Democratic Hopefuls’ Ideas Show a Party in Transition : Politics: Five candidates equate liberalism with failed messages of past. A fight with traditionalists seems likely.

Searching for a message that will lead the party back to the White House, almost all of the Democratic presidential contenders are embracing ideas that sharply depart from liberal orthodoxy.

Calls for the party to set a new course ring through the campaign appeals of five of the six nationally prominent candidates: Govs. Bill Clinton of Arkansas and L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas and former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.

The sole exception to the trend is Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, who has cast himself as the defender of the traditional Democratic philosophy--though presented with untraditional vigor and vinegar.

By contrast, all of Harkin’s competitors are advancing ideas that challenge some of the party’s most entrenched beliefs and constituencies--from Kerrey’s call for a radical restructuring of the federal bureaucracy that would cut government employment, to Clinton’s plan to limit the length of time welfare recipients could stay on the rolls, to Tsongas’ proposal for increased reliance on nuclear power and Brown’s endorsement of term limits for Congress.

Taken together, these new approaches mark a party in transition, as a growing number of Democratic candidates look to win back the middle class with alternatives to messages that have failed in five of the last six presidential elections.

“In 1984, you had only Gary Hart saying we’ve got to change the way we’re doing business as Democrats; in 1988, you had only Bruce Babbitt,” says Mike McCurry, a senior adviser to the Kerrey campaign. “But, in 1992, you have only Harkin defending the old orthodoxy. The change has happened: we are now in a post-New Deal Democratic Party.”

But many Democrats reject that conclusion--a point underlined by the enthusiastic response Harkin’s assertion of liberal verities stirs among many party activists. “What Harkin is saying is we don’t have to abandon our basic values,” says Jo-Ann Mort, communications director for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. “No one is against talking about new ways to deal with problems, but there are basic core values that do make the Democrats different from the Republicans.”

The dueling visions raise the possibility that the 1992 primary campaign will be marked by a fundamental clash over the party’s direction, with Harkin--or perhaps New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, who is still considering a candidacy--defending the party’s traditions against critiques leveled by the other candidates. This basic conflict is likely to surface Sunday, when the candidates gather in Washington for the campaign’s first nationally televised debate.

On some issues, all of the Democratic contenders fit within familiar party boundaries. All support a woman’s right to choose on abortion. All talk about increasing government investment in infrastructure and social programs, in part by cutting defense spending. And, with the exception of Tsongas, all support organized labor’s top goal--legislation to prevent companies from hiring permanent replacements during strikes.

But on an array of economic, social and, to a lesser extent, foreign policy issues, most of the Democratic candidates are aggressively moving down paths that were shunned by the party’s recent nominees--and are unsettling to many liberals.

Rejecting the traditional liberal opposition to the death penalty symbolized by 1988 nominee Michael S. Dukakis, four of the contenders--Clinton, Kerrey, Tsongas and Wilder--support capital punishment in some circumstances.

Breaking a decade of virtually unstinting Democratic criticism of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, Kerrey and Clinton have declared that the former President’s denunciations of the Soviet Union as “an evil empire” hastened the lifting of the Iron Curtain.

Although all the candidates join congressional Democratic leaders in condemning President Bush’s proposal to cut capital gains taxes across the board, Tsongas and Clinton support a targeted cut in the tax rate for long-term equity investments--as does Cuomo. Similarly, Kerrey has expressed interest in reducing capital gains taxes by indexing them to inflation--and Brown talks about cutting, or possibly eliminating, the tax for long-term investments. Only Harkin and Wilder unequivocally oppose a capital gains tax reduction.

Despite fierce opposition from organized labor, Clinton, Kerrey and Tsongas all backed Bush’s proposal for “fast-track” negotiations on a free-trade agreement with Mexico. Likewise, Brown and Tsongas back term limits for state and federal legislators, while Wilder has indicated general support for the idea--which the Democratic congressional leadership has uniformly denounced.

Even the new orthodoxy in some cases rejects the old. Four of the candidates and Cuomo, as well as the Democratic congressional leadership, have endorsed a tax cut for the middle class--a striking barometer of change in a party that historically has looked to government programs as the principal tool for responding to its constituents. The only contenders not pushing a middle-class tax cut are Tsongas, who considers the idea bad economics, and Harkin--who would prefer spending tax money on infrastructure and other federal programs, the more venerable Democratic response.

Many of the other heresies still carry political risk for the candidates in a primary electorate dominated by liberal activists and party interest groups.

“It’s a high-risk position to advocate change, because any time you move away from the Franklin Roosevelt-Lyndon Johnson platform, you are then moving away from the kind of voters who elect Democratic nominees in primaries,” Democratic strategist Brian Lunde says.

For instance, when the six candidates trooped before the AFL-CIO in Detroit last month for their first joint appearance, both Kerrey and Clinton received a chilly response for their support of free trade with Mexico. Harkin, meanwhile, clearly won the crowd with his tough talk on trade.

In a similar vein, both Wilder and Cuomo have disparaged Clinton’s advocacy of work requirements for welfare recipients. Wilder even suggested that Clinton was emulating former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s strategy of castigating the poor.

Overall, Clinton and Tsongas appear to have generated the most unease among party traditionalists--probably because they have offered the most specific blueprints for change.

Though liberal on most social issues, Tsongas has called on the party to abandon the class politics typified by Harkin’s volcanic denunciations of Wall Street and the wealthy. Tsongas argues that the country will not return the party to the White House until voters are confident the Democrats can manage the economy.

Behind that conviction, Tsongas has developed an economic agenda that might have been lifted from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s annual report: a cut in the capital gains tax targeted at long-term investments and start-up ventures, loosening of antitrust laws to allow greater cooperation between U.S. companies and revision of the laws governing legal liability for corporate directors to provide them more freedom “to act in the long-term interest of their firms.”

Clinton has challenged party traditions on an even broader front, provoking charges from Harkin partisans that he is offering only “warmed-over Republicanism.” But his admirers say Clinton is synthesizing new approaches for meeting the party’s historic goals.

Clinton’s most distinctive initiative, aimed at encouraging personal responsibility, defies easy ideological classification: tougher child support collection, elimination of federal tax deductibility for exorbitant business salaries, the withdrawal of driver’s licenses from high school dropouts and perhaps even reform of divorce laws to make it more difficult to split up families with children.

Although Kerrey has offered fewer specifics to support his call for change, many of his ideas are fresh. In addition to his proposal to cut the number of Cabinet departments in half, Kerrey has proposed converting welfare into a refundable tax credit that would encourage work by allowing public aid recipients to keep benefits if they took a job.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Kerrey--who won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam but became a strong foe of the war--has praised the U.S. management of the Cold War, declaring that “when President Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire, he did much to bring down these totalitarian regimes.”

Wilder’s platform of fiscal discipline, skepticism of foreign involvements, strong advocacy of civil rights and moderation on other social issues represents an unprecedented blend in national Democratic politics; as one Democrat observed, it reincarnates the old Dixiecrat vision of the 1950s--without the racism.

Brown has focused his public statements almost entirely on campaign finance reform and term limits. But his economic and social agenda--though still sketchy--exhibits flashes of the iconoclasm that propelled him to national prominence in the 1970s.