‘92 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION : Will It Be Riffs or the Roar of a Train? : Speech: Clinton’s style is compared to a jazz musician or unstoppable freight cars. Which he relies on in his acceptance address is a key question.

For 18 years of public life, Bill Clinton has relied on his mastery of words to energize his political career. Tonight, that reliance faces its ultimate test.

Clinton aides offer two metaphors to describe their boss’ style as a speaker: the jazz musician and the freight train.

The jazz musician takes his bows when Clinton is on target. “His speeches are riffs and improvisations,” said George Stephanopoulos, the campaign’s communications director. “He knows the themes and the music, then he gets a feel of the hall and plays.”

But when Clinton is not comfortable or not prepared for a speech, “he’s like a freight train,” another senior aide said. “He takes about 15 minutes to get up to speed and then he gets going and it’s fine for a while, but it takes forever to get it to stop.”

The classic, disastrous, example of that style was Clinton’s 1988 convention speech formally nominating Michael S. Dukakis--a text that Dukakis aides had largely written for him ahead of time, constraining his usual extemporaneous style.

For Clinton, his staff and the millions who are expected to watch tonight’s speech, the key question will be which of those two styles shows up.

Both styles stem from Clinton’s own belief in his ability to persuade, and the Southern tradition of off-the-cuff political speaking.

In his heart, Clinton believes, as one close friend puts it, that “he can persuade anybody to join him if he can just talk to them long enough.”

Aides admire Clinton’s tenacity in trying to persuade people and his mastery of the details of policy. But they admit that in his zeal to talk he often goes too far.

Clinton, says his strategist James Carville, is “the sort of person that when you ask him what time it is he wants to tell you the history of the Swiss town his watch was made in.”

While Carville and others often have tried to prod Clinton into speaking more briefly, he resists. And part of the reason for that resistance is that Clinton grew up politically in one of the last parts of the country where the stump speech--rather than the sound bite--remains a crucial weapon in the political armory.

Much of Arkansas politics consists of speaking before church groups, social clubs, campaign rallies and summer barbecues. And, as in other rural areas of the South, political speeches in Arkansas are intended as entertainment.

Last fall, during the early days of the campaign, Clinton and each of the other Democratic presidential hopefuls appeared in Manchester, N. H., for a roast of the state’s lone Democratic congressman. Each candidate was supposed to deliver a short, humorous speech. Former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., true to his angry man style, refused to tell jokes. Several of the other candidates got up and told a few jokes prepared in advance by their speech writers then launched into their standard stump remarks.

Clinton, who spoke last, got up and told a series of jokes about each of the jokes the other candidates had delivered. With the audience roaring in laughter, he then gracefully slid into his basic themes, winning wide admiration from an audience of political insiders who until then had known little about him.

Afterward, Clinton expressed some surprise that other candidates found that setting difficult. “In Arkansas, we do four of those a week,” he said.

A major part of that Southern tradition involves churches and preaching. Clinton, unlike most contemporary politicians, sprinkles his speeches with frequent biblical allusions and seldom seems happier than when he stands at the pulpit of a largely black church on Sunday speaking to the congregation.

As a boy, he memorized Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream speech,” reciting it aloud to friends. This week, as he has prepared for his speech, he has carried a videotape of that speech with him, watching it on a VCR in his suite along with tapes of convention speeches by John F. Kennedy, Hubert H. Humphrey, Jimmy Carter, Barbara Jordan, Mario M. Cuomo and Ronald Reagan.

Clinton also has carried with him texts of all the convention acceptance speeches in both parties going back to the 1930s bound together in a large notebook along with a memo from speech writer Paul Begala describing the flaws and strong points of each one. Begala and other Clinton aides consider President Bush’s 1988 speech, which many analysts credit with setting him on the road to victory in the last election, to be one of the best.

And despite the hectic pace of the campaign, Clinton in recent weeks has read several books touching on political oratory, including a new biography of Harry S. Truman, a book of essays by Texas newspaper columnist Molly Ivins, who is known for her humorous commentaries on contemporary events, and Gary Wills’ new book on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Lincoln’s second inaugural address is among his favorite speeches, Clinton told reporters recently. “He had a great ability to paint sweeping pictures with very few words.”

One final book led to a new hire on the Clinton staff last month. After reading a book by former Walter F. Mondale and Dukakis speech writer David Kusnet, Clinton brought him on as an additional speech writer. Kusnet’s book urged Democrats to return to a more populist speaking style.

Begala, Kusnet and Clinton staff member Robert Boorstin have been the chief drafters of the convention speech. But in Clinton’s case, the hoary politician’s claim that “I write my own stuff” is actually true.

Clinton routinely takes speech drafts from his writers and tears them apart, rewriting, then asking his aides to rewrite some more. The process can often be grueling.

“We’re at the pain stage,” a senior aide said Tuesday evening when asked how far the preparation for tonight’s speech had progressed. “We’re a little late getting there, but we’re there now.”

At times, Clinton’s desire to do his own writing has led to problems. Several weeks ago, for example, when he gave a speech on family values, Clinton began rewriting the draft his speech writers gave him only three hours before his scheduled noon speaking time. When the appointed hour rolled by, “he was still sitting at his desk, half dressed, writing,” an aide recalls. Aides were still editing the last pages of the manuscript as Clinton rose to speak an hour behind schedule.

Left to himself, Clinton would seldom use a text at all. At his best, he can soar using only the most minimal of texts. Last spring, for example, he delivered a 45-minute speech to a conference in Cleveland based entirely on 22 words jotted down on a piece of paper. The reviews were glowing. Shortly afterward, Clinton began serious discussions about running for President.

His style is plain--avoiding elaborate rhetorical structures and concentrating, instead, on stories. In Arkansas, he would frequently spot someone in his audience and build an entire speech around an anecdote of that person’s life, longtime aides say. During the current campaign, he has employed a similar approach, talking about the stories of people he has met on the campaign trail.

During the early days of the campaign, particularly when Clinton’s back was to the wall during the New Hampshire primary, that approach often allowed the jazz musician side of him to shine through.

But in more recent months, as Clinton has fought off exhaustion, illness, a sore throat and the depression of battling off a constant barrage of bad news and bad polls, the freight train has more and more often rolled through the campaign.

Knowing the importance of mood and rest to Clinton’s speaking, his aides have been careful to keep their man to a minimal schedule in the last week, resting his voice and leaving him plenty of time to work on the most important speech of his career.

“It’s not an easy thing to do because it’s a unique opportunity,” Clinton said Wednesday when asked about the speech. “There’s a lot I want to say. I don’t want to take three days to say it.”