PHILADELPHIA -- The Hard Rock Cafe throbs with lobbyists, strategists, politicians, and one journalist up way past the usual bedtime. Compliments of corporate sponsors, there is free food, drink, and a foot-thumping rendition of ''Mustang Sally'' in the real Big Tent - the money tent.
Sad to say, that's where the serious business of American politics gets done, whether the participants are Republicans or Democrats. Watching just a tiny piece of that all-American enterprise - the buying of the president - leaves the impression that most everything else that is happening here is just circus.
Circus is Arianna Huffington in a designer pantsuit talking about poverty. It's a parade of media and political people so important they chatter incessantly into cell phones as they walk or mostly cab around the city. It's protesters who post their whereabouts on Web sites so TV cameras and bicycle-riding police officers are sure to find them.
And, of course, it's also the scene at convention headquarters each night, where image is packaged as reality, all designed to sell Texas Governor George W. Bush to American voters. In the surreal bubble of the Republican National Convention, women are important, if they come in the right package and send the correct message, like Bush's foreign policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Diversity is prized if it looks and sounds like Colin Powell and there is no need to commit to specific policies like affirmative action.
Against the backdrop of the omnipresent three-ring circus of this political convention, reality comes in brief flashes and snippets of conversations.
''Everyone stayed on message,'' chortle delegates from the state of Washington, congratulating themselves for sticking to a ''This is not Houston'' theme in interviews with local media. ''I want government out of my life,'' proclaims a female delegate from Idaho, on the way back to her hotel on a shuttle bus provided by the government of Philadelphia. Another female delegate from Maine, wearing a ''W stands for Women'' sticker, explains that the sentiment comes from the candidate's positions on education and health care. Asked about his positions on choice and gun control, she rolls her eyes.
And then there is the Hard Rock, where the reality of business and politics meet in the context of hot music, an open bar, two governors - John Rowland of Connecticut and Paul Cellucci of Massachusetts - and corporate sponsors like Pfizer Inc. and Bell Atlantic/Verizon. Getting past the watchdogs at the front door isn't easy - former Massachusetts state Treasurer Joe Malone didn't pass muster - which makes the party all the more alluring. It's human nature, after all, to covet most what you can't have, to seek access where it is denied.
A lot has been written and broadcast this week about the sham of packaged ''news'' put out by the Republicans. In truth, the Democrats will try to pull off the same thing on behalf of Vice President Al Gore.
Voters who actually watch either convention will be smart enough to see it and understand it for what it is, political propaganda. It is what they can't see that is more insidious and dangerous.
Observes Scott Harshbarger, the former Massachusetts attorney general who is now president of Common Cause, ''None of the action is on the floor. All of the action is in private receptions from which the public is excluded, with a captive audience paid for by corporate America.''
With all the credential requirements and security checks, it is hard enough to get on the convention floor, which, after all, is nothing but a stage. It is even harder and often impossible to get to the scene of the real action referenced by Harshbarger.
But the truth does trickle out. The press this week reported on the Republican Regents, a select group of 137 people and companies that have each contributed at least $250,000 to the Republican National Committee for this election.
Here in Philadelphia, they are showered with gifts that come in leather-trimmed goodie bags. The real perk is the schedule of private receptions with senators, governors, and House leaders - access for a price that the average citizen could never afford.
The system makes Bush and Gore more of a means to an end for private interests than a leader for the masses who are the targets of their televised propaganda. And the masses are smart enough to know that, too, which is probably why so few of them are bothering to watch the circus.
Next stop: the Big Top in L.A.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist.
