All the President’s Stagehands

President Bill Clinton made a campaign visit to a Fresno school Thursday morning. He spoke for about 45 minutes, a politely received bit of boilerplate about it taking a village to build a bridge and so forth. Afterward, he met privately in a classroom with an assortment of San Joaquin Valley pooh-bahs then flew away in Air Force One for an afternoon speech in Rancho Cucamonga.

The stop registered on the radar of national politics as only the faintest of blips--a paragraph or two in the newspaper roundups, a few seconds of backdrop for the networks. Yet, something remarkable did happen here Thursday. Just as it had happened the day before in Pueblo, Colo., and Sun City, Ariz., just as it would happen later in Rancho Cucamonga and Bel-Air.

What happened was the movement of a president through town. It is a logistic demonstration that always amazes those who experience it for the first time at ground level--the hotel managers who see their inns remade overnight into a temporary White House, the school principals whose playgrounds are re-created as sound stages, the beat cops who find themselves drafted into an army large enough to take Grenada, and so on.

“People always say, ‘Why don’t you have the president just drop in while he’s here?’ ” said Martha Whetstone, a campaign official who was traveling with Clinton. “He doesn’t ‘drop in’ anywhere. For the president to move just one foot requires an incredible amount of people and effort.”

*

It began as a political feeler. An aide to Cal Dooley, a Democratic congressman from here, was contacted by Clinton’s people. The president may or may not be swinging through California in a week, she was told. He may or may not stop in the valley. If he came, his topic would be education, unless it was crime. The site would need to accommodate a crowd of 25,000, or maybe 5,000. It would depend. The aide, Lisa Quigley, began hunting quietly for a location.

Secret Service and campaign advance staff members trickled into town. For a time, it appeared Visalia, 30 miles south, had been chosen. Town officials were summoned for a Saturday meeting--only to be advised that plans were changing again. Four days before the event, the Morris E. Dailey elementary school here was selected. The campaign was delighted with the student body demographics. The Secret Service liked the flat terrain and perimeter fence.

Now advance teams came in waves, from the campaign, from the White House Communications Agency, from the Secret Service. While much of this would be paid for by the campaign, the cost, nonetheless, might be enough to startle poor Howard Jarvis from his grave. Consider it takes roughly $40,000 to fly Air Force One for an hour, and go from there. Consider parallel buildups were underway in Rancho Cucamonga and Bel-Air.

They brought in bomb-sniffing dogs. They brought in “crowd-builders” and technicians to rewire a 90-room wing of the hotel, running in secure telephone lines that would allow the president to function as if he were in the Oval Office. They printed 4,000 tickets, baked 40,000 cookies, built stages and press platforms overnight. They arranged to shut down the airport and rail lines at strategic moments. Agents scoured the neighborhood, securing manhole covers, introducing themselves to neighbors, showing around pictures of shadowy characters.

*

For security reasons, the school playground had been encased in blue plastic tarps. This didn’t look sufficiently telegenic, however, and so American flags were hung where the cameras could be expected to point for the cutaway shots. Explained an advance veteran: “The picture is everything. You have to get the right picture: The President surrounded by kids, flags in the background, all that. You get 30 to 60 seconds on national television, and you want it to be your picture, your message.”

Such basic political thinking--circa, the Television Age--no doubt will seem callous to those who take these events at face value, as a chance to hear a speech, to let kids see a president. In fact, a good number of Dailey’s students had been placed by mistake behind a press platform, unable to see anything but the rear-ends of reporters. And afterward, tears streamed down little faces. Parents fumed.

The blunder didn’t make the network news--too local-yokel, no doubt. What was shown was The Picture: Clinton beaming, children massed behind him. It wasn’t a total victory, however, for the advance team. The story it illustrated had nothing to do with education, villages or bridges to the 21st century. It concerned trashy speculation about the president’s medical records. Somehow it seemed a shame. All that work, all that logistic magic, for a few seconds of prattle about whether the president might have been tested for venereal disease. America.