An Unconventional Invitation to Democrats

Dear Democratic Party Convention Site Selection Committee (do you guys actually get all that on a business card?):

Hello, or as we say, hola! By now you’ve received many nice letters from Los Angeles civic leaders inviting you to hold your Year 2000 political convention here, in the Millennial City, the capital of the Pacific Rim.

This isn’t one of the nice ones.

The last time you graced us with your convention was 1960. In 1960, tuna was 39 cents a can. In 1960, Barbra Streisand won a Thursday night talent contest in some Greenwich Village club. Let me push your liberal-guilt button: It’s affirmative action--it’s our turn.

If you’re still undecided, let me go where our leaders are too politic to, and ridicule other past and possible contenders. (L.A. has been trashed plenty; I’m just tossing a little of it back over the fence.)

Philadelphia: They’ve had 163 years to fix that crack in the Liberty Bell, and they think they can handle a convention?

New York: Puhleez.

San Francisco: Willie Brown would manage to get himself nominated.

Boston: And people say L.A. drivers are nuts.

Kansas City: Equidistant from anything worth seeing.

Dallas: Does November 1963 ring a bell?

Chicago: Still has a mayor named Daley. (OK, not the same one who defended his chubby blue line, saying memorably, “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder.”)

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Conventions don’t just arrive. Cities have to invite them, and L.A. hasn’t. Tom Bradley wanted to welcome Olympic athletes, not politicians. Richard Riordan wanted the Democrats to come in 1996, but the 6.7 event in Northridge derailed that.

News accounts of disasters natural and man-made--slides, fires, quakes, riots, crime--don’t help, but I can’t believe Democrats are as big a bunch of fraidy-cats as NFL owners, who can face down big, mean football players but are too timid to park their cars near the Coliseum, where the 1960 Democrats closed their convention with JFK’s acceptance speech.

Roz Wyman, a Democratic player at that convention and ever since, the capo di tutti capi at the 1984 San Francisco convention and a member of the site selection committee, thinks L.A.’s bid looks “pretty good,” and that the days when “parties were totally oriented toward the East” are ending with the westward tilt in voting power. Even the Republicans convoked in San Diego in 1996.

Of any convention’s twin quandaries--convenient hotel rooms and decent transportation--Wyman says one is no longer a problem here and the other can be taken care of. If Democrats “can purge the ghost of Chicago 1968” by convening there in 1996, “they can come back to L.A.”

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Dear Democrats: Things have changed since the last time you were here, when London papers called the convention a “carnival” in “sprawling, hideous” L.A. The man who owns some of those papers lives here now, so it can’t be that bad, and if it is, they certainly can’t say so.

No smoke-filled rooms, anywhere--guaranteed.

While you’re here, we’ll have real taxis waiting at curbs marked “Taxi Zone.” Most of the time, we just get a kick out of watching Easterners standing there actually waiting for cabs.

There’s so much fun awaiting you and your families that your leadership may fear you’ll miss your caucus because of “attraction distraction”!

Amusement parks, museums, Hollywood, baseball, beaches, by all means--but also take the real “Seinfeld” pilgrimage; those cool New York moments were shot in L.A.

Toss a coin in an abandoned Metro Rail tunnel and make a wish; the MTA will still need the money.

Visit nearby picturesque Tijuana, where you can stock up on knockoff French perfumes, Italian leather goods and--for only a fraction of its $9 U.S. price--the new male potency pill.

Our shops will be ready for your particular needs, with souvenirs like “My mom/dad/stepfather/

stepmother/biological parent’s same-sex partner survived the L.A. Democratic Convention/

earthquake/riot/El Nino and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

Most of all, if you don’t get your sorry butts out here in 2000, you won’t need no stinkin’ conventions. We’ll take our 54 bigfoot electoral votes and move our presidential primary to January and tell you who the next president will be. Even politicians aren’t addlepated enough to prefer New Hampshire to California in January.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com