The idea was not to have a media event, but to visit a side of life that was once very important to the Democratic Party, one of the patches in the multicolored quilt that describes the romantic ideal of Democratic politics.
And so last week, while most of the Democrats at the 1992 nominating convention were partying and shopping and munching on fat strawberries, or sweltering in the Baked Apple as they looked for the latest glitzy diversion, Rep. Pat Schroeder of Colorado and some friends headed to East Harlem.
It was a side trip from the main event, which had gone about exactly as expected with Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton finally collecting the nomination he has wanted for most of his life and his troops now inspired for what suddenly had become a two-man race with the departure of Ross Perot.
Party nominating conventions don`t really have much of a purpose anymore, other than to mutate into a grand television spectacle, the results of a deliberately crafted primary election process that is aimed at squeezing out and homogenizing every identifiable source of dissension.
Two people were able to avoid this withering process. Former California Gov. Jerry Brown had his chance, prime time this time, to rail and condemn the big-dollar cynicism that he believes has corrupted the process.
And Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Casey, who could have talked from the dais if only he had abandoned the strong anti-abortion position that made him a very lonely man at this celebration, stood fast. The conservative Roman Catholicism that sustained his huge family during a long and difficult career outweighed the brief need to seem very harmonious.
Everything that the Democrats had to have for a convention was produced in volume. There were many living Kennedys and sad, inspirational ghosts of Kennedys past. Jesse Jackson was brilliant, and more important, safely, almost meekly, within the camp this time.
The balloons, which failed in 1988 in what should have been seen as an augury of candidate Michael Dukakis` doom to come, worked this time.
Last Wednesday, the day New York Gov. Mario Cuomo put Bill Clinton`s name before the convention, Schroeder and some friends took their little-noticed sidetrip to East Harlem. The trip was important, too, because it touched on the other big development during convention week, the moderation of the Democratic message.
The group went to something called YouthBuild. There were no reporters. But Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Rep. Bud Cramer of Alabama came along.
Schroeder thought it would be interesting to sit down with the teenagers who get their GED high school certificates and practical job training at YouthBuild. They are paid about $30 a week, she said, and some of them have to travel two hours just to get there.
”I think they were really touched by that, the chance to sit down to talk to us without the bright lights and putting on a show,” Schroeder said. ”The thing that shot arrows right through our hearts was to have this whole roomful of kids say to us, `Do you see yourself in any of us?`
”Here they are sharing this island, kids with 4th- to 8th-grade reading skills, teaching us about the slang of the city, about being red-capped
(offered crack) and wondering if there is any way to get to the other part of life? To our part of life.”
When people outside the party sneer at the ”liberal agenda” and the Democratic connection to ”special interests,” Pat Schroeder, John Kerry and East Harlem are little parts of what they are talking about.
Visiting East Harlem is what Democratic liberal activists do, along with visiting the South Side of Chicago or visiting riot-torn Los Angeles or visiting the rural poor or building campaigns to help Native Americans or rejected Haitians or any of a thousand other causes.
When the Audubon Club needs money, when whales get stuck under the ice, when another vast chunk of rain forest is ground to pulp, these are the people who actually open solicitations that come in the mail and respond with money. They see it as part of the mission, and they are fairly quick to weep or bleed.
They are at the heart of Democratic politics, the balance to the conservatives who are at the center of the other party.
For much of the past 30 years, the Democrats have had at least an ideological commitment to using government to construct the bridges that allow people to escape poverty through education and job training, to attack social disorder, to reflect the Jeffersonian sentiment that nations should be judged by the way they treat their least, not their best.
It is still there. But what happened during the convention last week was that much of that history of the nation`s oldest political party was set aside, not because the Democrats want to abandon their liberal roots or their commitments, but because the nation no longer seems attracted to those parts of the patchwork quilt.
In Clinton and Tennessee Sen. Al Gore, the party has forged its most moderate ticket in years. Almost everyone who spoke at the convention reflected this change, even Jackson and Cuomo, who were eloquent in indirect defense of the party`s liberalism, but clearly called for the same changes in welfare and economic policy expressed in the Clinton platform.
