The stars are out at the GOP's big party. Both of them.

ST. PAUL, MINN.

If celebrities are a predictor of political success, the Republicans should surrender now.

They aren't, of course. But the presence of famous faces at a national political convention injects electricity into the atmosphere.

Denver was crackling last week with hot Hollywood A-listers. (Think Spike Lee, Fran Drescher, Annette Bening, Jennifer Hudson, Ben Affleck, John Legend and Susan Sarandon to name a few who made the trek to Colorado.)

St. Paul, on the other hand, is rich with, well, delegates.

The familiar faces most likely to stop traffic in the Twin Cities belong to television talking heads. Outside the Xcel Energy Center, at MSNBC's open-air studio, a crowd gathered to watch David Gregory and a roundtable of pundits.

"Rachel! Rachel! Rachel!" chanted a knot of onlookers as political analyst Rachel Maddow studiously ignored the cacophony.

Rachel who?

My point exactly.

Oh, there are a handful of stars around St. Paul, but they tend to be, well, geezerly.

Pat Boone, for instance.

Yes, he's still among us. In fact, the man looks good.

The singer, who was eclipsed only by Elvis in the late '50s and '60s and got his start on "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts," is a longtime Republican. He was a Ronald Reagan delegate to the Kansas City convention in 1976, when his man and Gerald Ford slugged it out for the nomination. That was a time when conventions weren't scripted events.

On Wednesday, Boone was the star of the Virginia delegation's "Jazz Brunch" in a leafy lakeside Minneapolis suburb.

You couldn't miss the 74-year-old singer.

Even young Republicans who weren't born when Boone was recording hits turned to stare. The bronzed Beverly Hills resident appeared in a white suit, black shirt, candy-cane tie, red pocket square and white cowboy boots. The singer's noontime appearance gave the party faithful a look at a member of an endangered species: conservative celebrities.

"I identify with John McCain," Boone told me, flashing his trademark white smile. "He spent those years in the Hanoi Hilton and although I haven't been tortured, I've certainly been put in solitary confinement."

It hasn't escaped Boone that he's joined in St. Paul by precious few other Hollywood types.

"Jon Voight is here," he said, naming the only other star anyone had seen around town.

(Voight had surprised Virginia delegates earlier that morning by showing up at their breakfast meeting. The 69-year-old Academy Award winner - "Coming Home," 1978 - read a speech that sounded a remorseful note for his anti-war activism during Vietnam and cautioned the country about the rise of socialism if Barack Obama is elected.)

Back to Boone. He has a theory about why stars tend to be liberals.

"Celebrities don't like rules," he said. "And we conservatives generally live by a set of rules."

Boone said he'd been "open-minded" about politics, attending functions with his friends that featured folks like Ted Kennedy and Malcolm X.

But when the late Jerry Falwell asked Boone to host a Hollywood party for the Virginia evangelist, the entertainer found few takers.

"It was a very intimate group," Boone laughed. "We were able to hold it at one table.

"Joan Rivers came. Marty Ingalls and his wife, Shirley Jones. And Steve Allen. That's it.

"Can you believe it?"

After three days in St. Paul, yes I can.

 Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net