Post-Election Turmoil Grips Democratic Party From Top to Bottom : Politics: Egos and interest groups are at odds on longtime principles. Talk grows of a challenge to Clinton from within.

The Democratic Party’s midterm election debacle has touched off a far-ranging struggle over the party’s future, even as its leaders strive to keep the fragile Democratic coalition together.

Driving the conflict in part are the clashing ambitions of individual politicians and the concerns of competing interest groups. But the main bone of contention is how much the Democrats can still rely on the principle that has been their cornerstone for more than 50 years: the power of activist government to solve the nation’s problems and win electoral support.

Skirmish lines are being formed from Capitol Hill, where key leadership posts are being contested, to the grass roots, where liberal activists are striving either to find ways to prod President Clinton into shifting to the left or to find some champion to oppose his reelection.

The combined effect of these confrontations, along with the actions of the President himself, will go a long way to determining whether the Democrats in 1996 will recover the ground they lost this month or fall even further behind the GOP.

Meanwhile, the party’s hierarchy is trying to curb potentially divisive debate about the election’s implications. “We can’t afford to dwell on what should have been or what could have been,” newly anointed Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debra DeLee, told state party leaders gathered last week in Orlando, Fla. “And don’t even think about pointing fingers.”

But it is not just the issue of blame for the outcome on Nov. 8--which New Mexico Rep. Bill Richardson labeled in Orlando as “a day that will live in infamy”--that now agitates the Democrats. They are more concerned about finding a way to combat the post-election Republican ideological assault, spearheaded by House Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich and designed to exploit the GOP’s huge Election Day gains by redefining the national political agenda.

“They (the Republicans) are just riding roughshod over us,” fumed the chief aide to a leading Eastern Democratic senator. “They defined the last six months of the campaign and if we give them a long enough leash here, we’ll be in a hole so big we won’t be able to get out of it.”

Some who believe that the President has drifted too far to the left argue that he should take a few steps to the right. “The message we were broadcasting for the most part is that we’re there for the have-nots but we’re not there for the haves,’ ” California Democratic Chairman Bill Press said in an interview. “And the haves voted and the have-nots didn’t. So we’re perceived, I’m afraid, as the party of African Americans, the party of Latinos, the party of women, the party of gays. But we’re not the party of white working men and women anymore and the middle class.”

To change that perception, Press said “we have to reshape our agenda and stress the issues that appeal to the haves, like welfare reform and maybe some marginal kind of health reform, but no big, global thing.”

Press’ views echoed the findings of another shot fired in the ideological struggle, a post-election poll released last week by the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist group Clinton headed before he ran for President.

Council President Al From said the survey, conducted by Stanley B. Greenberg, Clinton’s own pollster, demonstrated that Clinton and the Democrats were badly damaged by the President’s health care reform plan because voters saw it as a symbol of big government. “Clinton needs to stay away from big government programs” to save himself and his party from further harm in 1996, From warned.

But some Democrats see the Clinton presidency and the future of their party in almost diametrically opposite terms. “There is a mantra that Clinton went wrong because he was too liberal,” said Jeff Cohen, a longtime activist in New York Democratic politics and director of FAIR, an organization that monitors media treatment of public-interest and minority viewpoints. “But I know a lot of people who believe he campaigned against Reaganomics, but when he started governing, he started waffling.”

At a Manhattan forum sponsored by the liberal Fund for New Priorities to develop “a progressive agenda” for the next Congress, Cohen complained that “Clinton has given up on the idea of investing in the future” and argued that “Democrats have to have a program that talks about jobs” as a way of persuading a public skeptical about federal programs that government can make a positive difference in their lives.

Another forum participant, Frances Fox Piven, City University of New York political scientist and author of “Why Americans Don’t Vote,” argued that instead of worrying about why they did not get support from a larger share of the 38% of voting-age Americans who cast their ballots, the Democrats would be better off if they concentrated on going after the 60% who were non-voters by trying to improve the plight of low-income citizens.

Meanwhile, liberals and other discontented Democrats are also talking about supporting a candidate who would challenge Clinton for the Democratic nomination or possibly run on a third-party ticket, with the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s name most often mentioned.

“There’s a huge amount of pressure” from local labor leaders and black community activists to get Jackson to run, according to a former Jackson presidential campaign aide. He notes that a recent poll by the Joint Center for Political Studies, a think tank that focuses on black politics, indicated that 50% of black voters would support an independent black presidential candidacy, even though Clinton stands fairly well in the black community.

Another Democrat mentioned as a possible rival to Clinton in 1996 is Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, who sought the 1992 nomination and was reelected this month to his second term. Speculation about a Kerrey candidacy heightened after the Nov. 8 vote when the senator described the results as a “repudiation” of Clinton’s first two years in office.

The very idea of an intraparty fight for the nomination is enough to drive most established Democratic leaders to distraction. “The American people think that if you can’t run your own party in an orderly manner, why should they expect that you can run the country,” said longtime Texas party Chairman Robert Slagle.

But that attitude could change, according to an aide of a top Democratic House leader. “They (Democratic House members) want to give Clinton five or six months to see how he does,” the aide said. “If he stays where he is or goes down in the polls, he’s going to be in trouble.”

For the time being, Democratic House members have their own internal contests for leadership posts to think about. North Carolina Rep. Charlie Rose, a moderate running for minority leader against liberal Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, praised parts of the Republican “contract with America,” which Gephardt has denounced as “extremist.” And Texas Rep. Charles W. Stenholm, a staunch conservative challenging liberal House Whip David E. Bonior of Michigan, called for Democrats in the House to make a change in direction to the right.

To balance things out, Rep. Vic Fazio of West Sacramento, another liberal, must compete for reelection as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus against Maryland Rep. Kweisi Mfume, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus who at times has criticized Clinton for not being liberal enough.

While all three challengers are viewed as long shots at best, analysts say just the fact that they are running for the posts is evidence of the turbulence shaking the world’s oldest political party from top to bottom.

Times staff writer Alan Miller contributed to this story.