State’s Faithful Gather Before Pulpit of Politics

This does seem ludicrous: Taxi lines a half-hour long. Blocked streets. One-hour security lines. Sniffing dogs. And for what?

A convention? That’s what they call it?

“A fair argument can be made that these conventions really are anachronistic,” says California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer. “They’ve become more show than business. If we’re just going to put on a show, why don’t we have elephants and donkeys?”

We’re getting close. The news media at this Democratic National Convention are assigned to circus facilities. Times reporters and editors have been allotted work space on the second floor of a tent.

We’re covering a quadrillion-dollar political rally.

But there’s no use whining. Modern political conventions -- more so with each succeeding election -- are the end result of populist reforms that we demanded. Smoke-filled rooms have been closed and the political process opened up. Machine bosses and convention delegates no longer choose nominees; ordinary voters do in primaries and caucuses.

The last time California’s delegation played a meaningful role in a Democratic convention was 1972 in Miami. The California contingent was bitterly divided into camps supporting U.S. Sen. George McGovern and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The McGovern forces won, giving the liberal anti-war candidate the nomination.

That was the last truly dramatic Democratic convention.

“I was a 19-year-old McGovern volunteer from Harvard,” recalls California Treasurer Phil Angelides. “I made my way down to Miami and slept on a floor. That was a real convention.

“The great secret of conventions is that floor passes are hard to come by and you just have to find the 18-year-old kid who has them all. I managed to. The first night I was ‘band’; the next night ‘security.’ ”

After the floor fight when Humphrey backers failed to unseat California’s McGovern-pledged delegation, Angelides remembers returning to the convention floor with San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto one step behind. Alioto was a major Humphrey supporter.

“I’m this kid with long hair and the security people wave me right through,” Angelides says. “They tell Alioto, ‘Sorry, sir, you can’t come in. Your credential isn’t valid.’ I knew instinctively that our party was heading for trouble if I could get in the hall and the mayor of San Francisco couldn’t.”

President Nixon won reelection in a landslide, helped by a badly fractured Democratic Party.

Saturday night, veteran political consultant Joe Cerrell of Los Angeles looked around the lobby of the California delegation hotel, the Westin Copley Place, and observed: “This is all touchy-feely.”

But it is Cerrell’s 13th Democratic national convention and he is not nostalgic for the fractious floor fights. He has been on the losing side of a few, most notably as a Humphrey strategist in 1972.

“I prefer to have a mellow convention,” Cerrell says. “Everybody all peaceful.”

No fighting. No choosing. Mostly boring.

Then why shouldn’t California’s 441 delegates -- the biggest bloc in Boston -- just stay home, save the money and call in their pro forma votes?

Fortunately for participatory democracy, not everyone sees it that cynically.

It may be dull for TV viewers, but many delegates are arriving here wide-eyed. Most became delegates by running for the position at local party caucuses. They’re the activist grunts who ensure it’s not just the special interests that influence politics.

“I’m very excited,” says Kathy Hertel, 46, a Corona teacher, who is attending her second convention. “I get to see the people who I feel are real powerhouses and see them in person. People who I really admire: Bill and Hillary Clinton. Ted Kennedy.”

Says Asa Hopkins, 25, a Cal Tech graduate student and a first-time convention attendee: “It’s like coming across a ticket for the World Series. An opportunity to see an acceptance speech in person and meet a whole bunch of other active, concerned people from all over the country.”

Caren Bolinger, 51, of Westminster, also a first-time delegate: “It may be passe, but it’s important. This is the campaign kickoff. I’m very anti-Bush. I do not like the gentleman at all.”

“Conventions get people fired up to go out and work hard for three months,” Lockyer notes.

Says Angelides: “I’m going to church. We’re all going to church -- our church -- to draw inspiration and then go out and spread the word of our beliefs.”

Then there is Judith Droz Keyes, 58, a San Francisco labor lawyer, who has a special reason for being a delegate pledged to Sen. John Kerry. She’s also a co-chairwoman of his national finance committee, which means she has raised more than $250,000 for his campaign.

Kerry and her first husband, Don Droz, were buddies and patrol boat skippers in Vietnam. “They went out on several missions together,” says Droz Keyes. In fact, they were on the same mission in the Mekong Delta in 1969 when Kerry earned the bronze star and Droz won a silver.

A few weeks later, on another patrol, Droz was ambushed and killed. “John has said the death of Don Droz catapulted him to his activist opposition to the war,” continues Droz Keyes. “It hit him very hard.”

Kerry stayed in contact with the family. Droz’s daughter -- 3 months old when he died -- interned in the senator’s office. Recently, she produced a TV documentary about her dad that has been nominated for an Emmy. Daughter Tracy Tragos, who lives in Topanga Canyon, also is at the convention.

This is Droz Keyes’ second convention, but first as a delegate. In 1968, while pregnant with Tracy, she joined anti-war protesters in Chicago and got her head busted by a cop.

Now, that was an exciting convention. But disastrous for Democrats and acrid for America. Often boring is better.

George Skelton writes Monday and Thursday. Reach him at george.

skelton@latimes.com.