Wilder Urges Democrats to Alter Course

Virginia Gov.-elect L. Douglas Wilder told fellow Democrats on Monday they can recapture the White House if they return to “mainstream” politics as he did in becoming the first elected black governor.

Appearing before the Democratic Leadership Council’s fall conference, Wilder appeared to agree with President Bush’s strong stand against new taxes as he outlined a new party strategy for winning national office in 1992.

“Americans everywhere want to hold the line on taxes,” he said. “There was a time when Democrats were elected by campaigning against big government and high taxes. But for too long, we have let the other party take these issues away from us--indeed, we have allowed them to hammer us with these issues.”

His remarks could touch off an intraparty debate since many liberal Democrats have contended that the ballooning deficit and social problems cannot be solved without additional taxes.

As a black pacesetter in a Southern state, however, Wilder’s comments could carry a lot of weight in Democratic discussions of how to win the next presidential election.

Wilder criticized Bush by implication for his anti-abortion views by noting that Virginians voted to preserve Thomas Jefferson’s principle of limited government.

“And that means keeping government out of our personal lives and out of the most personal of personal decisions,” Wilder said.

Wilder, who received international acclaim for winning a state that was a bastion of the Confederacy during the Civil War, suggested that Democrats have lost five of the last six presidential elections because they are out of touch with typical voters.

While his message carried an implied rebuke to party elders, Democrats at the meeting gave Wilder a prolonged standing ovation for his victory over Republican challenger J. Marshall Coleman in a race decided by less than 2% of the vote.

Even on the issues of environment and education, he said, Democrats allowed the Republicans to “take these issues away from us with rhetoric, but without vision” during the 1988 campaign.

“I believe that if the Democrats at the national level will have the same faith in America’s new mainstream as I do, in the years ahead we can and will harness the power of this political force to elect a candidate of America’s new mainstream to the White House,” he asserted.

A similar theme was sounded by Sen. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), who said the party had moved too sharply away from forward-looking liberalism and toward the left, driving away moderates and conservatives.

“Our party has reached an impasse because the growth of the welfare state has reached the limits of public tolerance for higher taxes and bureaucratic expansion,” Robb said.

“Either we will continue on the course of the last 20 years or we will rebuild a presidential majority around unifying themes and principles that make sense to most Americans,” he added.