Democratic Party copes with deep split

WASHINGTON -- Democrats lost more than power Tuesday. They lost their sense of direction.

Tuesday's election exiled the country's oldest political party from power in the national government, aggravated a deep fault line in its ranks and started what could be a long struggle over what direction to take now.

The first skirmish started immediately, with a fight between liberals and centrists over which faction should lead the party in the House of Representatives. That fight will be settled next Thursday when House Democrats choose liberal Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., or centrist Rep. Martin Frost, D-Texas, to replace Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., who is stepping down as minority leader after eight years of failing to lead his party back to majority control.

The Democrats' internal skirmish will continue well beyond the House, however, and is certain to be played out in a wide-open competition for the party's presidential nomination in 2004. And if the winning nominee then loses to President Bush, Democrats could spend the better part of the decade feuding over how to win again.

"Out of the rubble there can be a cathartic experience," said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist in California. "But you can very easily paint a scenario where fissures exposed on Tuesday continue to get wider and wider, the party continues to focus on the battle of what it stands for and remains focused in a paralyzing way on tactics instead of refocusing on message." The party is deeply split between the left and the center.

Question of roots

On the left, advocates argued that the party has strayed too far from the liberal roots of government activism on behalf of the poor and working classes that defined it under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.

They think leading Democrats became too timid, too covetous of the political center and too fearful of being labeled big-government liberals. They argue that leaders such as Gephardt and Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., the party's leader in the Senate, complained about Bush's tax cut but were afraid to propose repealing it in an effort to put more money into government programs.

"You can't beat something with nothing," said Amy Isaacs, the national director of the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action.

"We are in danger of coming out of this election learning all the wrong lessons. Running to the middle is the wrong lesson. Given a choice between a phony Republican and the real thing, voters will go for the real thing every time." Refusing to propose freezing the Bush tax cut before the rest of it can take effect costs the party credibility on other economic issues, said Lehane. If Democrats are unwilling to talk about taxes, he said, they are unable to talk convincingly about spending new federal money on a program such as expanding Medicare to pay for prescription drugs.

Frost said Thursday that parts of the tax cut going to the richest 1 percent of Americans "ought to be revisited." Centrists say reverting to old-style liberalism would doom the party to permanent minority status. They say the party must move beyond big-government programs and the old-style coalition politics of offering narrowly tailored benefits to many small slices of the population.

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Richard Harpootlian said the national party focused on attracting votes from blacks, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and other interest groups, but neglected white men.

South Carolina's Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges lost this year, he noted, when his share of the white vote dropped from 40 percent to 30 percent.

"We got our brains kicked out because we couldn't convince white people it was in their interest to vote Democratic," he said. "The sooner the Democratic Party gets over the 1970s idea of breaking people down by ethnicity and sexual orientation, the better off it's going to be."

Finding its voice

Finally, the party needs to find a voice to counter the president's, either in a charismatic new leader or in a chorus of like-minded voices.

But it won't find what it needs by exhuming the past.

In the closing week of this year's campaign, when Bush was barnstorming the nation, the only Democratic face on national television every day belonged to an icon of traditional Democratic liberalism, Walter Mondale, the former vice president and 1984 presidential candidate.

Said Harpootlian: "We started going in the toilet after we started seeing Mondale's face on TV day and night."