Now is The Time for all Good Men....

Two receptions are achurn in fair-sized ballrooms on the top floor of the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. Guests slosh back and forth from one to the other. New guests foam in. By stair, mostly. Half the elevators are out of whack, one with a cargo of Democrats captive inside it. They can't be much worse off in point of comfort than those of us up here, but one condoles their piteous lack of booze.

Fritz Mondale, trim and neat in the press of bodies, is working the room like an intern on hospital rounds. The Democratic Party is feeling much better, is going to pull through, may be its old self before long. Dr. Reagan, the patient's savior, isn't in town, and Mondale, who administered vitamins a few hours earlier in the form of a rousing speech, is sopping up credit.

But moving along. There are other rooms to work, and he wants to be out of the Bellevue before Dr. Kennedy drops by. Two nights ago--or maybe it was last night; the nights have a way of sloshing into one another--Mondale threw a bash in this very room, and when Kennedy showed, the guests and the photographers went for him the way the Flyers would likely go for Bo Derek if she happened to flounce (Continued on page 152) The Time for all Good Men.... (Continued from page 96) naked into their locker room. Fritz and Joan were left alone in the receiving line.

It is the second (or third) night of the 1982 Democratic National Party Conference. The nominating convention is two full years off, but Mondale and Kennedy are already running. Others are coming out of the blocks this weekend. None of them knows--God may not even know!--that Kennedy will quit in six months. Fritz is trying to stay ahead of the pack and narrow the gap between himself and Teddy.

His speech, in fact, is a Kennedy speech--traditional party values: full employment, compassion--delivered with vigor, except that Fritz tends to whine the lyrical passages. A return to the faith, in short, after semiapostasy as Jimmy Carter's V.P. Fritz has cash and an organization, but while Carter, thank God, isn't physically in Philadelphia, his ghost is still palpably monkeyed on Mondale's back. Come December, Fritz will be front runner by default; but being out front means being exposed and, thus, vulnerable, a lesson the next six months are going to teach Ted. Mondale may well be the party's best bet in a general election, since he doesn't polarize people strongly against him. But it's hard to give Kennedy speeches better than Kennedy does.

Stately, plump Ted Kennedy struts in behind a straw-hatted banjo jazz band, trailing a cuadrilla of groupies and aides--a pudgy E1 Cordobés on his way to the plaza, where he clearly expects to cut two ears and the tail. Those few pols who still pretend to some dignity manage neither to gape nor to press toward him, but most of the room is at once in multiple orgasm. Kennedy swathes through, waving, baaing greetings, stopping to pump the paws and capture the platitudes. At these last, his face assumes a mask of joy; his gray mane shakes; his lion head nods proudly.

At length, he struts out to dispense charm in the other ballroom, taking about a third of those here with him, making the room momentarily spacious, permitting a view of the bar and the ravaged buffet.

•

Like the other more or less announced candidates, Alan Cranston has a trailer in the basement of the civic center. All weekend long, his small but excellent staff has been passing conference participants through it like sheep through a dip. You go into a room on the right and watch a movie. You go into a room in the middle and wait for a while. You go into a room on the left and chat with the Senator.

The movie shows Cranston in a track suit, loping around some park; Cranston taking a break and a dozen canned questions; Cranston loping again, building up speed. The theme music is from Chariots of Fire, but Cranston, bald and cadaverous, looks like E.T. Offscreen, though, in a business suit, he looks plainly terrestrial. He tells you a bit about his background. He talks cogently about nuclear freeze (an idea that Kennedy has adroitly swiped from him and Senator Gary Hart). He takes uncanned questions.

Now he is taking a long one, embroidered with comment, from someone's precociously bright, self-important 11-year-old. He heeds with all appearance of attention. I don't mean to say he's enjoying the kid or the question; he's showing patience. And I think a patient President might not be bad; a long-distance President, not another sprinter, one who doesn't grin a hell of a lot.

•

John Glenn grins, but only in great moderation. When he does, he reminds one of Eisenhower, though the memory may also be conjured by his syntax. He is receiving a group of state party officials in his suite at the Plaza. We sit in a narrow horseshoe with Glenn at the prongs. He grinned once or twice shaking hands when we entered, but since then, he hasn't. He asks our views and answers our questions.

