Delegates from Big Brother

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

In pigment and chromosome, the 1980 Democratic Convention was nearly perfect. Television directors were ecstatic as they ordered their crews to zoom in on the U.S. profile spread across Madison Square Garden, from pink cheeks with a hint of baby fat to wrinkles and wattles, from deepest ebony to lily white, female and male.

The Democratic National Committee proudly documented the diversity of the spectacle. Their figures showed that 15% of the 3,381 delegates were black, 49% were women and 11% were under 30. That was probably as finely polished a reflection of this shifting country as any political institution could rally.

Yet something was wrong. It was not in the statistics or the cosmetics. Reporters ran into it almost immediately whenever they began talking to delegates.

Betty J. DeVito, a mother of seven from Mercer, Pa., was an ebullient woman who explained she was drawn to politics the day she heard Harry Truman speak from the caboose of a campaign train when she was 13. In New York, she got up every morning at 6:30 and was busy being a Carter delegate far into the night, even though her feet were swollen, and she figured it would cost her $700 to attend the convention, and she had to take a week off from her job without pay.

DeVito is an accountant for the state of Pennsylvania, a government employee. All over the convention floor, the situation was the same: an inordinate number of the delegates seemed to be a part of, or somehow plugged into, the government at some level. The most dramatic evidence of this imbalance was the fact that the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers claimed 372 convention delegates between them (virtually all were from public schools). They made up over 10% of the total, though public schoolteachers constitute less than 2% of the population of the U.S.

Not until last week was much thought given to the implications of this kind of imbalance. The Democratic National Committee said it did not keep information on delegate employment or source of income. The best data it turned out were compiled by CBS. They unlimbered their computer for TIME and went at the figures again. The earlier suspicions were confirmed--40.3% of the delegates to the Democratic National

Convention were public officeholders or government employees in some capacity. (Only 7% of the general population is employed by government at all levels.) And the figure, some experts point out, does not reflect the number of other delegates who are dependent on Big Government spending, though they may work in the private sector.

Austin Ranney, senior political scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, finds immense irony in this development. "One of the great reasons for reform from the very beginning was to get away from patronage, so delegates would not be beholden to the old bosses," he says. Ranney now fears that all of the electoral reforms have not prevented the beholden of a different kind from entering through a "back door" of the convention. Since there are no longer power centers like Chicago's late Mayor Richard Daley, and only 69 Senators, Governors and members of the House were delegates this year, the new "boss" is Big Government, and in most instances the trail leads back to Washington and the Administration.

The Democratic Party seems to be forming itself like another part of the federal bureaucracy. In Ranney's view, a Kennedy revolt of 400 or 500 delegates never materialized in part because too many of the people on the floor had a personal stake in spending programs Jimmy Carter had fostered for states and localities.

That network of elected officials, civil servants, their consultants and contractors looks alarmingly like a talent bank for preserving the political power of the incumbent President.

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