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Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

Which turns into a trickle, a trickle of sweat, which he cannot avoid wiping away from his upper lip. This happens during nearly every speech he gives, inside or outside, air conditioned or not, and he just can't help it, reaching out quickly with his left hand and executing a backhand swipe. It can happen four or five times in a 20-minute speech, but he has been trying very hard to avoid it during this speech, the speech in which he announces that he wants to be president of the United States.

To no avail. Al Gore may have the heart and soul of a moderate Democrat, but his sweat glands are positively Nixonian.

Think it doesn't matter? Think such things are so trivial that a presidential campaign does not care about them? Think again. In Campaign 2000, every gesture and intonation, every wink and every nod is being analyzed for its effect on the public. The power to connect with people through word and deed, through eye contact and handshake, not only helped Bill Clinton get elected and re-elected but sustained his poll numbers and salvaged his presidency through one of the most humiliating scandals in presidential history.

Which is why both the campaigns of Al Gore and George W. Bush, the front-runners of the Democratic and Republican Parties, left nothing to chance as they within days of each other announced their intentions to become president.

Last Tuesday night, the night before Gore announced in Carthage, Tenn., his campaign flew in a secret weapon: Michael Sheehan. Educated at the Yale Drama School and a former actor, Sheehan coached Clinton on gestures, lip curling, forehead crinkling and general body language in his 1996 presidential debates. Sheehan also picked out his suits and ties.

Tony Coelho, Gore's campaign chairman, brought Sheehan down from Washington and whisked him to the garage of longtime Gore aide Alberta Winkler, who lives not far from the Gore family farm.

Inside the garage, Gore delivered his speech while Sheehan videotaped it. Gore was dropping his voice at the end of sentences, Sheehan told him, giving himself "lows" instead of "highs."

Gore gave the speech again, and Coelho shouted, "Perfect!" and hustled Sheehan out of town. "This is going to be a 17-month campaign," Coelho said later. "I'm not going to psychoanalyze everything Gore says and does. I want to let Gore be Gore."

But which Gore is Gore? Known today for his jokes about his own woodenness ("How do you tell Al Gore from his Secret Service agents? Al Gore is the stiff one"), when he ran for president in 1988, there was barely a mention of stiffness or woodenness in any of the thousands of news accounts about his campaign. In 1988, during the New York primary, Gore instead became known for his slashing attacks, for raising the Willie Horton issue against Michael Dukakis way before the Republicans did and for pandering to the Jewish vote by attacking Jesse Jackson.

Gore learned from his defeat, however, and his jokes about his own stiffness gave him a somewhat more palatable if not overly engaging image.

Now, a new Gore has been assembled. He delivers his speeches more swiftly, with greater modulation and on occasion in gravel-throated, rip-roaring revival-tent tones. He still sweats, but some things are beyond coaching.

He faces an opponent, however, who lacks his experience but has a great strength: George W. Bush is comfortable within his own skin in a way that Gore still seems to be learning.

It is no small thing in politics. Ronald Reagan was no great intellect, and he lacked the depth and breadth of detailed knowledge that many of his opponents had, yet he connected with people. People liked him, in part because he seemed so comfortable with himself.

And when Bush not just works a rope line but plunges into crowd, he does so with an obvious relish.

Why should such things be important?

"Fundamentally, a presidential campaign is about communicating with the public," presidential scholar Gil Troy said. "The 20th century is the age of the visual image, and so we speak with words, and we speak with pictures, and campaigns must master both."

Thus, to a large extent, campaigns have become theatrical productions, just as political journalism now resembles theatrical reviews. "Artifice has become supremely important in politics," Troy said. "It is more important to act rather than to be. The role of the candidate is to fulfill the role not of commander in chief but celebrity in chief. Clinton was excellent at it, but he learned it from studying Ronald Reagan."

So whether by design or through simple affability, when Bush pushes a meal cart down the aisle of his campaign plane, shaking the hand of every journalist on board, and actually snapping the suspenders of one, it makes an impression and builds an image. "He's very good connecting with people both in person and on TV," said Don Sipple, a Republican media consultant who worked for Bush in his campaign against Ann Richards in 1994. "He has good eyes." One thing Bush can do is slow down his blink rate and laser his eyes into whatever he is looking at -- a single voter, a crowd or a TV camera. "Eye contact is everything in this business, and he knows how to connect, in person or through a TV screen," Sipple said.

But just as in the Gore campaign, the Bush campaign knew the candidate's announcement speech was much too important to leave to chance. So in May, in South Carolina, Michigan and California -- three critical states in the election of the next president -- the Bush campaign assembled groups of average citizens to watch films of Bush. Each person held a meter in his hand with a knob on it. If he liked what he was seeing and hearing, he turned the knob one way, and if he did not like it, he turned it the other. The farther he turned the knob, the greater degree of like or dislike.

A computer assembled the responses and created a graph line that was superimposed over the films of Bush. This way, Bush and his aides could watch the films and learn exactly what lines, what gestures, what facial expressions made people like or dislike him.

It is called people-metering, and ironically, Bush's father made it famous, though some would say infamous.

In 1988, the campaign of George Bush put together fake news broadcasts for people-meter groups, telling them that Michael Dukakis had let convicted murderer Willie Horton out of jail and that Dukakis opposed the Pledge of Allegiance. Both scored big people-meter negatives and helped convince Bush to launch his attacks against Dukakis.

George W. Bush's campaign uses only real footage in its people- metering, a senior campaign aide said, and it is being used not to select issues but speaking styles.

"Most of what Bush said in the films, people liked, but it depended on how Bush said it," the aide said. "The more passion he showed, the more involved he looked, the better he did on the people meters. When he struggled through a speech or was unprepared, the people didn't like it."

Campaigns are about more than style and stagecraft and strategies, of course. They are also about issues and substance and, sometimes, character.

But both front-runners in this race seem firmly convinced that you can't get people to concentrate on the latter without perfecting the former.

"I am loving this," Gore said after his speech. "I am glad to be fully announced."

"I felt I connected with the people, and they appreciated it," Bush said. "And I'm glad it's over."

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