The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Ronald Reagan's friend Thomas Jefferson spurned carriages and escorts on his Inauguration Day in 1801. Instead, he strolled from his boardinghouse with some friends to the Capitol, where he took the oath of office and became the third U.S. President. He walked back for lunch -- probably with Reagan.

Things were simpler then. Last week at the gaudy end of the Republican Convention the 41st President roared off from Houston in a six-story, 227,000- lb.-thrust 747-200B jet. George Bush's seven-plane campaign air force began to crisscross the country from Gulfport to Hartford, bearing hundreds of advance men, surrogates, White House aides, Secret Service agents and reporters. These hordes will follow Bush through countless paralyzing motorcades and rallies, accompanied by helicopters, armored limousines, blocky weapons vans and scores of VIP-toting luxury autos, all in search of the elusive voter.

What have we done to our Presidents? What have we made of this office that was so painstakingly designed to avoid kingly dimensions? We have instead gone beyond mere royalty and invested the poor fellow with godly power -- then raised our expectations accordingly and vented almost every human frustration and anger at him. We have girded him with this hideous apparatus for his safety and convenience; all too often it deafens and crushes its audiences and imprisons the President. An old hand from the days of Richard Nixon watched a phalanx of agents muscle aside delegates on the convention floor last week to clear the way for Barbara Bush. "The Secret Service has taken over the White House advance operation," he muttered through clenched teeth, "and the Bush people have let them."

As Bush's battle group was winging on its thunderous way, Mort Engelberg, the Hollywood producer turned bus-caravan impresario for the Clinton-Gore campaign, was in a dank Cleveland hotel mapping yet another ground-level incursion down the back ways of this civilization through Ohio and around Lake Erie to Buffalo. The earlier buscades along the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys were surprisingly successful strikes, finding people in neighborhoods where they lived, not at airports or pre-packaged arenas. Reporters from local television stations could hitch a bus ride for a hundred bucks or so a day, compared with more than $1,000 on a political airlift. Nor were the local news spots edited to 90 seconds a day -- more like 90 minutes. Engelberg's original idea was to steal the settings for Bush's family-values pitch before the President could arrive. The buses fit modest front-yard dimensions. The people flowed easily and eagerly out of the grass roots.

Old political calculations are dangerous. This election is between a savvy Democrat, nurtured by a small town and given an overlay of Oxford and Yale, and a duty-driven Republican reared in the nation's richest suburb and now in possession of the most majestic and mighty political office in the world. Given the country's suspicions of bigness and power, planted long ago by Reagan's friend Thomas Jefferson, it is not at all an uneven contest.