Democrats Must Shed Past to Have Future, Critics Say

As the competition for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination finally gets under way, many party members believe their biggest challenge will be to convince American voters that it’s time for a change. Failing to do that was “the real mistake we made in 1988,” said John Sasso, manager of Michael S. Dukakis’ ill-fated presidential bid.

But, before Democrats can persuade voters to change the party in the White House, many believe they must first change their own party. Specifically, they must reexamine the ties to special interest groups, the commitment to big government and other attitudes that have long defined the party’s leadership, its image and the vision it offers the country.

At the same time, critics say, the party needs to provide voters a clear choice between what Democrats and Republicans stand for. In recent years, the relationship between the Democrats who control Congress and the Republicans who own the White House often has been cozy. For example, some Democrats believe Dukakis refrained from hammering then-Vice President George Bush on the emerging savings and loan debacle because doing so could have embarrassed influential congressional Democrats who had received contributions from thrift institutions.

Ten months before the Democratic National Convention in New York, the most significant question facing the party is whether it can nominate a candidate willing and able to deal with these structural conflicts inside the party. These are conflicts that arise not so much between liberals and conservatives as between the customs of the past and the demands of the future.

If the party fails to overhaul itself, many Democratic activists say, it is not likely to reverse the course that led to losses in five of the last six presidential elections and has put it behind the GOP in current public opinion polls.

In brief, here are the elements of the party’s past that the Democrats are trying to reconcile with present-day political realities:

--Big government: During four decades, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, “Democrats have staked their electoral position on being able to deliver domestic services to their supporters,” said Cornell University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, slower economic growth and accelerating inflation cut into the federal government’s ability to spend. In addition, two major national traumas, Vietnam and Watergate, eroded public faith in government’s ability to do anything effectively and honestly.

Finally, whereas Roosevelt’s programs--born in a depression that affected almost everyone--promised benefits to a wide spectrum of voters, later Democratic proposals targeted much narrower constituencies, especially blacks and the poor.

Enter Ronald Reagan and the era of big tax cuts and huge deficits.

“What Republicans did was take all the money out of the system and make it hard for Democrats to service their supporters,” Ginsberg said.

For many voters, post-Reagan Democrats often seem to be promoting the cause of government for its own sake--and theirs--a far cry from the visceral message Democrats offered in bygone days.

The party’s two most recent standard bearers, Dukakis and Walter F. Mondale, were both reflections of “the modern Democratic political culture--a culture made up of white papers and subcommittee hearings,” contends Larry K. Smith, a Democratic Senate aide and campaign adviser. “But that culture could no longer explain to voters why the Democrats wanted to do what they were proposing.”

--Interest groups: In Roosevelt’s day, the Democrats constructed seemingly invincible majorities by mustering whites in the then-Solid South, plus blue-collar workers, Catholics, blacks and Jews in the cities of the North and West. But a flood tide of social and economic change has been eroding the bonds that held the alliance together.

The growth of the suburbs, the rise of the service economy, the decline in blue-collar jobs and the declining authority of labor unions weakened the old coalition. So did the rise of the civil rights movement, which put liberal Democrats in conflict first with Southern voters and then with many urban ethnic Democrats.

And today, the budget squeeze, combined with the current recession, has aggravated the frictions among these old allies and intensified their demands for the favors of government. Meanwhile, the public has grown resistant to spending scarce tax dollars on what it often perceives as undeserving special interests.

In particular, this has been making it difficult for Democrats to hold on to their black support without losing white voters. This problem is highlighted by the current controversy over Democratic-sponsored civil rights legislation that President Bush charges will produce racial quotas on the job.

In complaining that President Bush has been exploiting the race issue to divide the Democrats, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a probable presidential contender, said: “The reason (Bush’s tactic) works so well now is that you have all these economically insecure white people who are scared to death.”

As Clinton sees it, Bush has been telling worried white workers: You’re right. I won’t do anything for you. Government can’t do anything for you. But at least I won’t do anything to you.

Some Democrats complain also that the party is hampered by pressures from groups organized to promote liberal social causes, such as abortion rights, gay rights and feminism. These forces, Georgia Gov. Zell Miller charged in a recent address to Democratic National Committee members, “have imposed a filter through which only the purest of the politically correct can pass.”

“To some, it is not enough to be pro-choice; it is demanded that the candidates favor taxpayer funding, even for abortion on demand,” Miller complained. “To others, it is not enough to endorse government support for the arts, it is demanded that candidates oppose any restrictions on the uses of arts funding, even if they are obscene.”

--Co-incumbency: During the more than 20 years of almost total Democratic failure in presidential elections, the party has had almost total success in dominating Congress. That has helped keep the party alive, but it has also drawn the Democrats into a kind of partnership with GOP presidents and limited the Democrats’ ability to attack them on the stump.

As a result, said University of Texas political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, “the congressional Democrats have essentially become a party for themselves,” functioning as co-incumbents along with GOP chief executives such as Reagan and Bush.

