Rival Factions Vie to Mold Democratic Agenda : Politics: Liberal activists invoke legacy of New Deal and Great Society. A meeting of conservatives is likely to disavow that position.

“There are some other Democrats who say we ought to be more accommodating to the Republicans,” Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin told more than 300 fellow liberal Democrats gathered in this critical presidential battleground Saturday to stake out a claim on the party’s future. “We’re here to fire a shot across the bow of those Democrats.”

Harkin’s martial metaphor was only the opening salvo in a long and potentially fateful weekend of intraparty debate here in the Midwest. With major prospects for the 1992 nomination slow to declare themselves, the early Democratic presidential campaign is being waged mainly in the ideological arena where opposing factions are vying to shape the policy agenda. That agenda will define the party’s bid to regain the White House.

The struggle is getting off to a fast--and rough--start. No sooner had Harkin and other like-minded leaders of the Coalition for Democratic Values wound up two days of meetings devoted to reaffirming the activist legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society than members of a far more conservative organization, the Democratic Leadership Council, began assembling in Cleveland for their national convention today.

As its very first order of business, the Cleveland convention is scheduled to adopt a resolution decrying the very same legacy that the Des Moines liberals revered because, or so a working draft of the resolution contends: “In the minds of too many Americans, the Democratic Party has stood for government programs that don’t work, special interests before the interests of ordinary people and a reluctance to assert American values at home and abroad.”

In a similar vein, another resolution proposed for the Cleveland convention’s approval calls for congressional backing of President Bush’s request for “fast track” authority to negotiate a free trade agreement with Mexico, an idea that one agricultural activist here said “would turn out the lights on rural America” by exposing American farmers to a flood of unfairly cheap competition.

But, meanwhile, on Saturday it was the Des Moines liberals who held center stage in the Democrats’ guerrilla theater of politics. And they were determined to make the most of their opportunity here in the state where the presidential nominating process officially gets under way next February.

“We designed this meeting to raise issues that the presidential candidates who come here to campaign will have to respond to,” said Heather Booth, executive director of the coalition, which was founded last fall under the chairmanship of Ohio Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum.

A Friday night reception and a daylong series of panel discussions and speeches gave the coalition a chance to get its views across to a flock of party activists who will play a big role in the struggle for delegates in next February’s precinct caucuses. And the coalition’s prestige got a boost when former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, the only officially announced Democratic presidential candidate, and another likely contender, Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, both addressed the Saturday session.

Participants in the policy discussion were intense and impassioned in denouncing what they said they view as the gross inequities of the Reagan-Bush era. “Every suicide because of a lost job, every old person who freezes to death in the winter, every homeless child who dies under a bridge somewhere--their lives should be remembered by all those who got rich at these people’s expense,” declared Michael Lux, executive vice president of the Iowa State AFL-CIO.

Referring to recent government efforts to offset the soaring expenses of health care, Dr. Steve Gleason, chairman of the National Health Policy Council, declared: “Our attempts to cut costs so far have been like denying food to famine victims staring helplessly through the display window of a supermarket while the portly continue to eat.”

Leaders of the coalition made plain their view that part of the blame for such conditions attaches to members of their own party, who they charged have been too willing to go along with the conservative Republican thrust. Though no one mentioned the Democratic Leadership Council by name, it was apparent that this rival group and its Cleveland convention was much on the minds of the Des Moines liberals.

Every time congressional Democrats had been ready during the last decade to solve one of the nation’s social or economic problems, “there was always a little coterie of Democrats” who got in the way, Metzenbaum complained.

Now, Metzenbaum said, that same group has decided that the only way the Democrats could succeed in winning the White House is “to make the Democratic Party more like the Republican Party.” Said Metzenbuam: “That’s just unadulterated bull.”

It was Boston Mayor Raymond L. Flynn who offered the most fervent response to the argument for change put forward by the Democratic Leadership Council and other self-styled centrists. “I’d rather lose with a party that stands for something,” Flynn said, “than be part of a party that is guided by elitism and polls.”