Enter the Omni and the first sensation is unnerving: It doesn’t seem like a convention hall so much as a TV studio.
So much room is devoted to the made-for-TV podium and network sky boxes–nearly half the hall–that there is not enough room for the delegates and guests. Fire marshals closed the doors before the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s speech Tuesday, locking out Martin Luther King III, Dr. King’s eldest son, and the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, King’s successor as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Wednesday night, Ann Richards, the keynote speaker of two nights earlier, was shut out, among others.
But American political conventions now are designed as four-day commercials for their parties, and the Democrats–previously known for floor fights, special-interest speeches, and outside protests–are beaming.
Media Gets the Message
“More than at any time in the history of television, the news media are giving the leadership of the Democratic Party the opportunity to get their message out the way they want it out,” said Michael J. Robinson, a political scientist at Georgetown University.
“The Dukakis campaign has its hand on the throttle of this convention in a death grip,” said CBS Executive Producer Lane Venardos. “It has become a challenge (for us) to sandwich in a little reality.”
The party, now securely run by Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, clearly knows how to get its message out.
It has created a central speech-processing unit so that most speakers will hit the chosen Dukakis themes: children, drugs, fairness, middle American values and George Bush–who is never so much criticized as belittled as a joke. Popular Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, is basically ignored.
Youth is another theme, and the party has made certain to feature younger officials during the prime time hours, in place of some older and more familiar Democratic figures.
And each night the podium is crowded with children, to reinforce for cameras the theme of family, which Democratic polling shows is another way of evoking the party of the future.
“It is the best coordinated, best organized and clearest message convention I’ve been to, and I’ve been coming since 1964,” said Democratic media consultant Frank Greer happily.
This is the way people usually talk about Republicans.
At times, the Democrats have been not so much good as lucky. When House Speaker Jim Wright took the podium Tuesday, the much ballyhooed high-tech TelePrompTer began rolling Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd’s speech instead. But the gaffe occurred before the networks had begun their telecast.
This was not the convention that the Democratic Party had once planned, which was to include stars such as Barry Manilow and “lots of videos.” But it is the one Dukakis wanted–nix the glitz and substitute unity, discipline and strong management.
One key was the central speech unit, through which all but a select few texts had to go (Jackson and Kennedy were big exceptions).
“We receive the texts early, and then all the writers working with the party on this make suggestions,” said one party official privately. “We just want to make sure all the notes are sounded in this symphony.”
And then there is the hall, which is split in half by a giant podium and a massive press area.
Joseph Angotti, the executive producer of NBC’s political coverage, said that the layout of the Omni might make for an odd looking convention hall, but it makes for superb television. The sky boxes and cameras are close to the podium, and everything is so densely packed together on the floor that the scene is easy to capture through a video lens.
So tight are the delegates, squeezed in like a game-show audience to cheer for the cameras, “You have to think that at the next convention they will dispense with the delegates altogether,” Grossman said.
Some of the delegates were beginning to think the same thing Tuesday night, when the fire marshal ordered the hall closed because of overcrowding, locking out more than 1,000 people, delegates among them.
“This really invalidates the system of delegates nominating a President,” said one delegate, a prominent Democrat. “Next time you think they’ll just rent a sound stage in Hollywood, hire a couple thousand people to pose as delegates, a couple hundred to act as demonstrators and film the thing.”
But the delegate refused to have his name used, and his reasons explain much of why Dukakis has achieved his unity. “We’re going to win this time, and I don’t want to be on record as trying to screw it up.”
Staff writer David Treadwell contributed to this story.