Should the Clinton-Gore ticket win in November, it is likely to set the cast for the serious Democrats of the future, much the same as John Kennedy`s election inspired and empowered many of the liberals-people a lot more liberal than Kennedy himself.
What the 1992 Democratic National Convention was all about was winning.
It is tempting to draw a comparison to dealing with the devil, but as Schroeder pointed out while reflecting on the visit to East Harlem, that is not what happened.
”I think people who believe we have pulled up that bridge to the poor are misconstruing what is really going on,” she said. ”I think there is such a tension and a fear that we are losing it in the global marketplace that the No. 1 focus just has to be jobs, jobs, jobs and economic growth.
”It doesn`t mean that these other things are not going to be focused on. Take this program. Back when we had economic growth, we could count on the money in the budget. But what Ronald Reagan`s legacy has been is that the cupboard is bare. Until you get some canned goods back in the cupboard, it`s hard to argue about how to address these problems.”
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And before you can even start arguing about who gets the pate and who gets the baked beans, she noted, you have to win.
Behind the scenes, this shift caused trouble for some, not so much trouble that it poured out onto the convention floor or exploded in caucuses, but enough that there was a dark edge to the ”We Don`t Need Two Republican Parties” buttons that materialized on liberal lapels.
”I went to a meeting today, and what happened is basically we got kicked in the teeth,” said one of the party`s most active feminists. ”The Republicans are out there now working on their base, quietly. The Democrats now want to go out and expand the middle, but they are not working on their base, which is us.”
Women were strongly showcased during the first two days of the convention, but what some wanted was prime time on all four days of the convention. They came expecting it, but didn`t get much of it.
They may be reading too much into a situation that might better be attributed to the confusion of stage-managing such a huge event, but a perceived slight is just as good as a real one in these circles.
The assumption is that feminists can be abused because there is nowhere else for these liberals to go on Election Day, and that is true. Because they are committed to the party and to the ideal of democracy, because they despise George Bush, and because they have a little whiff of potential victory in their noses, they will vote.
But the reality that drove this convention is that there aren`t enough liberals left to elect anyone in a national campaign. The fat part of the electorate is moderate, middle class, tired of politics and longing to hear from someone who can talk its language.
It wants health care without federal bankruptcy, a little help with the built-in heart attack that comes when that most ominous of all parental bills, the one for college, arrives. It wants some sensitivity to the fact that middle-class people, too, get stuck under the ice or ground up like rain forest pulp. Public schools that actually teach would help, too. And it would be nice to assume that loud noises in the night are trucks backfiring, not gunfights.
The Democrats have spent years wandering in the desert because of this problem, with state chairmen playing the role of Greek chorus, chanting that the structure, the activists at the heart of the party, were too much more liberal than the electorate.
That is why the quilt has been folded for now and that is why a different message will be carried onto the campaign trail by Clinton and Gore.
If the shift gives the liberals a stomachache, the party`s pragmatists think it is wonderful and long overdue.
Sen. Dennis DeConcini of Arizona is aware that the legacy of the Democrats is individual rights, but he said the party shouldn`t go thumping around the country trumpeting about that when what people want to hear are plans for jobs and economic opportunity.
That`s why he likes the idea of having two moderates on the ticket instead of seeking a moderate-liberal balance or some geographic fiction aimed at collecting the electoral votes.
The Southland, too, likes the ticket. That has been solid Reagan-Bush turf for the past three presidential elections. The Democrats know their big challenge is to crack that Electoral College advantage.
”If we fail, I guess it will be pretty difficult for the Democratic Party to succeed at all in the immediate future,” said Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. ”The Reagan Democrats were very uncomfortable going all the way back over to Dukakis. They got halfway and got dragged back. I think now they are going to go back there and stay rooted with this ticket.”
So the liberals took their trip to East Harlem while the rest of the party prepared to get as moderate as necessary, even as moderate as Republicans, to win in November.