In This Speech, Acceptance Is All : Clinton must win wide confidence tonight

Nobody needs to tell Bill Clinton how much is riding on tonight’s acceptance speech. He understands what is at stake. For if he cannot define for the American people what he is about, and why he--and not George Bush or Ross Perot--is the answer to the country’s problems, then his campaign is in trouble.

ACCEPTABILITY QUESTION: The acceptance that this Democratic nominee for President needs most is acceptance by the American people of the very idea of a Democrat inhabiting the White House. That hasn’t been the case for so long now that the notion itself may seem sufficiently novel that people might need a little time to get used to it. One goal of tonight’s acceptance speech has to be to make people comfortable with the basic idea.

PLAUSIBILITY QUESTION: Some in Great Britain suggest that the reason John Major is prime minister today is that Neil Kinnock, his Labor Party opponent, just never looked and acted the way people thought a prime minister ought to look and act. George Bush, with a substantial foreign policy record under his belt, won’t have that problem; Bill Clinton does.

Does this man cut a credible figure of a President? One of the ways for him to answer the plausibility question is to deliver not just a partisan call to battle stations but a substantial address that contains at least a plank or two of solid presidential timber.

GOVERNING QUESTION: A successful acceptance speech would also aim at helping people overcome any gnawing concern about putting both the federal legislature and the federal executive in the hands of the same political party. Clinton’s relentless, even single-minded effort to paint his presidential bid in the most middle-of-the-road hues helps. By definition, governing in a large and complex democracy is a centrist process; extremism is dysfunctional. By positioning his party in the middle, Clinton is not only trying to broaden its appeal but may also be helping it prepare for the possibility of governance.

THE THEME QUESTION: Bush, in his very effective 1988 acceptance speech in New Orleans, was able to leave people with a comprehensible high concept: It’s not yet time to declare an end to the Reagan era. Thus: “Read my lips, no new taxes.” It’s a pledge that came back to haunt him, of course, when he did raise taxes. But the value of a compelling theme is that it suggests the speaker has a confident enough grasp of the task at hand that he is comfortable with simplifying the message without becoming simplistic.

That is a lot to ask of one speech. But Clinton is asking a lot of the American people. He is asking them to allow him to be their President. He’s the one who wants the job and they are the employers.