Congressional leaders contend that they need to compromise with the President in the best interests of the country. But critics charge they are too heavily influenced by their concern with protecting their own power and incumbency and that Democrats must challenge Bush aggressively, particularly on domestic policy, if they are to have any hope of regaining the presidency.

“The need (in Congress) to perform, to deal with problems” makes it difficult to draw a clear distinction between the parties on some issues, House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri concedes.

One conspicuous example is last fall’s budget compromise, which ruled out any new spending without either cutting existing programs or raising new taxes and also eliminated the possibility of a “peace dividend”--trimming defense spending to fund domestic programs.

“(Congressional Democrats) sold their birthright when they made that budget deal,” Rochelle Horowitz, political director of the American Federation of Teachers and an at-large member of the Democratic National Committee, complained. “They destroyed their potential as an opposition party.”

Given the complexity of these problems, no one expects quick or simple answers. For, although nearly everyone concedes the need for change, some contend that the Democrats cannot afford to break completely with their past, particularly their fundamental identify as the party of government.

“We shouldn’t apologize for being close to government,” said Tim Hagan, Cuyahoga (Cleveland) County commissioner and an Ohio leader for the Mondale and Kennedy presidential campaigns. “We should say that the government is the only voice that speaks collectively for the public will. We should tell people there is no other choice if they want better housing, health care and schools.”

But others contend that Democrats can no longer take for granted the idea that voters will accept the value of government. “I believe very strongly that we have to demonstrate that we can make government work again,” said Arkansas Gov. Clinton. “We have to be willing to reexamine the way government is structured to deliver services.”

One example: The use of vouchers, which would give citizens greater flexibility in choosing government services from education to health care. A school voucher would enable parents to choose which public school their child would attend.

Democrats are also striving to demonstrate the benefits of government in concrete terms, rather than relying on promises and abstractions. Thus, under Majority Leader Gephardt’s rewards-for-results proposal, the federal government would pay financial bonuses to states that meet specific goals for upgrading their health care and school systems.

“The beauty of the rewards-for-results system is that we don’t spend any public money until the public’s goal has been reached,” Gephardt said.

Another aspect of the role of government under debate has to do with national security. Some Democrats argue that the dramatic transformation of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union permits the diversion of funds from the defense budget to domestic programs.

But former Dukakis manager Sasso argues: “You can’t run for president of the Department of Health and Human Services. A President has to show he realizes that part of the job is to stand up to our responsibilities abroad.”

And Rep. Stephen J. Solarz of New York, who led the effort to line up Democrats behind the vote to go to war in the Gulf last January, said, “A candidate has to persuade the American people that there are circumstances other than an invasion of the United States under which he is willing to use force if American vital interests are at stake.”

So far as interest groups are concerned, determination to resist their demands seems to be stiffening among Democratic leaders.

“You have to say to them, ‘If you want to come to the table, you don’t come as a interest group leader, you come as a Democrat,”’ Hagan said. “If they say, ‘If you don’t toe the line on our issue, we’ll take a walk,’ you don’t even let them come to the table.”

For Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, the answer is to focus not on specific interest groups but rather on broad issues--health care, education, employment and the like.

“My point is, rather than say my pitch to the black voter is this or my pitch to the labor voter is this, you concentrate on the problem,” said Wilder, the nation’s first black elected governor and a candidate for the Democratic nomination.

“And, in the process of doing that,” he added, “you bring into the party a large number of persons who believe the same way that we do on the issues.”

In dealing with the thorniest interest group issue of all, race, Democrats believe they can counter the divisive potency of Republican warnings about quotas by casting affirmative action in a broader context--by appealing to white voters’ long-term interests in civil rights progress.

“You can’t allow Republicans to define the issue of race as if it was a little sliver,” said New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. “The issue refers to progress that has been made, to divisions that continue, to the failure of the Administration to deal with those divisions and to the war zones in our cities that nobody is doing anything about.”

As for co-incumbency, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, who announced his presidential candidacy Sunday, voted against the budget agreement and opposes it now because it stands in the way of his proposals for cutting defense spending and using the money to fund domestic programs. He points out also that, despite the agreement, next year’s budget deficit is expected to be larger than ever.

His proposal to transfer $3.1 billion from the Pentagon budget to fund health research, education and other domestic programs was turned down last week by the Senate. But Harkin got some key support, including the vote of Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell of Maine.

And Harkin himself is expected to carry on the fight. “If I were President, the first thing I’d do is get rid of that damn agreement,” he said.

Some Democrats see co-incumbency in all its manifestations as having broad and insidious implications that threaten their party’s chances.

“The only candidacy that can win is the one that challenges not only the Republicans but also, and equally, the confederacy of officeholders, party leaders, lobbyists and consultants who have reduced the Democratic Party to a party of complicity,” veteran pollster Patrick Caddell wrote in a recent New Republic symposium on the problems of the Democratic Party.

“For any Democrat to win the general election,” Caddell said in an interview, “he will have to run a campaign in which he confronts the leadership of his own party.”