1988 Democratic National Convention : ‘Delegate Trackers’ Fret Over Errors in a Foregone Conclusion

To many of the 4,162 delegates here and the historians who will record this event, the Democratic National Convention of 1988 was wrapped up before it even began. The would-be nominee finished the primaries with an overwhelming majority of the delegates and then reached a truce with his only rival before the convention opened.

But to a harried band of campaign workers crammed into trailers in the convention hall’s basement parking lot, this highly orchestrated event remains fraught with risk. Nothing is taken for granted. Responsible for ensuring that the delegates do what the candidate wants, these trailer-bound “delegate trackers” fret that even a minor glitch in the nationally televised proceedings might take on undue importance in an environment in which there is not a lot of news.

Jackson Delegates More Animated

Take Monday night, the convention’s convivial opening. There were no votes, no conflict, nothing to be excited about, right? Wrong. Trackers for Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, watching portable televisions in their windowless trailer, noticed that Jesse Jackson’s delegates screamed louder and waved their signs higher than the Dukakis delegates.

Always vigilant, the trackers promptly picked up their point-to-point telephones and instructed the Dukakis delegations on the floor to show more exuberance for their man.

“Every time the band stops,” a tracker was quoted as telling a delegation whip on the floor, “there is more noise for Jesse than for us. So we need to make more noise.”

Known as the “boiler room” or “nerve center” of the convention, the fabled yet little-understood trailer operation of this convention has been reduced to managing the tiniest possible snags in what is expected to be a highly predictable event.

The biggest test of the trackers’ skills came and went Tuesday evening, when the delegates voted on two platform planks supported by Jackson and opposed by Dukakis. Inside the Dukakis trailer, the atmosphere was tense and fast-paced. Fifteen young men and women seated at two long, narrow tables talked into baby blue telephones to floor whips.

“Thirteen defections in Minnesota!” called out a young woman with auburn, curly hair and glasses. She had just received the initial count from Dukakis’ Minnesota delegation on a Jackson plank that called for no first use of nuclear weapons.

“Get Madeline over to Minnesota!” a young man shouted. Madeline Albright, Dukakis’ senior foreign policy adviser, was dispatched to the convention floor to persuade the disloyal delegates to vote Dukakis’ way.

Susan Brophy, Dukakis’ deputy director for delegate selection, walked up and down the narrow trailer aisle collecting tallies. There was trouble, she said. The vice chairman of the New Mexico delegation was being verbally “worked over by the Jesse people.” A Dukakis staffer was sent to his rescue.

Sandwiches in plastic bags arrived and the trackers ate ravenously between their calls to the convention floor. “Final vote from New York!” one tracker shouted, holding up a tally sheet to be collected. “Final vote from Texas!” another shouted. A third tracker was on the phone with a whip from the South Carolina delegation, collecting a vote on a plank calling for higher taxes.

“One hundred twenty-eight (against) to 46?” he asked. “OK. Great. Nice work.” He instructed the floor whip to begin polling his delegates on the “no first use” plank and to call him if there was trouble.

Out on the convention floor, the mood among Dukakis’ delegate whips was equally intense but at times far less organized. For all their radios and technology and air of efficiency, the counting of votes among the California delegation fell immediately into disarray. The process by which the votes were to be tallied had been changed the night before and the counters were uncertain what to do.

Radio Assembly Slips off Face

“We had to reinvent the wheel in full motion,” said Marko Turbovich, Dukakis’ chief California whip. He had perspired through his shirt, and his face was so greasy with sweat that his high-tech ear-and-microphone radio assembly kept slipping off his face.

“Trailer, trailer: This is Marko. Pick up the phone. PICK UP THE PHONE!” he screamed into his short-wave radio set as he ran up the 44 stairs from the bottom of the delegation to the top.

Inside the trailer, the votes were coming fast. Except from California, of course.

Tad Devine, Dukakis’ chief delegate tracker, paced up and down the trailer floor. A tall, slender man with horn-rimmed glasses, Devine barked instructions, asked questions and occasionally ran his hand through his dark hair.

It was up to Devine to decide when the floor whips would report their vote to their state delegation chairperson. If the vote was not going Dukakis’ way, Devine planned to stall and try to persuade the defectors to return to ship. Otherwise, he wanted quick reporting to keep the convention on schedule.

“No first use--It’s going to be a winner!” he shouted. “Get a hold of people and tell them to let the numbers go. Let it go! No first use. Let the numbers go!”

Dukakis’ senior advisers huddled in a separate room in the trailer. They were there to decide strategy if a vote did not go Dukakis’ way. They could call up members of Congress on the floor and ask them to lobby delegates. They even had a point-to-point phone connecting them to Dukakis’ hotel room and they could summon the candidate if they needed him to lobby delegates.

But for all the anxiety and the preparations, the sweating and the shouting, the inevitable was occuring in this seemingly most inevitable of conventions: Dukakis was winning by large majorities.

“It’s going exactly as we expected things to go,” an intense Devine confirmed.

Staff writers John Balzar and Karen Tumulty contributed to this story.