bout halfway into the Republican convention, news-starved journalists began venting their frustration with the carefully scripted lovefest.
''How long can this convention go on with its happy face?'' asked CNN senior analyst William Schneider Tuesday afternoon, his voice rising. ''Will hotter heads prevail?''
His colleague Jeff Greenfield echoed the point, wondering if Republicans were actually making a political mistake ''by erasing any known conflict from this convention.''
So eager were conventioneers for some fighting words that temperate, professorial vice-presidential nominee Dick Cheney's line that Bill Clinton and Al Gore ''came in together, now let us see them off together,'' was enough to trigger an outburst of pent-up partisan whooping.
In delivering this mild-mannered convention's version of a ''give 'em hell'' speech last night, Cheney may not have exactly delivered ''red meat, [but] but a little steak tartare at least,'' quipped NBC's Tim Russert.
If the modern convention is what MSNBC executive producer Steve Capus calls a televised ''press release,'' the key to Philadelphia is whether Republicans are successfully projecting a portrait of inclusion and compassion or whether the event strikes independent viewers and voters as tinny and contrived.
''We are putting a different face on the Republican Party,'' House Speaker Dennis Hastert told CNN. And from the prime-time addresses of African-Americans Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to the rainbow coalition of children that surrounded Laura Bush to the rocking gospel group, the Republicans provided the TV audience with a steady diet of ethnically and racially diverse players.
At the same time, the apparent dichotomy between those images and the party faithful became a story line for the pundits to gnaw on.
The Republicans have their story and they're sticking with it. And that story is simple: a party speaking in unison. David Shribman analysis, Page A1.
Bluntly expressing what other commentators cautiously alluded to, ''Politically Incorrect'' host Bill Maher told CNN that the convention ''looked like an NBA game to me. The entire audience was white, but everyone on the stage was black.''
On Tuesday night, Senator John McCain delivered a crucial unity speech in which he embraced former rival George W. Bush as a man ''who wants to lead a Republican Party that is as big as the country we serve.'' Tellingly, several members of a focus group interviewed on MSNBC afterward said the fiery Arizona reformer's remarks seemed strangely dispassionate, with one man lamenting that ''he didn't have the fire in his belly I've seen in the past.''
At least that focus group was watching. This is the convention season that the broadcast networks have written off as too boring and predictable to warrant major coverage. (Surprises were so few and far between that word of President Gerald Ford's stroke yesterday sent the cable networks feverishly scurrying for medical experts and condition updates, their reporters seemingly relieved to be working on a real story.)
On opening night, NBC skipped the proceedings to air a rerun of ''Third Watch'' and only ABC made the commitment to show at least an hour of prime-time activities each night. That didn't keep Peter Jennings and his crew from signing off, however, before Powell even finished his Monday address, arguably the convention highlight.
Still, Jennings may have offered the most salient commentary when he noted that ''Republicans are behaving a bit like Democrats.'' Even Cheney's speech, intended to stir the masses, contained some traditionally Democratic-sounding themes, with its promise that ''no child will be left behind'' and its warning that the GOP's opponents ''will feed fear and we will appeal to hope.''
But it was really Powell's speech, in which he scolded delegates for opposing affirmative action and talked about social spending, and was still cheered, that convinced commentators that they were seeing a new kind of Republican convention.
''No boos, no catcalls,'' from the delegates for those liberal positions, noted CBS's Ed Bradley. Greenfield marveled that Powell ''used two words you almost never hear at a Republican convention - `Spend more.'''
With the delegates determined not to go public with any of their differences, journalists searched high and low for faint signs of trouble.
CNN's Wolf Blitzer staged an impromptu debate between pro wrestler The Rock - who introduced Hastert - and conservative activist L. Brent Bozell III over the propriety of the sex- and violence-laced pro wrestling industry. CNN correspondent John King managed to root out three disgruntled conservatives in the Oklahoma delegation who complained about Bush's too-squishy position on abortion and the fact that the abolition of the Department of Education was no longer a priority. And in what passed for high drama, the cable cameras focused on the Texas delegation, where some delegates offered up a silent prayer to protest a short Tuesday night speech by openly gay congessman Jim Kolbe.
''That was the probably the most contention we've seen in the convention so far,'' said Fox News anchor Paula Zahn. ''Wasn't much,'' retorted partner Brit Hume, speaking for many of his colleagues.
When Jennings played provocateur by asking former House Speaker Newt Gingrich - a symbol of the strident conservatism noticeably absent at the convention - whether the party was looking ''to run away from you and the congressional delegation,'' Gingrich dodged the question like the young Muhammad Ali used to slip punches. With even its most combustible entities sticking to the script and frustrating the media, the Republicans were looking to project likability. The issue is whether they strained credibility.
After McCain's crucial speech, CBS anchor Dan Rather was among those to notice that he had not even mentioned the subject nearest and dearest to his heart - campaign finance reform. As she worked the convention floor, ABC's Michel Martin took note of the ideological differences between the convention speakers and party platform and said, ''It's not clear at the moment which point of view is going to be carried into the fall.''
For now, the point of view that dominated TV was that of a party so set on avoiding images of conflict that ABC commentator George Stephanopoulos reported he couldn't even find an Al Gore-bashing button among the delegates.
Responding to one reporter's questions about the softer tone of this convention, former House Speaker-designate Robert Livingston acknowledged that in the past the Republicans had been guilty of ''using some pretty tough rhetoric.''
Viewers saw little of that this week in Philadelphia.
