Nothing left to chance or interest at Republican convention

By ROGER FRANKLIN herald correspondent

NEW YORK - You might expect any gathering that attracts 15,000 reporters, 13,000 police officers, 10,000 protesters, 3000-odd delegates and an unknown number of hookers to be an event of at least passing importance.

But on Tuesday in Philadelphia, when Republicans convene to nominate George W. Bush as their standard-bearer in November's presidential election, any such expectation would be a gross delusion.

True, by the time the balloons fall from the ceiling and everyone marches home to the tune of Happy Days Are Here Again, Bush the Younger will have introduced the world to his running mate, Bush the Elder's former Defence Secretary, Dick Cheney.

But apart from filling a job that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first Vice-President, "Cactus Jack" Garner, once dismissed as being worth "a pitcher of warm spit," the four-day event will have achieved, well, next to nothing.

Given that the star-spangled affair is going to cost the Republican Party, the city of Philadelphia, the media and America's taxpayers all of $US300 million ($626 million), it may just turn out to be the most conspicuous waste of political capital in the history of the republic.

That is, of course, until the Democrats meet a few days later in Los Angeles to blow an even bigger wad of cash.

To what end? For those who lament the vanished rough-and-tumble of American politics - the regional bosses and cigar-chomping kingmakers, the smoke-filled rooms, the horse-trading and vote-buying - it is all very sad.

Once upon a time, conventions said something about the candidates they selected, even if it was only that the winners were more ruthless than the also-rans they trampled in the rush for power.

But now, what are supposed to be the four-year highpoints of American democracy make for such a dismal spectacle that the ABC TV network at first refused to delay its weekly broadcast of Monday Night Football. It was not always this way. Once, up until as late as three or four elections ago, there really was something for reporters to report.

In their heyday, the conventions were such naked displays of intrigue, poison and betrayal that only a medieval meeting of the College of Cardinals could have held a candle to them.

The last time Republicans convened in Philadelphia, for example, was way back in 1948, when their leading light was Thomas Dewey, a little chap with a high voice and gigolo's moustache.

Although he was derided as "the little man off the wedding cake," as an arm-twister Dewey had no equal. Legend has it that one leader of a state delegation threw his votes behind Dewey after being warned that, if he did not, the mortgage on his mother's home would be foreclosed by the candidate's banker buddies.

"The CIA had nothing on Dewey," was the way one Republican stalwart later recalled the man whose memory still makes party veterans shudder, not least because he went down to a totally unexpected defeat at the hands of Democrat Harry Truman.

In 1960, the Democratic convention was a thieves' market. Lyndon Johnson bought votes with promises of patronage while John F. Kennedy's operatives handed out envelopes full of his father's cash (or so it has been alleged).

Twenty years later, as Republican Ronald Reagan polished his "aw shucks" smile in the wings and rehearsed an acceptance speech that blamed air pollution on trees, conventions still left room for the unexpected.

The Rockefeller wing of the party, which wanted the moderate Gerald Ford to serve as the Gipper's veep, tried to negotiate a pact in which Reagan would have been a largely symbolic figurehead while his number two called the shots. Actually, the real font of power would have been Henry Kissinger, who hatched the Byzantine manoeuvre in the first place.

Reagan let the plotters plot then picked Bush the Elder. Ford returned to the semi-obscurity of attending state funerals and writing memoirs so turgid and self-serving that his ghost writer is probably the only person to have read them from cover to cover.

These days convention organisers leave nothing to chance. With the nominations long since nailed down by voters in the primaries, the bosses' biggest chore is trying to keep everything nice and squeaky clean.

For the Republicans, that means making sure the party's leading lights are not seen hob-nobbing with too many captains of industry. It would not do to give the impression that Republicans are the party of capital and privilege, which of course they are and always have been.

As for Democrats, who are also the party of privilege and power but better at concealing it, the ticklish issue will be keeping the party's menfolk away from the LA Playboy Mansion, where Hugh Hefner has promised to lay on a hutch of fundraising bunnies.

This has angered the party's feminist wing, which defended the President's right to dally with a dim intern but sees something unsettlingly sinister about a party with bunny girls, albeit demurely clad. Perhaps that is the real Clinton legacy: the way his party has grown comfortable with holding and defending contradictory points of view, each at the same time.

What can US viewers expect during the scant coverage the networks are giving the conventions?

Not much in the way of genuine news. There will be some nattering among commentators about Bush's choice of Cheney, who is a surprising selection since he is 59 years old, has had three heart attacks and comes from the state of Wyoming, where cattle outnumber registered voters by at least 100-to-1.

After that, count on a gush of mush - tributes to the goodness of Billy Graham, the wisdom of Ronald Reagan and the wonder of small children. In an effort to make Bush's party look like something other than a bunch of white folks from the country club, Gulf War victor Colin Powell will shuttle between photo ops, as will the three or four other blacks the party can muster.

The Democrats are likely to go heavier on victims, as is their wont. Four years ago, in what became a 10-hanky celebration of misfortune, a crippled Christopher Reeve was the marquis speaker, followed by Al Gore's death-bed recollections of his sister's death from lung cancer.

Then came parents of a little boy killed by a bacteria-tainted hamburger, a young mother wounded by a thug's stray shot, and the resident of a women's shelter who relived the beatings she had suffered at the hands of her brutish husband.

This year, the Democrats appear to have built their big play for pathos around Caroline Kennedy, who is expected to invoke all her dead kinsmen, including brother John jun. Given the emphasis on infirmity, it may well come as a considerable relief if the TV cameras are drawn to the streets outside the conventions, where viewers are likely to see any number of big, brawny, muscular men engaging in vigorous encounters with spirited protesters.

The Vegan Avengers are already in town to denounce meat eaters, and so are all the other groups that turned the World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle into such a memorable affair. When the fun is over in Philly, the tribes will speed across country to jeer the Democrats in LA.

Philadelphia's police have a reputation for being some of the thickest specimens ever to smash heads.

Only last week, three senior officers were suspended for printing and selling a T-shirt that says "Welcome to Philly" above a picture of a suspect being kicked and beaten by a furious mob of officers.

Across the country in Los Angeles, plans to bottle up the protesters far from the convention centre were dismantled last week by a judge who ruled that barricades and cyclone wire are clear impediments to free speech.

In both cities, it does not take much imagination to catch the faint whiff of teargas if, of course, you can ignore the much stronger scent of a certain barnyard commodity that is already thick on the ground.