Maestro of the Democrats

...By encouraging Super Tuesday, he channeled the energy of Southern legislators away from their perennial complaints that the rest of the party isn't as conservative as its Right wing...

...It would be "inexpedient and dangerous," said the document, for the Federal government to pay for roads, assume state debts, "foster one industry to the detriment of another," charter a national bank, limit immigration, or interfere with slavery...

...As has happened often under Kirk, though, the regulars got a break too: They won't have to worry about rules fights between conventions...

...Still, the Democrats seem poised to approach and perhaps surpass in Atlanta the serenity of the 1976 convention in New York...

...Well, maybe...

...One potential "win-win" situation for the Democrats would be a debate over the refusal of Dukakis to endorse— as Jackson has—a policy of "no first use" of nuclear weapons...

...That the Democrats regained control of the Senate in the fall of '86 may not have been a coincidence...

...It was not yet 3 p.m...

...Still, at least Dukakis can get off to a fair start, thanks in good part to another can-do, no-flash miracle man from Massachusetts: Paul Kirk...

...With room for headlines and a few mug shots...

...Speaker Jim Wrightof Texas— who will be presiding at the Omni Convention Center under something of a cloud, since his House colleagues are currently investigating his book publishing activity—is unlikely to pound down platform disputes with a fasthammered voice vote...

...As I was getting ready to write my version of this startling development, a full, unqualified retraction arrived at my office and those of the other reporters who had been present...

...Who knows...

...That miniplatform, a triumph of negation, began: "Resolved, That the Federal government is one of limited powers, derived solely from the Constitution...

...He ordered state Democratic parties not to hold straw polls in 1987 and that curious, costly custom died away unmounted...

...Next, Kirk smothered a challenge from the Right by appointing an issues committee so comprehensive demographically and so bland ideologically that it sapped support from the potentially divisive Democratic Leadership Council—an equally bland but narrowly based group some derided as a "white man's caucus...

...He also ruthlessly stripped the party's caucuses on the Left of their official status and subsidies...

...But the party under Kirk is more unified than it usually is in the early summer of a Presidential election year...

...But he looks pretty happy, considering how soundly he has been thumped...

...Andrew Mollison is a national correspondent for the Cox Newspapers...

...He and his Republican counterpart, Frank Fahrenkopf, took control of the 1988 fall debates by declaring far in advance that all candidates from both parties had agreed to set aside dates selected by a two-party committee...

...It earned Kirk the gratitude of Presidential hopefuls eager to avoid that expensive early starting point for their campaigns, however, and of officeholders who dreaded the drain on party resources and the ritualistic airing of unresolved policy dilemmas...

...But the Presidency was won by the Whigs, whose anti-Democratic coalition was so shaky that they decided not to risk adopting any platform at all...

...The move disappointed bloodthirsty reporters and earnest "issues Democrats...

...Carter blew his re-election bid after Edward M. Kennedy's bitter last stand in 1980...

...Kirk long ago predicted this summer's outbreak of peace, just as last year, well before it was known who would be the nominee, he came up with an approximation of the Democratic campaign theme...

...Slipping into the Dukakis camp one by one over a period of weeks proved to be a less obtrusive way for them to exercise their clout...

...I never heard anyone accuse Bob Strauss of being an ideologue...

...In fact, Democratic spending should soar closer to the GOP totals than in any Presidential year in the last two decades, although loopholes in reporting laws concerning "soft money" given to or spent in behalf of parties by corporate or union treasuries and fat cats make it impossible to ever know for sure...

...Washington-USA MAESTRO OF THE DEMOCRATS BY ANDREW MOLLISON Washington If Michael Dukakis has his druthers, Atlanta in mid-July will be host to the dullest Democratic National Convention since Franklin D. Roosevelt's second-term snoozer in 1936...

...The Reverend Jesse Jackson will have to provide his followers with one or two minority planks to battle for, if only to work off steam...

...Conventional wisdom holds that quiet confabs help a candidate...

...Better financed...

...Carter ran on a murky platform that was much shorter than the one adopted four years previously in George McGovern's 49-state debacle...

...Certainly the converse is true: Noisy ones hurt...

...Thel988messagecouldbe reprinted by a full-size newspaper on a single page...

...I think one of the reasons the American people will support Mike Dukakis is his party is more unified, better prepared, better financed and will be more competitive than at any time since 1964," Kirk told reporters at the National Press Club in mid-June...

...Only Jackson could trigger a walkout this year...

