When Bill Clinton and Bob Dole each selected the site for their launch speeches last week, they told Americans much about what the upcoming presidential campaign would be about. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of "American Soul" (Mercury House, 1995).

Observers looking for clues about the shape of the upcoming presidential election campaign would do well to consider where Bill Clinton and Bob Dole gave their launch speeches last week: Pennsylvania State College for Clinton and the Center for Strategic and International Studies for Dole.

Clinton picked a small eastern state college symbolizing young people from the working poor and lower middle classes striving to make it up the economic ladder. Dole picked a Washington think tank symbolizing experts with firm views that America has to be strong at home and abroad.

Both spots say much, if not everything, about the themes that will dominate the campaign. Clinton will pound home the message that he has delivered on his promise to make things better for middle class Americans as well as the working poor. Dole will counter that Clinton has dangerously messed us up abroad at a time when we have become more bound up with the rest of the world than ever in America's history.

Both these campaign thrusts seek to address the main challenge confronting each candidate. Clinton's problems are simple and quantitative: he has a unified party behind him with a huge campaign war chest. From now until November 5, he has to persuade masses of people from the economically hard-hit working poor and lower middle classes to go to the polls and vote for him.

Foreign affairs mean little to voters from these classes unless and until some new Vietnam-style involvement looms. If over the next six months Clinton can prevent any "blood bath" in foreign policy or in the economy, he likely will be a shoo-in for re-election.

On the other hand, the bulk of Dole's vote is going to come from the main Republican political reservoir, the traditional middle class. Despite the widening economic gap between its lower and higher segments, most Americans identify themselves culturally as middle class, including many minority people. Being middle class means consuming, and consumers know how dependent America has become on the world economy: cheap Chinese goods, still reasonably priced Japanese cars, fine but cheap textiles from the "newly industrialized countries."

There are a lot of issues Dole can score on within this vast class but, unfortunately for him, too many more that he can't. First there is his age and his infirmity. Second he is the consummate insider, an image so disliked in mainstream America that it got Perot 20 percent of the vote in 1992. And third there is the economy which, on the surface, doesn't look too bad: unemployment low, inflation in check, price pressures leveling off.

There could be all kinds of unpleasant October surprises that might destabilize Clinton, but Dole is too shrewd a politician to base a political campaign on mere hope alone. There is, however, one event that could give a dramatic boost to the Dole campaign and the one most feared by the White House: acceptance by General Colin Powell of the vice-presidential nomination.

Unlike Clinton's get-the-voters-out challenge, Dole's main challenge now is pulling together the pieces of what still could be a formidable Republican political organization -- an organization that snatched him from the jaws of humiliating defeat in the primaries and made him the virtually certain Republican candidate.

Dole clearly hopes the message of "our country in danger" will override all rage in his party over abortion, religion, labor unions, regional splits. If at the San Diego convention General Powell walks onto the stage, embraces Dole, and announces his acceptance of the nomination for vice-president, the reverberations will be enormous.

General Powell is much more than a highly respected military man of color. He is one of America's top foreign policy experts. Nothing would better dramatize the Dole theme that America could be facing very rough seas abroad over the next four years than Powell's nomination. And the chances of a Dole-Powell team winning on November 5 would shoot up.

Does Dole have some private whispers from Powell quarters that the general might agree? There really is no other way to explain Dole's choice of location for launching his presidential campaign.