THE SECOND COMING OF THE POLITICAL CONVENTION

For the first time in decades, at both the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer, we're at risk of honest-to-God politics breaking out  

- CHARLES P. PIERCE

THE FIRST NATIONAL POLITICAL CONVENTION THAT I EVER WENT TO WAS ONE I DIDN'T really attend. It was 1976. I had spent the previous 18 months trying to get Congressman Mo Udall elected president and had failed. (Not that it was entirely my fault.) The Democrats had come together in New York to nominate Jimmy Carter, whom we had chased all over the country, only to lose narrowly to him in almost every primary. We lost in Wisconsin when everybody went to bed thinking we'd won, and the Milwaukee Sentinel got caught with a Dewey Defeats Truman headline in its early editions. Then, in May, with the campaign barely breathing, we lost to Carter in Michigan by fewer than 2,500 votes. I still have nightmares.

I felt that, out of loyalty, I should watch Mo's concession speech in New York. I quickly learned that you don't just walk into a political convention. Instead, I went to a workingman's Irish bar near Madison Square Garden and dropped a fiver on the bartender so he'd turn on coverage of the convention happening a few blocks away. With the TV rattling away at the other end of the bar, I heard Mo say goodbye.

Four years later, the Democrats were back in New York. So was Mo, delivering the keynote address at that convention, and so was I, in the employ of The Boston Phoenix this time, a press credential around my neck. The big story then was Senator Edward Kennedy's unsuccessful primary challenge to Jimmy Carter, which had handed Ronald Reagan a fat lead in the polls. Ill feeling was at high tide in the Garden when Mo took to the podium.

In a passage that will echo down into the conventions this summer, Mo explained how the Reagan forces had refused to seat his friend and fellow Arizonan Barry Goldwater as a delegate at their 1976 convention because he had supported the incumbent Gerald Ford against Reagan's challenge. It was enough for the rising movement conservatism to cast Goldwater into the wilderness forever.