POPCORN CANDIDATES

By BRUCE HANDY

Managing a modern presidential campaign is often compared to selling soap. But an even better analogy would be to marketing a big Hollywood summer movie--and not just because summer movies and presidential candidates both tend to have problems with character.

"We've often said that opening a movie is a lot like a political campaign in that we have an idea and the job is to make people want to see it," says Barry London, a vice chairman at Paramount and the man in charge of marketing Mission: Impossible, which just had the second largest opening in movie history. By "idea," London means the film's conceit, in this case the conceit of sticking Tom Cruise in a movie version of a popular old TV show. In Hollywood, as you've probably heard, this is known as a high concept, and if it's grabby enough no one really cares if the actual movie's any good or not; the concept pretty much sells itself, although in Mission: Impossible's case, tie-ins with everything from the N.B.A. to Kellogg's Corn Pops helped too.

High concepts are also popular with politicians, who like to think of them as "issues"--something to keep in mind this summer when you hear about the dangers of same-sex marriage as often as you hear about Jim Carrey playing a demonic cable installer. Bob Dole's campaign had what it thought was a grabby high concept in the fact that Bob Dole, a conservative war hero, is not President Clinton. But as the President takes his own conservative positions on issues like welfare and kiddie curfews, Clinton increasingly is Dole, which means that what Dole isn't is himself--a horrible conundrum best left pondered in college dorm rooms. When political pros say Dole needs to define his vision, what they really mean is that he needs a better high concept. He is said to be considering a 15% across-the-board tax cut, although given his history as a deficit hawk, this would be riskily out of character for Dole, like casting Tom Cruise in a remake of a popular yet inappropriate old TV series--Gomer Pyle, say, or The Munsters. Actors call this stretching. So do political people.

Making matters even tougher for the Kansan is the fact that Clinton's high concept is to remind everyone that Dole and Newt Gingrich have often shared a podium; in today's political climate this is the equivalent of having "starring Judd Nelson" at the top of your movie ad. Which does bring up a key difference between movies and presidential candidates: the Twister camp isn't saturating the airwaves with negative ads pointing out that the plot of Mission: Impossible makes no sense whatsoever. Not that it would matter: even fans of the film seem to recognize its shortcomings, shrugging them off with, "Hey--it's a popcorn movie." This token of the American public's genius for tolerance should be a comfort to Clinton and Dole, given the fact that less than half the electorate, according to polls, says it would be proud to have either one of them as President. What this means for November is unclear. But in the summer, at least, we're easy.