Conventions Are Taking the Life Out of the Party

George and Ira Gershwin’s “Strike Up the Band” will open at the Orange County Performing Arts Center today, and there couldn’t possibly be a more appropriate entry during an election year. As a matter of fact, there may quite likely be more excitement on the Center’s stage than either of the national party conventions offered this summer.

Seniors remember when party conventions were different, when they were low comedy instead of high tech. When candidates didn’t come to the convention knowing they were going to be nominated and had to spend their time wheeling and dealing instead of creating slick TV shows for the consumption of those Americans who still watch these affairs.

I’ll have to admit that I watch as much of the conventions as the networks allow us. In 1988, that means an eight-hour miniseries for each convention. The TV networks said, in effect, “We’re programming you for two hours each night, so you’d better produce your shows for that time slot.” The Democrats--as Democrats are wont to do--botched that scheduling the second night of their convention, and I was scared to death that the networks would cut away in the middle of Jesse Jackson’s speech to give us a rerun of “Dallas” or “thirtysomething.”

In earlier times, conventions offered more suspense, drama, back-stabbing, double-dealing and flat-out enjoyment than TV’s most compelling soap operas. In those days, TV and radio serviced the conventions, rather than vice versa. They were untidy, but they showed the democratic process with all its warts and beauty a lot better than these plastic, tightly programmed and controlled conventions of today.

Who can forget the chaos at the 1956 Democratic convention when Adlai Stevenson, the presidential nominee, threw the vice-presidential nomination to the floor and Estes Kefauver defeated John Kennedy in a bloody, no-holds-barred battle for the second spot?

Or the riots in Chicago eight years later as anti-Vietnam demonstrators--who had already deposed a sitting President--fought a guerrilla battle with police as they tried to influence the nomination of an anti-war candidate? And the disillusionment when Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who carried their banner so vigorously in the early going, didn’t have the heart or the guts for the final run?

Or the infighting between the forces of Sen. Robert Taft--”Mr. Republican”--and political Johnny-come-lately Dwight D. Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican convention?

Candidates weren’t always nominated on the first ballot in those days. Such popular candidates as Adlai Stevenson (1952) and Thomas Dewey (1948) required three ballots. It took Wendell Willkie six ballots in one of the Republican Party’s more memorable conventions, in 1940. And if you want to go back to the ‘20s, the Democrats required 44 ballots to nominate James Cox in 1920, and 103 ballots to nominate John W. Davis four years later.

Most of the convention excitement started to be deflected in the 1960s with the growth of the state-by-state presidential primaries. Although the political validity of this method of nominating a President is debatable, it has certainly destroyed the drama of the national conventions. Today, the fat cats sit back, watch the results of some obscure caucuses in Iowa and a primary election in New Hampshire, then anoint the most likely candidate with tons of money, which he uses to buy his way to a first-ballot victory at the convention.

All of this ties in in some wondrous ways with “Strike Up the Band.” Musical comedies were either revues or were built around sappy books that had to do with rich people on an ocean liner or cheerleaders in some fictional college where the major course of study was football. When George S. Kaufman wrote “Strike Up the Band” for the Gershwins to set to music, Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States, and satirizing the influence of big business on government policy wasn’t considered either appropriate or funny.

According to an excellent piece by Tommy Krasker in the Orange County Performing Arts Quarterly, “Strike Up the Band” bombed even before it got to New York, in spite of some of the Gershwins’ most memorable tunes. It was revived three years later with a lot of the bite removed and had moderate success. To mount the version appearing here, researchers were able to dig out the original script and score--so it remains to be seen if the satire will seem pale in the year of Irangate and Edwin Meese.

It’s ironic that in a time when political conventions were knock-down-and-drag-out affairs in full public view, a show like “Strike Up the Band” would be unacceptable. And now, in the days of our polyester conventions, audiences will probably wonder what the fuss was all about. Everything changes, nothing changes.