Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 6, 1992 TAG: 9203060201
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LEXINGTON LENGTH: Long
Brant Martin launches a brown jet of tobacco juice into a cup. The snuff-dipping boss of the Texas delegation doesn't like what he's hearing, not one little bit.
The senior from Fort Worth has been working the phones all afternoon, talking to his Texas sources - at the Dallas Morning News, at the Houston Chronicle, at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in the state Democratic headquarters.
He's been cultivating these contacts for the past year, gleaning all the insight he could about the inner workings of Texas Democratic politics. But now that things really count, the experts he's talking to can't seem to agree on whether Bill Clinton is going up or going down.
That makes Martin as nervous as a ranch hand who has stepped in a den of rattlers. He's spent the past year hustling $6,000 from banks and law firms back in the Lone Star state. Heck, every loyal W&L alum back home wants to make sure his state boasts a Texas-sized float that will impress the Lexington townsfolk during the opening parade at the Mock Convention. It's a matter of honor. Tradition. The enterprising Martin has even talked Blue Bell, a Texas ice cream maker, into sending up some of the delicacy for the Texas delegation's big blowout.
But now this . . .
"We're on top of the money, we're on top of the float; now these last few days it's harum-scarum with the politics," Martin says. "We don't want to be wrong."
It's the final days before Washington and Lee University's quadrennial Mock Convention; and if you think the real Democratic presidential campaign is a muddle, try Mock Convention headquarters. Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas have only their political careers on the line; W&L students have an 84-year-old tradition to uphold.
Only four times in 19 tries has the Mock Convention predicted the wrong nominee for the party out of power, and most of those misses came in the dark ages of the New Deal. W&L students have been wrong only once since 1948, and even that mistake came 20 years ago, before many of these students were born.
Martin scowls at the possibility of a repeat. "Nobody wants to break that string," he says. "Especially not us."
So the pressure is on. Not that they didn't ask for it. The students moved this year's convention from its traditional date in May - when the real presidential nomination is often locked up - to early March specifically so they could make their choice before the field is whittled down.
But it's tough. Will Thomas, the convention's western coordinator, is badgering the New Mexico state chairwoman. Morgan Warner's political and media contacts in Santa Fe and Albuquerque are telling her that Democrats in New Mexico simply haven't made up their minds yet; their primary isn't until June. But that's not good enough for W&L.
"Since their first straw poll is Saturday, you need to have someone on the phone. Their time zone is two hours different. We'll be done by the time they start . . .
"Still, try to have someone on the phone finding out. We have to have these numbers. Maybe after Tuesday, you'll see a pattern in the people you talk to. Clinton first, Tsongas second. Tsongas first, Clinton second . . .
"Tsongas is just coming up in the polls out there.
"If you can get on the phones tomorrow - with the Colorado primary next door, maybe the people in New Mexico will finally get their minds straight. Keep calling. We need hard numbers . . . "
When he's through with New Mexico, Thomas sighs.
"No one wants to get it wrong," he says. "At least I'll be away this summer. No one will be able to accost me walking across the Colonnade and say, `You got it wrong.'"
Cuomo on line one
You can talk to the kids running the Mock Convention for two or three hours before someone bothers to mention, oh, by the way, Mario Cuomo called the other day.
The New York governor phoned twice, in fact. Once to confirm in person that he would be happy to be their keynote speaker, the second to go over with the students exactly what they wanted him to talk about.
"He said, `I'm very familiar with the W&L Mock Convention,'" sophomore Ted Elliott, who took the first call, says rather matter-of-factly. "He's very personable."
But then, W&L students are accustomed to being the center of national attention every four years.
There are certain required stops on the campaign trail. Iowa is one. New Hampshire is another. The W&L Mock Convention is a third.
It's been that way ever since 1924, when a deadlocked W&L convention abruptly turned on the 23rd ballot to former ambassador John Davis, who wasn't even a declared candidate. When the real Democratic convention later did the same thing on the 103rd ballot, the W&L mystique was born.
