Democrats’ Emotional Night

Seeking to strengthen their hold over the nation’s political center, Democrats opened their national convention Monday with emotional appeals from former Ronald Reagan aide James S. Brady and wheelchair-bound actor Christopher Reeve that cast President Clinton as a leader who reaches across party lines to help ordinary Americans.

In a buoyant mood sustained by Clinton’s freshened lead in public opinion polls, thousands of delegates and guests danced, sang and cheered their way through an evening of speeches from party leaders--but fell reverently silent as Brady, grievously wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt against then-President Reagan, walked haltingly to the dais with the help of his wife, Sarah, and a cane.

Sarah Brady, a leading advocate of handgun control, praised Clinton for signing the “Brady bill,” the 1994 law that imposed a five-day waiting period on gun purchases.

“Mr. President, you deserve our thanks,” she said. “A big ‘bear’ thumbs up,” added her husband, whose nickname is “Bear.”

With that endorsement by two prominent Republicans, Sarah Brady drove home the bipartisan theme, declaring that “gun violence is not a Democratic or Republican problem. It’s a problem that affects each and every one of us.” She drew applause when she praised Reagan for supporting the Brady bill--the first time the Republican leader had ever publicly been praised at a Democratic convention.

Reeve, the charismatic leading man of the “Superman” movies who suffered paralyzing spine injuries when he was thrown from a horse in 1995, brought many delegates to tears as he appealed for more medical research.

“Sure, we’ve got to balance the budget and we will. . . . But we’ve also got to take care of our family and not slash programs people need,” he said, echoing Clinton’s refrain during last year’s budget negotiations.

Referring to another Democratic symbol--as well as a symbol for the disabled--Reeves cited words from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “I believe, and so does this administration, in the most important principle FDR taught us,” he said: “America does not let its needy citizens fend for themselves.”

The convention’s use of two disabled celebrities as its major speakers on opening night was unprecedented but served two purposes for an event whose formal outcome, Clinton’s renomination, has long been a foregone conclusion.

First, Reeve and the Bradys put appealing human faces on the overall pitch Clinton plans to make to voters during the remaining weeks of the presidential campaign: an activist federal government seeking to solve the nation’s problems within a constrained budget.

Second, they made compelling television--so compelling that the major commercial networks ran more than 11 minutes overtime to broadcast the end of Reeve’s speech and a brief response from Clinton, who was at a campaign rally in Toledo, Ohio.

For convention planners, that was a major accomplishment--one that the Republicans did not achieve during their convention--and came as no accident.

The party’s general chairman, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, said the lineup was aimed partly at drawing a larger television audience.

“It has star quality, if you will,” he said.

Both the Bradys and Reeve brought many in the audience, including First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, to tears.

“He was very inspiring,” Kelly Stewart Maer, a delegate from New Jersey, said of Reeve, who was immobile in his wheelchair, a tracheotomy tube visible at his throat, as he spoke. “We were hanging on his every word. He’s still a Superman to us.”

In keeping with the Democrats’ overall attempt to portray Clinton as above partisan politics--a theme remarkably reminiscent of Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign--Reeve’s speech had no overtly partisan lines at all and no explicit endorsement of Clinton but centered on an appeal for funding for medical research to cure spinal injuries, stroke, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS.

“This is not something one party can do alone,” he said. “It’s something that we as a nation must do together.”

Sarah Brady was more political, endorsing a new Clinton proposal to prohibit people convicted of misdemeanor spouse abuse from owning handguns. But she, too, was determinedly bipartisan, noting that she and her husband are longtime Republicans.

Their approach, and the absence of other partisan rhetoric during the prime-time broadcast hour, reflected the underlying ambition of the increasingly confident Democrats: to reach out to independents and even moderate Republican voters to assemble an electoral majority that not only could reelect Clinton but restore Democratic majorities in Congress after two years of Republican rule on Capitol Hill.

If they succeed, Clinton will be the first Democratic president to win two elections since Roosevelt--and his party will have pulled off the feat of returning from what looked like political obsolescence.

