PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : Simply Put, the Democrats Lack Guts : The candidates’ TV forum demonstrated the party’s descent from passionate conviction to issue-peddling.

Back in 1976 when I was working in the ill-starred presidential campaign of the late Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, I was approached by a well-known expert who offered this candidate from a rural state “a major policy initiative” that would give Church some credibility with urban voters. He suggested that Church, in the next debate among the primary candidates, propose giving every big-city fire department a super-pumper. The promise of such a gift from Washington would, he assured us, help our candidate break out of the pack.

I thought of the super-pumper as I watched Sunday’s debate among this year’s Democratic hopefuls and recalled my dismay in 1976: Had American politics really come down to nothing more than some flashy gimmicks? But as the debate progressed, I became nostalgic for the gimmicks of the 1970s; at least they were flashy.

You would never have known from the highly mannered discussion on Sunday night that this country’s economy was flying at stall speed with its wings icing up. To hear Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey urge the G-7 nations to stabilize the ruble, or Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder ascribe our economic problems to wasteful government practices, or Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s call for voluntary national service, you could conclude that all the economy needed was the wisdom of a few good consulting firms. It was a dreary performance sodden with political scholasticism and it was eloquent testimony to the Democrats’ descent from being our most passionate public people into a collection of sublimated errand boys for the party’s interest groups. The Democratic Party without passion has no discoverable purpose, and its inutility was on conspicuous display Sunday night.

The one sustaining hope for the Democrats throughout the last dry decade was that they were our national standby squad. When the bottom fell out of the tub, the Democrats would be there with alternatives, and if they couldn’t win, they might at least scare the Republicans into doing the right thing. But what they said in their presidential debate would have scared no one. The candidates suffered from an infirmity that condemns opposition parties to oblivion: They were inoffensive. Only the Japanese might have taken even the mildest exception to what was said.

When people are hurting, they need someone to give voice to their pain. For Americans having to choose between foreclosure and hunger, or for the castoff employees of defunct airlines or downsized software companies, the tottering economy has become the source of innumerable anxieties, few of which were addressed by the candidates.

Beleaguered Americans might be inclined to question why, in these straitened times, the only ironclad entitlements seem to be reserved for those who enter the country illegally. They might concede that 6,000 Haitian boat people will not overwhelm us, but they might question whether welcoming those 6,000 might endow us with an open-ended moral obligation to receive every other refugee from Third World pestilence or despotism. And as jobs get harder to come by, they might also want to know how much longer they will have to continue atoning personally for past discrimination, or why they are thought mean-spirited for requiring a measure of reproductive responsibility for people on welfare. These may be ugly and ungenerous thoughts, but they are on lots of minds. Democrats, however, consider them ineffable, so people turn to the David Dukes and the Pat Buchanans who may not appeal to the better angels of human nature but do have a feel for what is eating at many Americans.

Perhaps in the next six debates, the Democrats can give voice to people’s anxieties, but I’d bet against it. The problem is in the self-limiting nature of the Democratic primary process that involves meeting the narrow tests of the party’s supporting constituencies. By endorsing every last demand of the labor unions, Democrats forfeit the right to speak for the unorganized. By refusing even to raise the possibility that affirmative action might not be a divinely inspired doctrine, they lose credibility with the very people most in need of knowing that minorities are not their real enemies. By intoning the dreary policy mantras supplied by their staffs rather than investing the statistics with flesh and blood examples--a skill for which they need to consult the genius of the despised Ronald Reagan--they come off as detached, pedantic and bloodless.

On the bright side, some of them may come to understand that their passion to be President must be matched by a depth of feeling that can be expressed and understood by ordinary people. A charitable view of the six candidates’ performance is that they were simply trying to appear presidential. But rather than trying to scent themselves with attar of presidential roses, the six needed to show that they could connect emotionally with the plight of so many Americans. The problem with the first presidential debate is that it was too damned presidential.