The Magic and the Message

The script is plotted down to the hour, computers are spinning out electoral-vote permutations, in-house pollsters are tracking every nuance of the electorate's mood. Yet for all the number crunching and tactical machinations, the Republicans' re-election strategy is not conceptually elaborate: in essence, it consists of two words—Ronald Reagan. The President's men have good reason to believe they can win simply by flying him to the right places at the right times and letting him wow the voters.

The candidate is game. As he is nominated this week in Dallas, and then embarks on the final campaign of his 20-year political career, it should again become clear just how deeply he relishes the public flash, the roar of the crowd, the visceral approbation. After the official Labor Day kickoff deep in Reagan's home territory, near Disneyland in ultraconservative Anaheim, Calif., he will be on the road three days a week at first, more later.

The candidate positively twitches for this last national battle to begin. Indeed, to Reagan, the acts of campaigning for President and being President tend to merge and become one seamless public performance. His presidency has been loaded with theatricality; if all goes according to plan, his campaign will be full of presidential grandeur. Reagan just may be the most naturally and skillfully exuberant presidential campaigner of this century. When he addressed 20,000 red-hot devotees in Austin a few weeks ago, the audience hollered and clapped; Reagan's energy level rose in response; the crowd grew more frenzied in turn. "He loved it,"says one campaign aide. "Absolutely loved it."

By usual standards of presidential performance, Reagan might be judged a failure. He regularly loses track of his facts, or gets them wrong, and he follows his ideology no matter where it leads. Several of his subordinates have shown egregious lapses in judgment. Many others are mediocre. His budget is preposterously out of balance, and generally his programs have tended to hurt the poor. For these reasons, a large minority of Americans are neither charmed nor disarmed by the easy Reagan smile, the low-key Reagan warmth and the relentless Reagan sincerity.

But with most citizens, he seems to have established an uncanny rapport, beyond political agreement or disagreement, as if he were a favorite twinkly uncle who happened to make it to the Oval Office. Not since Dwight Eisenhower has the U.S. public felt such fondness for its leader, and not since Franklin Roosevelt has any President seemed quite so relaxed about the job. Reagan's political adversaries concede his special knack for coming across as both engagingly human and larger than life. Says Robert Lent, a regional director of the United Auto Workers: "He looks good and he's an actor. He's the kind of guy you could strike up a conversation with if he lived in the neighborhood."