...Jackson will be pumped up by camp followers who pour into Atlanta to surround the convention hall...

...Kirk's command of the party continued to prove sure as the campaign for the '88 Presidential nomination got under way in earnest...

...That year there were no floor debates on anything...

...Kirk is hardly the first Democratic chairman to value party unity above platform purity...

...The toughness to govern and the compassion to care" was how he put it...

...When Kirk asked now, the National Education Association and other groups not to make pre-primary endorsements, they huffed and puffed...

...Even Carter's platform looks bloated next to this year's 4,000-word diet draft...

...The only tension was over whom he would pick as a running mate...

...But I don't think they'll be the kind of issues that divide the party, and I think they can be done in a way that makes a statement as well...

...National Organization for Women(NOw) members, gay men, thehandicapped, lesbians, blacks, Hispanics, Asian and Pacific Americans, populists, liberals—these and other rightsoriented activists loyal to caucuses that lost power when Kirk became party chairman in January 1985 are watching the man from Chicago for cues...

...Yet not all was serene for the Democrats in Lyndon B. Johnson's victory year, 1964...

...His price for backing a unanimous rules report was an agreement to strip members of the Democratic National Committee of the power they used this time to make themselves automatic delegates to the next convention...

...This past March Kirk once again minimized a mistake when he swiftly withdrew his premature suggestion that the party bigwigs and officeholders who were unpledged super delegates could settle the nomination within a week or two if it was still open after the California primary...

...Nor, for the first time since 1840, were there any roll-call votes...

...He then used the issues committee as an excuse for calling off the party's 1986 midterm conference...

...Jimmy Carter's forces won three rules fights, compromised on a fourth, and crushed liberal activists in a roll-call showdown on whether to allow unlimited platform debate...

...Will that matter in November...

...Super Tuesday turned out to be a harmless, if inefficacious, enterprise...

...This would allow Dukakis to appear tough on defense while giving Jackson a conspicuous opportunity to back a policy a recent poll shows is approved by 88 per cent of American adults...

...The 1976 platform was only half as long as the 25,000word 1972 blockbuster that involved debate on 20 minority planks and pushed McGovern's acceptance speech back to 3 a.m...

...And there are sure to be roll calls on the Presidential and Vice Presidential nominations...

...The platform process this year was conducted in Michigan and Colorado, far from the seething hive of interest groups in Washington, D.C...

...The Massachusetts governor can't quite hope to match that, though committees in June unanimously endorsed compromises designed to avoid floor fights over rules and credentials...

...Paul Kirk, the unheralded Democratic national chairman, planned and predicted this year's drowsiness...

...Having rejected a standing offer to pull a Henry Wallace as a third-party candidate, he now seems more interested in becoming an influential insider, pulling strings and prodding voters in his own briar patch, than in becoming the Alexander Throttlebottom of 1988...

...Hubert H. Humphrey went down to defeat after the tear-gas-laced affair in Chicago in 1968...

...Kirk shamelessly catered to labor and business caucuses, which supply more money than they spend...

...Members of the Mississippi delegation walked out after Humphrey's intercession failed to settle a credentials fight between "regular" and "freedom" Democrats...

...There may be some votes on the floor of the convention," he conceded...

...That's a long way from the triple cross of "amnesty, acid and abortion" borne by McGovern in 1972...

...Democrats set their brevity record in 1840, when they compressed their points into a crisp 1,000 words...

...My own belief is that economic trends in the fall and a candidate's reactions to the pressures of an all-out campaign have about 99 times more influence on the results than summer polls or money or party machines...

...He hopes to have greater calm than the Democrats enjoyed under his much flashier predecessor, Robert Strauss, in 1976...

...His canny sense of party mechanics was apparent from the beginning in 1985, when he won the chairmanship despite the distrust Southerners and Westerners felt for a Harvard-educated lawyer who used to work for Senator Kennedy...

...Jackson got his revenge...

...That was the last time the nation's largest political party came together in a chastened and vote-hungry mood after losing two Presidential elections in a row...

...The Chairman did trip by suggesting at a breakfast with journalists that the party might think about limiting Social Security benefits...

...McGovern was clobbered after the Miami beach marathon in 1972...

...Civiland constructive" was how Kirk described it...

...Definitely...

...A disaster had been downgraded to an incident...

...and Walter Mondale lost after a confused Vice Presidential selection and a fumbled attempt to dump his party chairman in San Francisco four years ago...

...Nevertheless, they complied...

...More unified and better prepared...