Exactly what he says isn't important. Just as, before, he reminded us of Ike, now, between the lines, he is reminding us that, dull as he is, he is touched with the glamor of space flight; that, as a former Marine colonel, he's well protected against attack from the right; that Ohio is a key state--in short, that he's electable. The others will have to watch out for Glenn if he ever gets himself a heavyweight staff.

•

A room at the Bellevue. Eight people sitting at a square table, two observers. The rules committee of the Democratic National Committee is getting through some dull but necessary business before proceeding to a reception outside town. Three months ago, the party reformed its reform. A commission chaired by Governor Jim Hunt of North Carolina excised absurdities enacted over years and somewhat ransomed the party's nomination from the media and restored it to the party in convention. The hope is for a more rational choice of nominee, one more likely to honor the party and have its support; hence, better equipped for both running and serving. At peace with itself at last, the party, through its national committee, adopted Hunt's rules without disturbing a comma and with no more show of resistance than a hangover victim puts up when offered a headache pill and a bloody mary. Now the rules committee is tying up a few loose ends.

The spectators are John Perkins, A.F.L.-C.I.O. political director, and his assistant. Their silent presence signifies more than what we at the table say. Organized labor has come home to the Democratic Party.

After ten years of estrangement, unseemly bickering, rows and the tossing of plates, infidelities on both sides and a few unsatisfying, brief reunions, the ardor is gone, but the couple can live together. Labor is coming through with the household money. The party has promised to be good. Perkins, at an unspeakable personal sacrifice in boredom, is keeping an eye on it.

•

Civic center on Saturday, foreign-policy workshop. Eighty-odd participants and more than half as many spectators in a room ablaze with TV lights and evidently air conditioned by the same people who do the Bellevue Stratford's elevators. Shirt-sleeved, bright Senator Paul Tsongas is ticking us through amendments to the draft statement of the party's foreign posture like a Harvard prof holding an oral exam.

The amendment we're on concerns the Middle East, of more than usual concern this morning: The Israeli war machine is besieging Beirut. The amendment's author is Jewish--by profession as well as persuasion, as his text reflects. The speaker is Congressman Toby Moffett, of Lebanese descent, with family in Lebanon. He is speaking in support and speaking forcefully.

How's that for a headline? "Arab and Jew Agree On Mid-East Stance!" Beats "Man bites Dog." Is this a Democratic conference?

Yes, indeedy! The Democrats are united, for a change. Why may be expressed in the following equation: Party unity equals hunger for power times prospect of slaking same.

Essentially, the party has been on short rations for 15 years. What's left of it is very, very hungry. Its prospects of chowing down are looking up. Hence, it's united.

Moffett sits down. Tsongas calls the question. The amendment carries by voice vote, overwhelmingly.

•

One way to gauge the health of a collective is to ask it to meet in Philadelphia, then see if it shows up and can survive. That's what the Democratic Party did last summer.

Results were surprising. Nine hundred Democratic mullahs, muftis and Janizaries--most of us veterans on one side or the other of the jihads over Vietnam and party reform--gathered in an atmosphere of union and civility and discussed matters of faith for three days without anyone's so much as gripping the hilt of his scimitar, let alone spilling blood. For the rest, we watched the candidates, like belly dancers, undulate for our affections.

And celebrated. Candidates threw bashes. So did state delegations and lobbying groups. All over Philadelphia, fatted calves were butchered, for this our party was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.

The group grope called politics gratifies two urges: the urge to help the collective to ideal goals and the urge to help oneself to extra helpings. When humans yearn to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, promote the general welfare, acquire social or economic advantage, succor friends, injure enemies, be deferred to or feel important, they often seek political influence--commonly called power.

Parties are teams whose aim is winning power, but that doesn't mean they serve no useful purpose. Parties function as go-betweens in the messing around of governed and governing--less than marriage brokers but more than pimps. The public wants its troubles listened to, its doubts soothed, its ego fondled, its frustrations relieved, its needs and cravings ministered to. It will pay, in votes and otherwise, for those attentions. Politicians can provide them and want the fee. Parties help the two nuzzle up to each other and try to ensure that each gets what it's after.

