The campaign proceeds. It begins to seem a sort of dreamwork of American power.

-By Lance Morrow