Ready for Big Night : Dukakis Takes a Preview Tour of Cramped Podium

Michael S. Dukakis, ready for the Democratic convention to hand him the party’s presidential nomination, today took a preview tour of the cramped podium where he will deliver his acceptance speech Thursday night after tonight’s endorsement from the delegates.

For the most part, he bided his time today with a light schedule and declared he feels great about the honor.

The Massachusetts governor drove to nearby Conyers to visit a boys club and then went to a meeting with other governors and elected officials at Georgia’s Executive Mansion in posh north Atlanta.

“I feel great,” he told reporters as he entered the meeting.

In Conyers, he visited the boys club and on the way out--while stopping to work a crowd gathered at a block-long police barricade--had words of praise for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Tuesday night address to the convention.

Jackson was introduced by his five children, and Dukakis said: “I called Jesse this morning. I just said to him I thought the speech was great, but I thought his children up there doing what they were doing, being the kind of family they are, I thought that just said it all.”

Dukakis was expected to spend tonight in the privacy of his hotel suite to watch his nomination, an action by the convention that will crown more than a year of campaigning.

But unlike previous presidential candidates on the verge of nomination, the 54-year-old New Englander has declined to seize the spotlight, allowing it to fall largely on Jackson. He has spent little time in public in Atlanta, conspicuously absent from the gatherings of state delegations.

Though Dukakis hardly needs votes with two-thirds of the convention delegates locked up, he has dispatched his chosen running mate, Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, and a phalanx of family members around town as surrogates. Each of his children has posted a schedule much more ambitious than their father.