Back in the palmy days before TV, when they were a pol's sole hope and refuge, parties enjoyed the institutional character of established hookshops, party bosses the respect due dependable bawds. The pols stayed in line, John Q. Public got serviced, parties prospered. Bosses took fair compensation in deference and graft. Only prudes refused to acknowledge that politics was a basic human appetite and activity. Only visionaries believed that politics might be pure. All the normal person hoped for was that politics might be performed in an orderly fashion, without offending decent folk too much, and it usually was. It's a current delusion that the withering of parties and the bosses' demise have somehow elevated American politics. The most obvious result, however, is that voters now get turkeys on Election Day instead of at Thanksgiving.

Parties also facilitate intercourse between the active and the contemplative dispositions, procuring ideas for politicians by encouraging thinkers to flash in their vicinity. Policy is fashioned from ideas, but politicians have none of their own. As Proust pointed out, "To repeat what everyone else is thinking is, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind."

From 1933 till the mid-Sixties, the Democratic Party functioned well. Its stable of pols heard the public's sad stories with sympathy and responded with vigorous motion to its desires for economic protection and social justice by seizing good ideas and turning them into policy. Its managers shilled up a majority of the American people and melded them into a flock of more or less steady and satisfied customers. American society was changed utterly, in the perception of most Americans for the better. Then the party of change fell out of step with the changes. During a decade and a half, the Democratic Party self-destructed. Success had made it overconfident.

I joined the Democratic National Committee in March 1967, before war poisoned the reign of Lyndon the Bounteous. John Bailey was chairman. Meetings produced a choral harmony that recalled Toscanini conducting Beethoven's Ninth. Not only was Bailey a consummate maestro; we members were disposed to follow his baton and sing the tune composed for us in the White House. There were private misgivings but no discordant notes in public. We sang, and then we went to supper.

I recall a supper at the Washington Hilton. The Cabinet supped with us; the President spoke. Journalists and other serfs were excluded. After reviewing in great good humor the domestic scene, the President turned his thoughts to Southeast Asia. And got exercised, as I think they say in Texas. And, at one point, bellowed, "If Mr. Ho Chi Minh thinks he can push me around, he's crayzee!"

Terrific, I said to myself. You got something personal with Ho, ask him to meet you outside the saloon at high noon; but leave the other 200,000,000 of us out of it.

That's when and why I stopped loving the war. The President converted me in person. Other Democrats, cleverer than I, were already converted. Many weren't. At its 1968 convention and for years thereafter, the Democratic Party tore itself apart. Not just over the war, though that would have been enough, but over the matter of minority representation, too. The great national struggles over the Vietnam war and racial equality were fought in the Democratic Party.

Once the lists were drawn between regulars and liberals, the two opposed each other no matter what. I remember a meeting before the 1974 conference in Kansas City at which delegate Joe Crangle of New York proposed including God in the party's charter. God won--but by only a close margin--after heated debate.

To serve on the national committee was to find oneself in a wilderness of monkeys, all howling inarticulately, some flinging excrement. After one vituperative session in Washington, I came upon Bailey (no longer chairman but a member for Connecticut) taking refreshment at the Mayflower.

"I don't know what's wrong with Larry O'Brien," he lamented in reference to the chairman at the time. "I ran this committee eight years without one roll-call vote."

But there was nothing wrong with O'Brien. As the N.B.A. knows, he, too, is a gifted maestro. The party had simply broken to smatters, and the committee that represented it had become unrunnable. Saint Francis of Assisi couldn't have gentled it.

The party turned inward. Having made society over, it remade itself. Thus distracted--and discomfited by mental obesity born of success--party managers ignored innovations in fund raising and information handling, so that the party became dependent on a few fat cats and was late to enter the computer age. Party politicians stopped listening to the public, ceased eying new ideas and kept turning the old trick of programmatic legislation in increasingly kinky ways--programs for left-handed midgets, for monoglot Kurds--that satisfied few voters and disgusted many. The Democratic Party stopped providing satisfaction and proclaimed its virtue instead--very annoying conduct in a go-between.

