Big Business Woos the Democrats

...That may or may not offer a clue to what an administration headed by Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen would be all about...

...His workmanlike speech, although widely hailed, was specific in its images of people and devoid of programmatic details...

...It's like a coinoperated legislation machine...

...Tomakehim waitthatlong before talking, they had him wade to the podium through the audience...

...The low profile of labor and the high profile of business was all symbolic, we were told, of party unity...

...Much of theslack was taken up by Atlanta '88, the host committee, recipient of receipts from a specially passed hotel and restaurant tax along with gifts from local companies...

...When Dukakis finished, balloons fell from the ceiling—at his firm insistence, it was pointed out...

...Privately, they're quite expressive about that...

...With an ultimate goal of $50 million in "soft money" to supplement Dukakis' official, Federally funded campaign, Democrats have their sights on approaching the $60 million Republicans plan to raise in supplemental funds before November 8. "Unity" was the banner waved by Democrats in front of the television cameras in the Omni Coliseum...

...But a large amount, more than I have ever noticed in covering Democratic conventions since 1968, came from big national corporations...

...Walter Mondale thought business was reassured by the selection of Bentsen for the second spot on the Democratic ticket...

...He apparently was happy that organized labor didn't have to pick up the whole tab...

...We were informed that his election is "not about meaningless labels, it's about American values...

...Symbolic as well, but out of sight, was a fund-raising machine more efficient than any the Democrats have ever put together since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson...

...The youthful Atlantan was not attacking the corporation that ranks at the top of the Fortune 500...

...On television, the convention proceedings were as predictable as the Presidential candidate it would choose...

...Washington-USA BIG BUSINESS WOOS THE DEMOCRATS BY ANDREW MOLLISON When Walter F. Mondale left San Francisco in 1984 the Democratic Party and his campaign committee together were $9 million in debt...

...And a lot of money was poured in by news media reporting the event...

...Telephone Association, and the National Realty Committee...

...I think these business guys smell a Democratic victory," said Vincent Sombretto, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers...

...New York's Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan made a quick flight at his own expense to Portman's home in Sea Island, Georgia, so the two could discuss the builder's hopes of constructing an international trade center in Washington...

...Convention managers told us Dukakis would be greeted Thursday night by a seven-minute demonstration, for example...

...Hospitality lounges were maintained there by the American Petroleum Institute, Edison Electric Institute, CocaCola Company, Delta Air Lines, Philip Morris Incorporated, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Salomon Brothers, ARCO, theU.S...

...Powell, who was representing six clients, nevertheless tried to fill the void: "Most business people are scared to death by these Federal deficits...

...While GM was ferrying delegates to Buckhead, the AFL-CIO, with 91 unions and a record total of nearly 20 per cent of the Democratic convention's delegates, was holding its only caucus of the week in the basement of Dukakis' hotel...

...When Michael S. Dukakis left Atlanta this year his committee's books were balanced and the Democratic party had $ 12 million on hand— only $3 million less than the Republicans, if both parties were telling the truth...

...The Service Employees International Union was locked in a raucous dispute with Atlanta developer John Portman over organizing janitors, but Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young crossed an informational "picket line" to go to a Portman party...

...followed by the losers, their families, and the party officials and celebrities who subsequently filed on the stage in prescribed order...

...Since none of this was occurring inside the Omni beneath the gaze of TV cameras, as an immediate influence upon the voters the business presence was a nonevent...

...If you asked, 'What's the one thing you hope to come up with from all this?' I think you'd find us pretty hard pressed to come up with anything, " said former White House Press Secretary Jody Powell, head of the Washington office of a public relations firm...

...Still, there are symbols more meaningful than balloons...

...AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland told them the Federation will decide whether to back the Democratic or Republican ticket in late August...

...They noted that he won't even let his fundraisers take money from political action committees or corporate treasuries...

...Itread: "GeneralMotors...

...Michael Fennell, a carpenter and Jackson delegate from Charlotte, North Carolina, slept in city parks because he couldn't bring himself to spend $70 a night on a hotel room...

...We also learned that this election "is not about ideology, it's about competence," about "the kind of America Lloyd Bentsen has been fighting for for 40 years...

...Andrew Mollison, a frequent New Leader contributor, is a national correspondent for the Cox Newspapers...

...So were dozens of similar events, ranging from the brunch held for the Platform Committee by a real estate group to the luncheon that Cassidy & Associates and Ocean Spray Products held for the House Speaker's wife, Betty Wright...

...Every hour of the day, there's an event being hosted by corporate America,' exclaimed Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado...

...The GM luncheon was held to honor Representative John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who was selected in a magazine poll, appropriately enough a survey of lobbyists, as "the most effective member of the House...

...We're part of an industry that provides about 25 per cent of the IRS tax base, " ter Horst responded...

...No officeholders were invited or showed up...

...Those who were locked out when the Omni was filled to overflowing for the speeches by Jackson and Dukakis could stroll next door to the World Congress Center and watch the show on television...

...Here was a traditionalist rejecting his advisers' advice...

...Delegates and "honored guests" in Atlanta included some 200 who pledged to raise or give$100,000 apiece for the campaign...

...That was just oneof the ways the Democrats, with a mere $9.8 million in Federal funds (the sum provided for each major party's convention), managed to put on a show that cost $33.5 million...

...It was comforted too, he declared, by the close working relationship Govenor Dukakis has with the business community in Massachusetts...

...Big Business was stepping forward as Big Labor stepped back...

...Prosperity" would have been abetter slogan for what was going on in the suites, corridors and lounges where the real preparations for the fall competition were getting under way...

...At the top of an escalator in the lobby of Jesse Jackson's hotel, Julie Wiedeman patiently waved over her head a sign of the times...

...Democrats benefited when Jackson ally Bert Lance and Lyn Cutler, co-chair since 1981 of the Democratic National Committee, spoke at a press breakfast in the Atlanta Zoo paid for by the Ford Motor Company...

...Afterward I asked Ford's Washington spokesman, former White House Press Secretary Jerald ter Horst, why his company sponsored the event...

...About half the delegates and alternates polled by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had household incomes of more than $50,000—that is, $20,000 above the national median...

...Business won't own Dukakis, I was assured by numerous Democrats...

...In Atlanta, wheredelegates were instructed which color signs to hold up when, Democratic leaders daily gave the news media a minute-by-minute briefing of what would take place each evening...

...We are just destined to be a player...

...All of this was perfectly legal...

...Yet not all contributions show up on the party's books...

...Next came the supporting families, first Dukakis', then Bentsen's, then Jackson's...

...Yet as an influence upon the people who will influence Dukakis, its growing role within the Democratic Party has become, for better or worse, a fact of life...

...A bare handful of delegates balked at the heady atmosphere...

...But most of the delegates—51 per cent of them men, 23 per cent black, 7 per cent Hispanic, 2 per cent of Asian or Pacific background, 1 per cent American Indian—seemed to take the business blandishments very much in stride...

...This was a world where the poor were represented by the sympathie well-to-do rather than by themselves...

...It was a world where Dukakis could call upon business and labor to work together to create "decent and affordable housing for every family in America" and to "retool their factories and help rebuild their communities.' In Miami Beach a few years back, it was considered a minor scoop when a British reporter stumbled across the script of the Republican convention and revealed that demonstrations for Richard Nixon were not only planned but timed...

...She was guiding Democrats out of the jam-packed lobby and into the chartered buses that would carry them to a luncheon in Atlanta's affluent Buckhead neighborhood...

...The labor delegations, divided between Dukakis and Jackson roughly in the same ratio as the other delegates, were simply urged to be loyal to their respective candidates in any platform fights...