Hugh Hefner's fantasyland in Westwood has recently been restored to hipness, but, for obvious reasons, hipness is one trait Gore cannot afford just now. For all its claims to licentiousness, the mansion throws rather tame parties. I made my second trip up the hill to Hef's sculpted acres on Saturday night for a preconvention party there, and the event had a kind of manufactured feel -- indeed, the mansion is a kind of convention hall, hosting parties so regularly that it maintains its own shuttle buses to move guests from the parking lot at UCLA up to its neo-Gothic grounds. There were two open bars and a band in the big tent out back that nobody was paying attention to. The crowd confined itself for the most part to the patio in back, around the second open bar, and trips into the grotto were just to tour the place, as one might inspect the Lincoln bedroom. Bill Maher and Arianna Huffington were there, Bryant Gumbel with a pretty blond, Patrick Cadell, the Democratic pollster, Christie Hefner, the cynical brains behind the operation and a horde of normal pop-eyed media types like myself. I wound up playing pool in the game room, which actually had Pac-Man among the collection of pinball and video games. Remember Pac-Man? I went looking for Pong, that most ancient of video games and by now, I would think, a real collectors' item. I didn't find one.

The truth is that the Playboy mansion is like a relic of a bygone era, a piece of 1950s Americana preserved, as it were, in amber. Hef was there, but not in pajamas, and not with the blond bombshell twins he has been touring with of late. Hawk-nosed Hugh looks old but well-maintained, holding forth on his philosophy of sexual freedom 20 years into the AIDS era. I'm sorry, but there is something quaint about packaging demure, air-brushed pulchritude in a world where you can watch people copulating with animals on your home computer with just a few clicks of a mouse. Just last night I was flipping channels and came across a naked man and woman having sex on a two-way swing suspended from the ceiling in the clever prime-time HBO series "Sex and the City." One thing Playboy is not any more is risqué.

Playmates today look like Barbies with carefully groomed patches of pubic hair. Hefner's supposed four-way relationship at the mansion sounds to me like a form of Hell, as though Satan had devised the perfect torture for Hef's past sins -- revenge of the bimbos! -- condemning him to live as a parody of his youthful self, the flamboyant septuagenarian playboy of the '60s enslaved by the demands of four -- count 'em! -- live-in playmates who, I suspect, put a greater strain on his credit cards than his Viagra-assisted libido. My suspicion is that Hef was in on this mini-scandal all along. It made some great publicity for Playboy, which must struggle nowadays to be racy, and it allowed Fighting Al to flex his rectitude.

The protesters were back in about the same force as we saw in Philadelphia, and with the same painful lack of presence. As I was walking out of Staples Center one night, tired after treading water through a long day of windy rhetoric, a young woman pleaded with me, "Don't just walk past, I've come all this way to talk to you." I stopped. She was advocating an end to the death penalty. I told her I completely agreed with her and marched off to dinner. Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me these traveling bands of protesters are acting out some script that no longer has any relevance. Once again, they joined forces for so many causes that any message they hoped to convey was completely lost. In a world where opinions are repressed, where one cannot publish opposing views or advocate for radical change, street protests are a way of sending a message that cannot be transmitted any other way. In our world, I'm afraid they have become just a nuisance.

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