DAMNED IF THEY DO...

The Democrats Scramble (E. J. Dionne Jr., June 3, 2003, Washington Post)

[M]ost of the Democrats running for president want to stay out of the line of fire between the party's factions. This week, for example, the liberal Campaign for America's Future is hosting a conference in Washington whose speakers are not confined to candidates of the left. Yes, Dean, Carol Moseley Braun, Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton will be there. But so will Kerry, Sen. John Edwards and (by video link) Gephardt.

Kerry and Edwards will probably not mention that they also have friends and advisers in the DLC, as does Sen. Joe Lieberman's centrist candidacy. But this scrambling of factions is the essential fact of the 2004 primary contest.

That makes it harder than it used to be to distinguish the strategies of the left and the right. Consider this quotation: "The interest group dynamic has been a problem these last 20 years. The party's whole has seemed to be less than its parts."

This thought comes not from Reed or From but from Eric Hauser, a former top lieutenant in Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential run and a liberal who is working with the Campaign for America's Future. Hauser says he is not knocking the groups. Republicans depend just as much on their own interest groups as Democrats do on theirs. But the GOP, he says, has been more successful up to now in "projecting its collective interests as a national agenda."

Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, says Republicans understood better than Democrats the value of "passionate" grass-roots groups that "give space to political leaders to find their voices." Because conservatives spent years building loyalty in the ranks, President Bush has been able to keep his party's conservative base mobilized while moderating his public message whenever doing so was politically useful.

The contest for the 2004 Democratic nomination cannot be understood apart from two factors. One is the intense opposition to Bush at the Democratic grass roots. The other is the widely held sense that the party's older strategies and internal arguments are inadequate to its current problems. Candidates can't win if they address only one of these concerns. But addressing both at the same time will require a political magic that Democrats haven't seen yet.

The point at which this analysis stops is, unfortunately, the point past which things are explained. The reason the GOP can keep its interest groups happy is because the things they want are generally popular with the American people. Folks tend to forget that the radical Republican Contract with America was a collection of items that polled favorably at levels over 70%. On the other hand, the Democrats interest groups make demands that are popularly only within the isolated group itself. There's no support for abortion on demand beyond the radical feminist fringe. No one wants gay marriage but advocacy groups. Slave reparations are considered lunacy by anyone not in the leadership position of a civil rights group. Only public teachers' unions think the education system isn't broke. Etc., etc., etc.... Even on issues where Democrats think they are in the majority--like privatization of Social Security--public opinion polls show the truth to be quite otherwise. The result of all this is that when a Republican runs on the issues that fire up his base he wins. In fact, when a Democrat runs on the issues that fire up the GOP base he wins--witness Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. But when Democrats run on the issues that matter to their base they lose winnable elections--Al Gore--and get annihilated in tougher ones--Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

Now, as it happens, this is a primary field nearly as weak as 1976 and 1992 and putative conservative could certainly win the nomination--someone like Hillary Clinton or Governor Bill Richardson of NM, for instance. However, even were such events to transpire, the Party would face another obstacle: George Bush, unlike his father and Gerald Ford, shows no willingness to let his opponent get to his Right. And just as Republicans learned the hard lesson during their wilderness years that if you offer voters a choice between an actual Democrat and a Republican running as if he were one, the Democrat generally wins, so are the Democrats confronted with the reality that given a choice between a conservative and a Democratic trying to seem like one, voters will almost certainly choose the real deal. Whatever else he may be, W is the nearly definitive real deal. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 3, 2003 12:02 PM