Drama, Hype Collide on Set in St. Louis

There is something reassuring--and at the same time truly odd--about presidential debates.

The reassuring, traditional part is what you see on TV: Three men who want to be president, standing on a stage together expounding for 90 minutes of essentially serious conversation about the fate and future of the nation.

The odd part is outside the brightness of the klieg lights: They are doing it in a sumptuously dolled-up basketball arena, the banners of college teams streaming unseen overhead, their gathering underwritten by a beer company.

Next door, hundreds of reporters are taking it all in while camera crews film them taking it all in and campaign surrogates bend their ears telling them just exactly what they should take in.

Debates are dramatic like stock car races are dramatic--there is always the possibility of a crash-and-burn, always the chance that fortunes will rise and fall on a moment’s delay in hitting the brakes or slamming the accelerator.

That did not appear to have happened Sunday night, if the early reviews hold. But like all debates, it was a collision of drama and hype, promise and portent.

The show actually began hours before the television lights came up, when hundreds of reporters, campaign operatives and staff members began streaming into the far reaches of the Washington University field house, site of the first of three debates among the presidential candidates to be held within eight days.

Tension, as they say, began to build. Heck, it reached a crescendo hours before the debate even began, when New York Gov. Mario Cuomo was ushered into the press room and was immediately set upon by reporters who asked insightful questions--like, who is going to win?

“You have to give us 24 hours to know who the winner is because we’ve got to see what you say,” said Cuomo, in a remarkable bit of media-stroking.

OK, so his patience might have been stretched with a few of the queries, particularly this one: “Do you expect surprises tonight?”

Cuomo’s logic-driven Jesuit education wanted to show itself. For a smattering of seconds, the answer waited on his lips: If I expected it, it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it? But true to his role, he sidled past confrontation into a patient recitation of how people watch these things hoping for a stumble but in the end can also learn a little.

If Cuomo, one of a legion of political veterans present here, was able to navigate easily in the weird world of the presidential debate, there also were those who ended up on the shoals.

Pity the amateurs, who for Sunday’s purposes were some of the folks representing the new-kid-on-the-presidential-block, Texan Ross Perot.

An hour or two before the main event, a group of well-dressed men sauntered outside the press room talking so stiltedly in debate jargon that they seemed to be tourists from another planet.

“Where’s the spin?” said one man, his voice dripping earnestness as he referred to the ear-bending that campaign operatives embark on to convince everyone that their man won.

“That’s the spin room in there,” said a second man, knowingly pointing to the press pen.

The first man looked querulous. Yep, it is, said a third man.

“That’s the first thing we learn in advance school,” he said, an obviously recent graduate of Perot’s how-to-run-a-campaign classes.

Aside from the wonderment of the Perotistas, virtually nothing about a debate is spontaneous, although everyone pretends all of it is.

For evidence, consider the images put forth by the candidates. Everyone, from Perot to Bush to Clinton, appeared to be working off the same script from the same media adviser. Bush and Clinton showed up in navy suits, red and blue striped ties. Their wives, Barbara and Hillary, wore conservative blue. Perot broke from the pack, if only slightly: Same tie but a dark gray suit. And his wife, Margot, dressed in red.

The candidates walked calmly onto the stage and stood at oak lecterns. Air conditioning forced frigid air onto them, so that under the heat of the lights none would feel compelled to sweat.

And then each, in their very opening lines, said the same things they say every day to virtually every audience, neat capsulizations of the wrenching and dramatic yearlong campaign.

First came Perot, the self-styled champion of the little people: “This is a movement that came from the people. This is the way the framers of the Constitution intended our government to be, a government that comes from the people.”

Then Clinton, the self-styled champion of a middle class he says has been deserted by Bush: “Tonight I say to the President, Mr. Bush, for 12 years you’ve had it your way. You’ve had your chance and it didn’t work. It’s time to change.”

And finally Bush, seeking a second term in which he vows to turn his attention to America: “We’ve dramatically changed the world. . . . Kids go to bed at night without the same fear of nuclear war. And change for change’s sake isn’t enough.”

If the post-debate congratulations that poured in for each candidate from their partisans had the ring of spontaneity, guess again.

Before the debate even ended, when it was still conceivable that someone could land a knockout punch, legions of Democratic stalwarts flooded the press room, far outnumbering their GOP counterparts. The Republicans caught up by inflicting a blizzard of pro-Bush memos on the crowd.

Whatever the party affiliation, the message was the same. Our guy won, the other guy didn’t.

From Democratic National Committee Chairman Ronald H. Brown, about Clinton: “Terrific, terrific.”

From Bush’s campaign spokeswoman, Torie Clarke, about Bush: “There was no comparison among the three candidates.”

From Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos, about Clinton: “Thrilled. Couldn’t have been better.”

From Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp, about Bush: “The whole dynamic of the race changed tonight in St. Louis.”

Before all the hoopla, when the candidates were still getting in their last looks at their briefing books and their last back-slapping huzzahs from their staffs, a lone janitor vacuumed the thick, red plush carpeting on which three candidates would stand and lay their campaigns on the line.

At 7:45 p.m., four fleeting hours later, the same carpet lay trampled and empty, used for the first and last time.

And then everyone receded into the night, to meet again Thursday in Richmond, Va., and do it all over again.