ASHINGTON - Big labor's endorsement of Vice President Al Gore. The imbroglio over whether former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey walked away in the middle of the Democrats' fight for survival in the mid-1990s. The question about whether Governor George W. Bush of Texas used cocaine.
In the hothouse of the political world, these are major events. In your house they are almost meaningless.
That's because the presidential campaign has opened, but it hasn't been accessible for viewing by a general audience yet. All these events, from the labor union's endorsement to the labored inquiries into Bush's roguish past, are political shows aired in private screening rooms in Washington, not in public theaters around the country.
Right now all the feints and taunts, all the bobbing and weaving, all the maneuvering and bickering, are being conducted in front of a small audience of political professionals, commentators and reporters. They're watching carefully even as the rest of the country is watching the World Series or preparing for parent-teacher conferences or raking autumn leaves.
Every campaign season has its slow beginning, its early jousting and jockeying. The current campaign, conducted against the backdrop of economic contentment and political cynicism, isn't even close to going public.
So the campaign continues in its subterranean form, a little like the mine fire in Centralia, Pa., that began burning beneath the surface of the city 37 years ago and continues to smolder. Almost everything that the candidates do is for internal combustion - to ignite a fire inside their own campaigns - and for internal consumption.
Trailing the campaigns
Two candidates, Gore and former Red Cross president Elizabeth H. Dole, scheduled official declarations of their campaigns with the express purpose of signaling to the political elite that they were not floundering. Dole's gambit didn't work, and she dropped out before she even made her campaign announcement. Campaigns are regularly accusing each other of sowing rumors among national political reporters.
For much of the year, former Governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee actually conducted an above-ground campaign, meeting voters in coffee shops, at country crossroads and at community centers. But he never broke the public's blank stare, and a candidate who was a few percentage points from breaking into the top ranks four years ago left the race two months ago.
This fall it's the Democrats who are conducting the least public campaign. Their main audience isn't the voters but the political establishment conducting its own primary -- awarding a prize even more valuable than convention delegates: credibility.
That's the heart of the strategies of both contenders. Bradley is conducting an above-the-fray campaign that has attracted the interest of some voters and many insiders. Gore is conducting a down-and-dirty campaign that is based on issues -- particularly the charge that Bradley walked away from the party when he didn't seek reelection in 1996 -- that are inscrutible to voters but intoxicating to insiders. He's also airing ads in early political states meant as much to change the dynamic in the political establishment as persuade voters and caucus-goers who have more than three months to make up their minds.
Looking inside
The effect of this first encounter between the Gore and Bradley campaigns is to underline -- for the small audience of political insiders -- the different approaches emerging in both camps. Gore is trying out the battling vice president approach that won presidential nominations for Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968, Walter F. Mondale in 1984, and George Bush in 1988. Bradley is arguing for restraint inside his own campaign, and he and his advisers have concluded that voters aren't in the mood for what they disliked the most about the last eight years - political bickering.
In this atmosphere all the major party candidates except Bush are preparing to gather this week at Dartmouth College for the first big political event of the campaign season, a pair of town meetings where the candidates will be tested even as they test the patience of the voters.
The sessions will be scrutinized by insiders, glanced at by the rest of the country, but eventually the presidential campaign will have to go public in a big way. The question for the candidates isn't so much where they stand on international trade or how they would protect Social Security, but whether they - and the entire political establishment - are ready for prime time. The outsiders who will decide are a lot more demanding than the insiders.