The Bradys’ message reflected two themes that the Clinton campaign sought to highlight all through the day: the fight against crime, an issue that Clinton has long embraced as a way to blunt Republican attacks, and gun control, a “wedge issue” that clearly separates the two parties.

The president, wending his way slowly toward Chicago across the vote-rich Midwest aboard a special campaign train, stopped at a police academy in Columbus, Ohio, to make his proposal for a new law that would extend federal handgun control to people convicted of misdemeanor spousal abuse, a category that could include tens of thousands of people.

“Those who threaten the safety of others do not deserve our trust . . . “ Clinton said. “If you’re stalking or harassing women or children, you shouldn’t have a gun. And if you commit an act of violence against your spouse or your child, you shouldn’t have a gun.”

Clinton said the change is needed because prosecutors often accept plea bargains that reduce domestic crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

Clinton aides said that gun control is one of their favorite wedge issues. Polls show a large majority of independent suburban voters, a key battleground constituency in presidential elections, favors more control on handguns.

Reacting to the president’s proposal, officials of the Dole campaign emphasized that their candidate has already proposed an “instant check initiative” that would prevent anyone who is under a court order for stalking or harassing a spouse from purchasing any gun.

“Bob Dole believes all guns--not just handguns--should be kept out of the hands of domestic abusers,” said a Dole spokeswoman, Christina Martin. “Dealing with America’s epidemic of domestic violence will take tough laws and tough prosecutors, not just more empty rhetoric.”

Critics of the instant check proposal argue that technology to make it work does not exist--in part because not all states maintain computer records capable of being searched for convictions in crimes such as domestic violence.

It is uncertain how many people would be denied guns under the president’s proposal, which would require enactment by Congress, but the number would almost certainly reach into the tens of thousands.

Monday’s convention session relegated most old-fashioned political speech-making to the hours before the nation’s major television networks began their single hour of prime-time coverage.

Before the Bradys and Reeve spoke, the audience in the hall heard from Democratic leaders including House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, as well as a tribute to the late Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown, who died in an airplane crash in Croatia this year.

Each day during the convention, aides said, Clinton plans to focus on a different issue by issuing a new proposal from his train--and the campaign’s principal speakers will echo his theme in Chicago.

Today, as he steams through Michigan, Clinton will propose a new federal initiative aimed at making sure children learn to read, officials said.

The proposal, which in one version was dubbed the “Reading Corps,” would dispatch trained reading specialists and national service volunteers to “make sure every kid can read by the third grade,” as one White House aide put it. Like many of Clinton’s recent initiatives, the plan would attempt to leverage relatively modest federal spending by encouraging local action.

Other proposals Clinton plans to unveil include an environmental initiative, scheduled for Wednesday and a new tax credit to encourage the hiring of welfare recipients, scheduled for Thursday. The total projected cost of the new plans is $8.3 billion, and administration officials said Clinton will propose cuts in other programs to offset the new spending.

The proposed tax credit for job creation is aimed partly at mollifying liberal Democrats who were bitterly opposed to Clinton’s decision last month to sign a Republican-sponsored welfare reform bill, officials said.

Administration officials said the welfare proposal may include both an expansion of an existing tax credit for employers who hire welfare recipients and a $3-billion program to help states create public-sector jobs or subsidize private-sector salaries for welfare recipients.

But some officials who opposed the president’s decision to sign the welfare bill said that the proposals are too insignificant to mitigate the effects of the new law.

“These are just sops to the left,” said one unhappy official. “It’s just putting balm on a wound.”

Monday was also a day for caucuses and pep talks among the delegates.

“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and organize,” Vice President Al Gore told New York delegates in the morning.

Once inside the United Center, a basketball arena used by the NBA champion Chicago Bulls, delegates danced the Macarena--the arm-waving, hip-wagging Latin step that invaded the nation’s baseball parks this summer--and chanted, “Four more years.”

Mrs. Clinton visited several delegations and told them why she believes her husband should be reelected: “It’s been a good four years for the people of this country.”

Times staff writers Stephen Braun, Ronald Brownstein, Sam Fulwood III and Judy Pasternak in Chicago; Paul Richter aboard the Clinton campaign train; and Elizabeth Shogren in Washington contributed to this story.

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