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Dukakis' vectors point downward, as if gravity were pressing on him especially hard. Even the words that leave his lips seem to have weights on them. When he says, as he often does in a speech, "My friends," the expression carries a curious gravamen of reproof or irony -- but no warmth. His speeches, however, have much of his body's compactness and concision and a certain driving force about them.
One fresh morning on a farm in Idalou, in the flatlands of West Texas, with an ashy-silver half-plate moon in the blue sky, the rally crowd was being warmed up by Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, a charismatic populist with a talent for comic fulmination. Dan Quayle, said Hightower, is so dumb he "thinks Cheerios are doughnut seeds." And: "If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want the drilling rights on George Bush's head."
Dukakis, with his weighty, even slightly oppressive air of self-possession and the small eyes that give his large head a somehow sealed look, like a tank turret even without his famous tank, applauded in an odd slow motion and dipped his left shoulder and gave a slow-motion thumbs-up sign, as if to say, "Way to go, Big Guy!" Then he came forward and started to tell the crowd about John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and about how "we can do better" and how 1960 has rolled round again. History, says Dukakis, repeats itself. And at least some of the crowd wanted to bring Hightower back for an encore.
THE PRIMAL IMPRINT OF DALLAS
George Bush's vectors fly upward, as if he were about to launch himself. His rangy walk would be a John Wayne saunter, except that he goes on his toes with a springy stride, with profile high and prowing the wind. It is his father's walk, the dark-suited, dignified swagger that one saw in the early 1950s when Prescott Bush of Connecticut crossed the Senate floor. On a dazzling day, the blue sky washed cloudless, George Bush performed such a swagger at the Columbus airport.
An American scene: the candidate came down the front steps of his plane and walked across an agoraphobia of tarmac to a crowd of red-white-and-blue flag- waving, sign-pumping Republicans gathered behind the rope to cheer. In the Kodachrome sunshine, one saw the sharpshooters on the airport roof and the shiny black Secret Service van with black tinted windows, an agent standing on the tailgate with his hand inside a black nylon bag that concealed his automatic weapon. The sunshine itself became sinister and a chill of premonition crossed the mind -- the dank American underdream -- and in a small spasm of panic one frisked the faces in the crowd, looking for the wrong one. The sudden foreboding had a specific primal antecedent in time and place and noon sunshine: the nerves were reaching back exactly to the imprint made upon the American mind on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. And as one boards the Dukakis plane in San Francisco, a frisky German shepherd pokes around the luggage, sniffing for high explosives.
THE RISE OF TELEVISION