Meanwhile, the nature of politics had altered, and the influence of parties had declined, with the advent to the scene of other go-betweens. Single-interest lobbies set up assignations with the state for political fetishists. Pollsters and direct-mail specialists arranged antiseptic contacts between pols and constituents that helped the pols get elected but were so technologically prophylactic that little feeling got through in either direction. Television enabled candidates to peddle themselves to the public without much help from their parties; hence, without kicking back much power to them or being restrained by them once in office. The effect resembled that of a stringent vice code that all but closes down the established houses but does not stop vice--merely makes it disorderly, brings a proliferation of callgirls and streetwalkers, higher prices and lower levels of hygiene.

In this altered, dehumanized state of American politics, the party boss gave way to the media advisor, or political pimp. Democratic Party reform, favoring primaries over caucuses, unknowns over established figures, enhanced that character's effectiveness. The result was Jimmy Carter. In an ecstasy of irresponsibility, we Democrats reformed our party to the point where its nomination might be swiped by a man with small experience of and less talent for government, with no ties to or any love for the party, whose only attributes (one can't call them qualifications) were the lack of a record to criticize, a soothing tube presence and a single-minded drive to be President. The other party's troubles allowed him to win.

As Carter abundantly proved (and Reagan is proving), the cathode tube can elect, but it cannot govern. One needs a strong party for that in a democracy--one of the numerous facts of political life that no one ever told Carter. He distrusted his party and contrived to weaken it further. In his hypocritical yen to seem above politics, he made party activism a reason to disqualify competent people for public appointments, thus punishing instead of rewarding party allegiance. He gave party leaders (who, as experienced professionals, might have helped him correct his bungling and bumbling) no more access to the White House than they might have enjoyed had Gerald Ford been returned. And he named to his staff, and to that of the national committee, a rabble of mean and insolent little men who poisoned his relations with the party's majority in the Congress and treated party stalwarts with scorn and contempt and, far from repairing the party's rusty machinery, suffered it to crumble entirely. Then, after all that and despite his lack of favor with the electorate, the party let Carter have its nomination again.

That was the last straw. Reality caught up with the Democratic Party. In 1980, it took a fearful thrashing. None could say, in conscience, that it was undeserved.

But sometimes a defeated party's hopes are improved (and its unity thus supplied) by an outstanding figure who comforts it in the long Egyptian night and sustains it in the Negeb and points the way to the land of milk and honey. Such a Moses has come forth to succor the Democrats. His name is Ronald Reagan.

One of the main reasons the Democratic Party fell from grace with the public was its success in achieving its agenda. The public came to feel adequately protected against economic depression and unemployment, came to think social justice had gone far enough. It traded those old needs in on new ones--protection against inflation, relief from high taxes--and turned to the Republicans for satisfaction. But Reagan's stewardship of the economy has brought depression and rising unemployment, rekindling the public's craving for protection against them. His callous readiness to pile the economic burden on those least able to bear it or make their squeals heard, his blatant truckling to the rich and powerful reawaken the public's desire for fairness. Reagan is making the Democratic Party's old tricks attractive again.

The party came to look irresponsible on national defense. Reagan is repairing that damage, too. The public, world-wide, has a bad case of nuclear jitters, yet Reagan has neglected arms control and seems eager (thank you, Mark Shields of The Washington Post) "to put MX missiles in unmarked cars on the New Jersey Turnpike and give every second lieutenant his or her own nuclear device." He makes the Democrats look more competent as defense stewards.

The Democrats seemed too permissive on social issues. Reagan's Moral Majority backers make them appear mature and sane, instead. If the Moral Majority were to have its way, courts would provide death by stoning not just for sinners taken in adultery but for married folks who depart from the missionary position. The public at large, however, is somewhat less strict. Where sex is concerned, it seems to favor being stoned during. The Moral Majority isn't a popular movement but a hypocrites' lobby. It mouths about God but actually worships mammon, whence cometh its clout, collecting vast sums and dumping them into the campaign cup.

And then the organ-grinder must feed his monkey. The more attention Reagan gives the Moral Majority, the more aid and comfort he gives the Democratic Party.

Reagan is the restorer of the party's hopes, the architect of its unity. He is to it what rape is to the National Enquirer: disapproved of but indispensable.

