OS ANGELES - The call came into the Louisiana delegation at 6:50 p.m. Wednesday.
The Boiler Room was not amused.
Somehow, the Democratic Leadership Committee, the centrist organization run by vice presidential nominee Joseph I. Lieberman, had gotten hundreds of ''GO JOE! DLC'' signs into the convention hall, and the delegates, awfully fond of the Connecticut senator, were happily waving the unsanctioned placards about. And this, just minutes before East Coast prime time.
So somebody from the Boiler Room, the convention-control center hooked up to the rank and file by computers and telephones, sent out the order.
''Folks, do not hold those up!'' yelled the whip. ''DO NOT HOLD THOSE UP!''
The white signs were quickly collected and thrown under a seat.
At 6:52 the phone rang again. It was fully 15 minutes before Hadassah Lieberman was due at the podium, but delegates were holding up their ''Hadassah!'' signs for all the world to see. Not good.
''Keep the Hadassah signs down!'' the whip pleaded. ''Keep them down, please! Keep them down!''
Everyone obeyed.
The tens of thousands of signs - as many as 10 or 15 different ones a night - were crucial to the look and feel of this Democratic National Convention in the days leading up to its climax last night. There was little else in the way of props in this vast crowd, crammed into this vast space. The Florida delegates tried valiantly to put their own stamp on the show, donning green plastic sunglasses, and clack-clacking noisemakers now and then. Down by Connecticut, there was a cowbell or two.
For four days, these delegates watched a long parade of people come to the podium to celebrate the things everyone said set them apart from their Republican counterparts: diversity, and a serious focus on issues.
Speaker after speaker stressed - sometimes acidly, to the delight of this combat-hungry crowd - their view that the diversity on the stage at the Republican National Convention was just window-dressing. The ''inclusion illusion'' as Jesse Jackson called it.
Democratic diversity is real, they all said. And not just the diversity of ethnicity, race and gender, but of ideology and ideas.
''That's the beauty of the Democratic party,'' said delegate Bill Bryan, of Bowdoinham, Maine. ''We do allow for differences of thought. There are liberals, moderates and conservatives alive and well within the Democratic Party.''
Guest speakers, and a series of panels composed of ordinary people, spoke of issues important to party members: gun control, affordable health care, gay rights, education. And while Gore and Lieberman were mentioned often, there was not, until last night, the dogged focus on them that marked the Republican Convention.
Many delegates said they were proud of the sober center of their convention, but even for some of them the issues talk came, after awhile, to have a spinach after-taste. The early-evening issues panels, even when hosted by stars like actor Jimmy Smits, didn't exactly rivet the delegates, who chattered right through them.
All but the biggest names and the loudest voices battled through the crowd noise to deliver their speeches, confident that the buzz could not be heard by television audiences.
Some delegates conceded it had been hard for them to get up a good head of partisan steam early in the week, partly because of the noise-swallowing size of the arena, and partly, delegates said, because the sprawling enormity of the city of Los Angeles made it more difficult to sustain a sense of cohesion and excitement in the crucial afterhours. All of Philadelphia, a much more compact city, seemed decked out for the GOP festivities. Los Angeles is too big to deck out, even if it cared to, which it mostly didn't.
Delegates, even those who said they expended much of their daily energies simply getting to and from the hall, stressed that there was no want of enthusiasm for the ticket. But, though they thundered for Gore last night, they did for much of the week seem starved for emotion and red meat, for moments to be moved by.
And, as the wild reaction to President Clinton's Rocky-like televised entrance Monday through the bowels of backstage showed, they also wanted their moments of showbiz. Images of talk-show host Jerry Springer, and of television reporter Maria Shriver - taking a break from her reporting duties to stand and lovingly applaud her cousin Caroline Kennedy - were flashed up on the jumbotrons, to loud applause.
Delegates, looking for a lift, pinned high hopes on Caroline Kennedy's speech, and that of her uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, on Tuesday night. But Caroline Kennedy studiously avoided emotion, avoiding in her smiling, dignified way talk of the tragedies that have marked her family's lives. That did not prevent a woman in the South Carolina delegation from crying right through her speech, but most delegates' eyes remained dry, a possible ''moment'' passing them by.
No matter. Lieberman, delegates said, would provide them with plenty to cheer about. Indeed, delegates were pinning high hopes on the vice presidential nominee in general. Asked what they looked forward to most at the convention, many mentioned Lieberman before Gore, the presidential nominee.
''Everybody's excited about Lieberman,'' said Nancy Wilson, a Columbia, Mo., hairdresser who wore a tall funny hat. ''He just has the charisma and the feeling.''
Lieberman certainly did not disappoint on Wednesday night, though he also didn't spellbind. The long, red Lieberman signs were waving from the minute he entered the room, and joyful delegates cheered for all of his jokes and applause lines, chanting ''Go Joe Go!'' especially when the senator made his civilized, sometimes indirect jabs at the other team.
In other conventions, such a festival mood was easier to elicit, said George Forrest, a button-covered delegate from Piggott, Ark., on Wednesday.
''In 1984, we'd get down in the aisle and dance. That one was more exciting than anything,'' he said. But times have changed, he said. In 1996, he recalls being told he couldn't bring his own signs into the convention hall.
''They're all somewhat choreographed,'' he said. ''You can't get away from that.''
The Puerto Rican delegation tried, briefly, to improvise its own choreography. On Wednesday afternoon, word went round that Representative Roberto Ramirez of New York would call for an immediate end to US military training on the island of Vieques. President Clinton has said training would end in three years. Puerto Ricans have demanded that it end immediately.
So delegates stacked the New York section with supportive delegates from all over the country, who were determined to hold up ''Peace for Vieques'' signs and cheer loudly when Ramirez broke from his script to call for an end to the training there.
But as Ramirez spoke, other delegates stood before the New York delegation to block them, hiding from the cameras what may have been the convention's only moment of discord.
''They tried to stop us to do this!'' said assemblyman Felix W. Ortiz. ''I was shocked they would bring a group and have them stand in front of us.''
A convention official put the whole matter down to ''some confusion.'' The other delegates had stood in front of the Vieques protesters because they were merely ''enthusiastic,'' he said.
But the New Yorkers and Puerto Ricans clearly thought otherwise. They said they had learned something of the limits of the ballyhooed Democratic diversity.
