PERSPECTIVE ON THE CONVENTION : It’s a Time for Work, Not Fun TV : The networks may tune out in the predictable years, but the parties will have to gather for their quadrennial task.

Is it possible to nominate candidates for President of the United States without the intense, sweaty, often messy spectacle of a nominating convention? Of course it is. But consider this: It is also possible to conceive a child these days without the sweaty, messy interaction involved in sex. But it is not the preferred mode of making babies--nor, I think it safe to say, will it ever be.

This is worth remembering as the Democratic Convention comes to a close amid a steady undercurrent of commentary--mostly from network television executives--about how conventions are really anachronisms.

Gavel-to-gavel coverage of these events had already gone the way of bobby-sox and cars with fins, and the total hours devoted to convention coverage has shrunk steadily. Next year, the television executives say, they might not cover these things at all, the clear implication being that if something is not telegenic, it should not exist. Well, an awful lot of worthwhile things take place in the world--including conventions--that may not be hot television fare. Just because this year’s Democratic Convention lacks high--or low--drama doesn’t mean that conventions will never be newsworthy again, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they serve no purpose.

The conclusion seems to have been reached, in some quarters at least, that just because we nominate presidential candidates in primaries, we will never again have a convention where an actual decision on the party’s nominee gets made. One only has to go as far back as 1976, when President Gerald Ford won most of the early Republican primaries and insurgent Ronald Reagan won most of the later primaries, to see a convention where the two candidates arrived almost exactly even and the outcome was in doubt. Some day, the primary voters will again be unable to make a collective decision and will swing from candidate to candidate; then we will have gavel-to-gavel coverage and high viewership.

Twelve years ago, Jimmy Carter was wandering around the podium looking in vain for a show of support from his chief opponent in the primaries, Ted Kennedy. I am a veteran of that convention, having worked for Carter. This week, those of us on both sides of that fight have been running into each other in Madison Square Garden and remembering how awful, how tense and how angry that convention was. Most people assumed that Carter would win the nomination because he had won most of the primaries, but the level of animosity reflected in Ted Kennedy’s inside-the-convention effort to deny Carter the nomination existed among Democrats outside the hall as well. The 1980 convention was a well-covered harbinger of the defeat to come.

The only time the critics get into their abolish-conventions mode is when the conventions are peaceful and more or less united around a nominee, and that is when they are probably of most use to the nominee--if not the networks. Every morning, state delegations meet and conduct the real business of building a presidential campaign.

The California delegation has been the recipient of the kind of attention you’d expect the largest and most critical state to receive. Its guest list has been impressive. In Wednesday’s caucus, Al Gore complimented Jerry Brown for his leadership on the environment. The Brown coordinator announced that Brown would speak that night, so his delegates didn’t have to chant “Let him speak,” as they’d been doing all through the first two days. And Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and the state’s congressional candidates addressed the group and huddled with their supporters. In a switch on traditional electoral strategy (which is also causing a switch in language), Bill Clinton intends to ride their “skirt-tails” to victory in California. In the meantime, John Emerson, the man tapped to win California for the Clinton-Gore ticket, passed up the chance to go hobnobbing with Gore in order to stay close to the group that would, in part, form the core of the fall campaign.

This process gets repeated every morning in every delegation; it is the human bonding that makes a political party. And every night the delegates gather to share the same experience, regardless of whether the cameras are on. In a good convention, people leave having made some kind of peace with each other; in a bad convention, the tension remains until Election Day.

Maybe in order to understand the utility of a convention, we have to look at a candidate who doesn’t have one--Ross Perot. While the Democrats are circling the wagons in New York, the Perot campaign is beset by problems between the original organizers and the newly hired professional staff. Can Perot resolve these conflicts in a teleconference? Will nationally televised town meetings ever create the bonds that form when people share a beer, or get teary-eyed together, or both? Probably not.