PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : The Democrats’ Troubled Sales Job : They can’t win the White House as GOP-moderate clones; maybe a pure liberal stance isworth trying.

Imagine taking on the job of Middle East sales rep for Virginia ham, or exporting tea to Brazil. How about managing a skateboard store in a retirement community? This gives you an inkling of the thoughts that have been haunting Democratic strategists: Maybe we’re in the wrong business.

Scanning the presidential elections since World War II for evidence of convincing Democratic victories--popular-vote totals that we denominate as mandates--we find that only once did the winner go much above 50%. That was in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson, the successor of the martyred John Kennedy, trounced the ultraconservative Barry Goldwater by 23 points. During the same postwar period, however, Republicans won smashingly in five of their seven victories. Only Richard Nixon finished with less than 50%, and that was in the three-way race with Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace in 1968. Bill Clinton’s 43% in 1992 was the lowest of all.

In their effort to reclaim their market share of the electorate, some Democratic groups--most notably the Democratic Leadership Council--have argued, quite plausibly, that only a move to the political center will save Clinton’s presidency and, indeed, the party itself. They argue that a forthrightly liberal Democratic Party would be nothing more than a stunted, isolated leftist sect--a stark denial of the fact that the country seems headed resolutely in a rightward direction.

The strongest support for a centrocentric Democratic Party comes from its last two presidential victories, in 1976 and 1992. The moderate appeal of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, it is argued, enabled them to win. But another way to look at those two victories is that Carter and Clinton would have won no matter where they were situated ideologically (barring, of course, flagrant extremism). Anger with Watergate and the pardon of Nixon would have propelled any of the 1976 Democratic primary hopefuls into the White House. Likewise, the readiness of the public to trade in recession-weary George Bush in 1992 could have benefited anyone from Paul Tsongas to Tom Harkin had they been more successful than Clinton in the primaries.

Difficult as it may be for Democrats to accept, they tend to win the White House when Republicans get into trouble. The Democratic Party is America’s standby equipment. It is the relief pitcher, the national escape clause, the voice when we dial 911. While the Democrats until this year had been able to dominate congressional elections, the presidency with its high moral symbolism and patriarchal majesty has been Republican real estate in normal times.

And what did the last two Democratic beneficiaries of voter rejection of Republicans do? They picked up the precepts of the men they had just defeated. Carter plunged ahead with the deregulation agenda set by Gerald Ford and Clinton went all out for NAFTA and GATT, which may have been good public policy but Republican policy all the same. For his troubles, Carter got what Democratic presidents can expect when they govern like Republicans: a challenge from the party’s left. Clinton courts the same fate if his definition of New Democrat varies in no substantial measure from garden-variety Republican. (As for a challenge from the Democratic right, that is ludicrous. Who would mount it, Sen. Howell Heflin?)

The one thing that has any political significance for the Democratic Party is its liberal wing--the unions, the poor, the minorities, the old men who got their first paycheck from the New Deal, the middle-aged women in Birkenstocks, the bald guys with pony tails fixing up old VW buses in Berkeley and, at least potentially, a whole lot of new voters turned off by the GOP’s puritanical tendencies.

For the Democrats, finding, much less capturing, the elusive political center is a task more metaphysical than political, more the stuff of necromancers than pollsters. When Republican presidents blow it and Democrats have a chance to govern, the last thing in the world they should contemplate is taking the stance that the voters have just repudiated. They should use these opportunities to demonstrate the virtues of liberalism, not repent of them.

Political survival alone dictates that the standby equipment be made of different stuff than the gear that has broken down. Democratic presidents who are forthrightly liberal, however, are far more able to conciliate those elements in the party who can be counted on to cause the most sleepless nights: a sullen and rebellious left.