In the altered, largely dehumanized state of our politics, the public grows increasingly volatile, flinging parties in and out of office, for both it and the parties have changed. TV and other agents have blurred the regional, ethnic, class and religious distinctions that once divided the American public into blocs that voted more or less consistently. Meanwhile (thank you, Alan Baron, editor of The Baron Report), "the parties realigned themselves into ideological consistency and realigned the public out of the process."

The Republican Party gathers off on the right. The Democratic Party collects on the left. The public, somewhere in the middle, has no loyalty to either. The country, meanwhile, declines, is less and less industrially competitive, diplomatically influential, financially stable and militarily potent. The decline is, at least in part, a natural down from an unnatural high; but whatever the cause, the public doesn't like it. Each party, in turn, makes it a little worse. Like the ball in a tennis game, the public is swatted from one to the other, not so much drawn by any hope of satisfaction as repelled by disgust with whoever's in power. So, now, the Democratic Party waits with growing confidence for Reagan to drive the public back into its court.

•

A pink discothèque with Marlon Brando posters at the bottom of a Philadelphia hotel, but this isn't a bash; it's a seminar. Gary Hart, who looks like a good-looking Abe Lincoln, has picked some experts as sidemen and is tooting at issues with proper Presidential gravity.

I've heard Hart before. Some of his phrases seem designed to charm the disco's regular patrons. "Nonprogrammatic methods of achieving social justice," for example--about as likely of discovery as nonfattening methods of eating Nesselrode pie. On the other hand, I've read the position papers Hart sent each of us participants before the conference. He's culled some excellent ideas on military reform, a key item on any agenda that would arrest the national decline.

Of all the candidates, Hart is running hardest. Reubin Askew, for instance, who will not speak at the conference but leaves no room unworked, is running for Vice-President, seeking to be a force at the 1984 convention. Ernest Hollings of South Carolina is as competent a man to be President as there is in the country, but Jimmy Carter has made things tough for Southerners and Hollings knows it. Hart, however, has the fire in the belly. That's enough to make him hard to count out.

His act is new ideas. Partly, I guess, because he believes in them and partly because it's the only act now open to him. And partly, I think, Hart is right. The tactical advantage of being out is that you don't need a program tying you down. You need only attack the program of whoever's in. But if Reagan does put us back in power, only good, fresh ideas will keep us there or justify having sought people's votes. The younger Democratic officeholders are lusting after fresh ideas with a mental horniness not witnessed since the early Thirties or the late Fifties--a hopeful sign.

The hall on Sunday, Kennedy is speaking. His first big speech of the 1984 campaign and, though none of us knows it, not even he, his last. Showing another talent, he delivers it like Pavarotti singing Verdi.

Robusto, asserting old values (and swiping at Hart): "Rethinking our ideas must never be an excuse for retreating from our ideals."

Buffo, roasting Reagan: "If Ronald Reagan doesn't know the facts about how this recession began, then Ed Meese ought to wake him up and tell him."

Lirico: "Our hearts are bright, our cause is right and our day is coming again."

We participants love it. It's restful and exciting at the same time. The hall is tiny to begin with. Kennedy's people have packed it with an unnecessary claque 400 strong. Breakers of cheers and applause foam up to the podium, laving the candidate momently pure of all defect. His speech is doing the same for us as a party.

Leaving the hall. Still flush with faith but reason returning. One hopes that if Reagan makes the party's old values attractive enough to put it back in power, its current lust for fresh ideas will provide the matrix for sensible policy. Which will have to be innovative, for the country, too, has fallen out of pace with change. Looking backward won't work, and there's the Democratic Party's justification. If the country is to be led into step with reality--something by no means certain--Democrats will do it.

One hopes, besides--almost beyond hope--that both parties will recover true vigor, become less ideological, more attuned to the public, thus able to gather it into broad, enduring flocks. In the past two decades, we have had one President shot, two hounded from office, one named by his predecessor and dismissed by the voters, another flung out by landslide at the first chance, and an incumbent who seems destined to go likewise: the sort of politics that would shame a banana republic. Healthy political parties cannot be virginal. The business they're in scarcely permits the semblance of respectability. At best, they're no better than worldly old go-betweens with both eyes on the main chance but tempered by a yen to give satisfaction. They make for stable politics, however. One wishes them well.

"The theme music is from 'Chariots of Fire,' but Cranston, bald and cadaverous, looks like E.T."