The pols and the media take W&L semi-seriously. In 1952, when California Gov. Earl Warren learned W&L was deadlocked, he wired the convention to release his delegates so Dwight Eisenhower could claim the nomination - and the headlines that went with it. In 1988, when Clinton was W&L's keynote speaker, he quietly lobbied students to nominate him for vice president, telling them the publicity would be good for his political plans later on. (They picked Al Gore to run with Michael Dukakis, instead.)
There's plenty of publicity to be had, too.
Over by the fax machine, that's Monica Young, a senior from Hawaii. She's handling the arrangements for the media types who'll converge on Lexington this weekend. Today it's CNBC, the NBC cable affiliate, and the Long Island daily Newsday calling. Ho, hum. An average day. The New York Times and Washington Post already have hyped this weekend's convention. A Japanese TV network is on the way, C-Span is a definite for live coverage, and CNN is a maybe.
No wonder both Clinton and Tsongas, the two candidates pegged by W&L as front-runners, have agreed to talk to this weekend's convention by telephone - although the convention organizers have had the audacity to tell the candidates they only want to hear from the one who wins. Don't call us. We'll call you.
"The neatest thing that happened today was this woman I talked to from New York," Young says. The Cuomo partisan called to see when he'd be speaking Saturday so she could set her VCR to tape his talk on C-Span. But that's not what Young found so neat. "When she called the operator for our number, the operator asked, `What is happening at that school? So many people are calling for it, I know that number by heart.'"
`Just get it right'
John Richert can't believe how out of touch some people are.
"I called the Bismarck Tribune and they told me the person to talk to was their chief political writer and the woman knew absolutely nothing," he says. "I was asking questions: Which way are people leaning? She said, `I don't really know.' What kind of base does Tsongas have there? She said, `I'm not really sure.'"
Richert shakes his head in disgust. Fortunately, the sophomore from Chattanooga has his own pipeline into North Dakota politics - the state's lieutenant governor, Lloyd Omhdahl, with whom W&L's North Dakota delegation has held extensive conversations over the past year. "He's helped a lot," Richert says. "I just called him up one day and explained what the Mock Convention was. He gave me his home number and said if you ever need to, call."
The Mock Convention doesn't rely on mere whim to make its pick. The Conventioneers are expected to conduct meticulous research - they started last spring - on the state they represent and how it's really expected to vote.
Along the way, the students have made some impressive contacts - mayors, congressmen, senators. Richert and the other part-time North Dakotans drove to Washington recently to pick the brains of the top aides to that state's two senators. Wheeler, a Texas senior who is heading the New Mexico delegation, went to Washington to interview the head of that state's teachers' lobby. Last summer, Martin and the other Texas co-chair drove halfway across Texas - Martin from Fort Worth, his buddy from Houston - to confer with Democratic officials in Austin.
"We're fairly relentless," Martin says.
University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato discovered that when he briefed the students last week.
"Some of these kids were citing conversations they've had with the national committeeman from Mississippi and how the northern region of Mississippi would vote as opposed to the southern region and what did I think about that?"
Even the eminently quotable Sabato was stumped.
The funny thing is that most of the W&L students playing Democrats are, in real life, Republicans. Convention co-chair Jamie Tucker even headed W&L's College Republicans last year.
"That's the hard part about this, forcing yourself to think like a Democrat," says Jason Gordon, a senior from Houston.
Martin unlooses another stream of tobacco spit. "In a way, it's easy," he says. "If it were a Republican convention, maybe we'd be swayed toward what we think. But now we can do it based on our analysis."
Spoken like a true Mock Conventioneer.
"They don't let their personal opinions get in the way," Sabato says. "They're very disciplined. They just want to get it right."
Former Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democrats' 1988 presidential nominee, will be the grand marshal of the Mock Convention parade this morning.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB