Democrats Told Their Disputes Aid GOP

Colorado Sen. Timothy E. Wirth, disturbed by a bitter dispute among Democrats, warned Tuesday that discord within the party is allowing Republicans to assume leadership in the environment and education, issues that until now have been uncontestedly Democratic.

“They’re trying to reach into our knickers as fast as they can do it,” said Wirth, one of the Senate’s leading environmentalists. The move could go unhindered if Democrats continue to bicker about the party’s future, he said.

Wirth said that he was “astonished” at a party conference in Philadelphia last weekend by a confrontation between Sen. Charles S. Robb of Virginia and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who outlined diametrically different visions of the party’s direction during a jaw-to-jaw exchange.

“Can you imagine the Republican Party having that debate . . . ?” Wirth asked in a breakfast session with reporters and editors of The Times’ Washington Bureau.

The dispute between Robb and Jackson reflected a deep division between Democratic strategists who believe that the party must reach out to more conservative middle-class voters to win national elections and those who contend that the party must instead rebuild its traditional base among black and Latino voters.

Wirth described such preoccupations as “barren ground” and argued that, instead, Democrats should emphasize the “issues of the future--education and the environment--beyond anything else.”

“Those are issues that are very clearly ours and are very clearly the issues . . . for the remainder of this century and well into the 21st Century,” Wirth said. He predicted that environmental issues in particular would be “very troubling, coming down the road very, very rapidly, emerging faster than anything I’ve seen.”

The Colorado senator said that he regards the Bush Administration’s emphasis on the two issues--including pledges by Bush to be the “education President” and highly publicized actions to halt offshore oil drilling and protect the ozone layer--as “good politics.”

The weekend conference in Philadelphia, sponsored by the moderate-leaning Democratic Leadership Conference, led some party members to speculate again about the role Jackson might play in the 1992 campaign.

Wirth, going far beyond the public comments of his colleagues, said that he believes there is “a real possibility” that Jackson could win the Democratic nomination.

After noting that rules changes obtained by Jackson at last year’s convention in Atlanta would heavily favor Jackson should he decide to run again, Wirth argued that “only a very strong competitor” could outpoll Jackson in the primaries and win the nomination.

The “surprise” candidate, Wirth suggested, might be Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, who he said had profited enormously from his role in leading the opposition to former Sen. John Tower as President Bush’s nominee to head the Pentagon.

“Nobody is going to tangle with Sam Nunn,” Wirth said.

He acknowledged that the scholarly Nunn might have “a tough time in the kitchens of Iowa” but said: “I’m becoming more and more of a Sam Nunn fan the more I get to know him.”