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Michael Dukakis' campaign caravan, like a sleek, sinuous dragon, all flashing lights, police outriders, limo, station wagons, Secret Service, staff, two buses for the press, sweeps through Sacramento at 8 in the morning, all traffic halted at intersections by leapfrogging police cars with astonishing precision. Not an instant's impedance in the arteries of democracy. The campaign dazzles by to its event and comes to rest at a glistening green public park in the most splendid of California mornings. A soccer field, roped off. Twenty or 30 small boys in their soccer uniforms, their parents and friends on the sidelines. The candidate appears, wearing khakis, red crew-neck sweater and jogging shoes. He saunters in his freighted way across the grass toward the boys, and then, without transition, starts idly toeing a soccer ball toward them, again in that curious slow-motion way he has, his body doing not the act itself but the slo-mo replay. The photographers click away. Dukakis, one thinks, may have made a mistake -- in his outfit, with his large head, he looks like Charlie Brown, and something in his almost rueful body English suggests that Lucy is about to snatch the ball away again just as he kicks. Unfair: a reporter remarks, "This is part of Dukakis' relentless search for a constituency shorter than himself." In a few moments it is over. The kids yell in little voices: "Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Dukakis, Dukakis, yay!" He gives a minichat of greeting. Absolutely nothing has happened. The caravan sweeps away. Next morning, the newspapers carry a picture, sure enough, of Michael Dukakis toeing a soccer ball toward a child.
Or George Bush's long procession of buses pulling off Route 51 in central Illinois one afternoon at 3:30 and sweeping up to the Del Monte canning factory. The press corps (numbering some 120 now) dutifully takes its place not far from enormous piles of corn that are being dumped onto the vast concrete acreage, then pushed by special dozers toward the trench that will catch the corn on conveyer belts and carry it with a kind of clanking Modern Times idiot ingenuity up a ramp to be mechanically husked and then borne inside the maw of the factory to its fate. So much corn has an unexpected rich barnyard kind of smell, a cloying excess of smell. Bush appears with his two oldest grandchildren, walks toward a monster mound of corn and, as photographers record the event, he acts like a man waiting for a train on a platform. Loretta Lynn and Crystal Gayle and Peggy Sue appear, dressed in tall spike heels, skintight pedal pushers and Bush T shirts. On the other side of the factory, for the thousandth time that day, the sisters introduce Bush by singing Coal Miner's Daughter, Amazing Grace, The Man from Galilee, and I Saw the Light. The crowds all day, surprised to find someone really famous among them, give the singers squeals of delight and that suddenly sharp liveliness of the eyes, the predatory gladness, that announces recognition of a celebrity. Loretta Lynn!
INVENTING THE MORAL ITINERARY