An Excited City Sizzles as Curtain Time Nears

ATLANTA —  “This,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, “is not show business. This is serious business.”

And, yes, what a business.

Most of the 30,000-plus delegates, journalists, hangers-on, protesters and assorted hucksters who have come to Atlanta for tonight’s opening of the 40th Democratic National Convention find themselves locked out of the posh hotel suites and darkened convention-arena boiler rooms where the Jackson and Dukakis campaigns swing the heavy hammers and pummel their political party into shape.

For those on the outside, Atlanta is a sweltering, 99-degree rumor mill. It is a bear pit mixing ambitious politicians and news-starved journalists. It is a zany trade show of entrepreneurs on the make, a colossal edifice ready for the grinding of all variety of axes. It is a reunion, an encampment, a cause, a party (and we don’t necessarily mean political)--an event.

In short, Atlanta on this week in July is what makes it all worthwhile to be in politics.

Here it is possible to sweat from the temperature and, at the same time, break out in goose flesh from the excitement in beholding the spectacle taking form. The rust-colored basketball arena known as the Omni will be America’s stage for four nights of tele-Democracy, supersaturated as it is done no where else in the world.

In the final hours before the gavel falls, downtown Atlanta crackles in anticipation.

There is the business of security: Everything in town seems to have been poked, sniffed or scrutinized for its potential to make trouble. Everything. One reporter found security agents sticking ballpoint pens into the soil of planters on each of 46 floors of a convention headquarters hotel. They were feeling for explosives.

There is the information business: Some delegates said they feel like crime suspects--subjected to one long interrogation after another. Not only are major news organizations competing to pin down every view of the 4,000-plus delegates with both reporters and pollsters, specialty polls are floating around under the sponsorship of everybody from the National League of Cities to Burger King.

Gene Mahon, 54, delegation chairman from South Dakota, said he has been called by 40 or 50 pollsters in the past month and a half.

“One pollster asked me my nationality. I said ‘American.’ He said, ‘Where did your ancestors come from?’ I said ‘Ireland.’ Then he wanted to know my race . . . . “

Jackson notwithstanding, there is the entertainment business of the convention:

“Remember . . . you never get a second chance to make a first impression,” Democratic National Chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr. told lieutenants on the eve of the convention.

By now, many television viewers already have seen a preview of the huge, steely gray podium that Democrats hope will give their convention a futuristic foundation.

But underneath the podium are the makeup rooms, and the rehearsal studio where the polish is put on the performances. Here is a plasterboard replica of the speaker’s platform. A television screen shows how the speakers would appear as they rehearse with the latest generation TelePrompTer.

Victor Raiser, the finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, practiced his speech with the word “turn” inserted every so often. This was to remind him that as he stood before America, he should shift his gaze from side-to-side.

Not Just Politics

There is campaign business: Anyone who thinks this convention is only about presidential politics is misinformed.

At the lobby of the Hilton Hotel Sunday was the latest political hopeful in California’s Brown family, Kathleen Brown, who has indicated she wants to run for California treasurer in 1990. She was there with her father, former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr., whose status in the California Democratic Party is somewhere between revered and beloved. As delegates came over to pay their respects to the father, they got to look over the daughter and meet a couple of family fund-raising specialists who happened to be on hand.

Even more intense is the politics around the Massachusetts delegation.

On the chance Michael S. Dukakis wins in November, there are a flock of eager Statehouse successors: Lt. Gov. Evelyn Murphy and Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn are both delegates. Atty. Gen. James Shannon is here as a member of the rules committee. Rep. Joseph Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, has no official convention role, but is in town.

There is good-time business: Many, maybe most, delegates began their careers licking envelopes and answering telephones as volunteers in some tattered campaign office somewhere. Now they are ready for better.

Georgia state Sen. Horace E. Tate, 65, a Jackson delegate, said he has received invitations so far to 35 parties during the convention week. Because this is his fourth convention, Tate guessed “I’ll probably accept about 10 of them” and pass out the rest to his children.

Blizzard of Invitations

Over at the Missouri delegation, delegates Deleta Williams and Neva Maddox sifted through the blizzard of invitations coming their way. Which choice to make, they wondered: a sightseeing trip and mayor’s brunch or a Planned Parenthood get-together.

And, of course, there is the business of business: In addition to the usual crush of button peddlers and T-shirt hawkers, big business also has moved into the Democratic National Convention. There are high resolution television monitoring systems sponsored by Southern Bell, AT&T;’s “uninterruptable” computer voting machines, research facilities provided by universities and all sorts of Atlanta boosterism.

Some commercialism is more merciful.

Both Cable News Network and Georgia Tech handed out survival kits to reporters. Among the contents: breath mints, aspirin and antacids.