Wake-Up Call for ‘Well-Meaning Weenies’ : NONFICTION : WE’RE RIGHT, THEY’RE WRONG: A Handbook for Spirited Progressives,<i> By James Carville (Simon & Schuster: $10, paperback; 183 pp.)</i>

First, a caveat: I once lived in Washington. I mention this not to apologize for my past but because it’s the right thing to do. Now that we’re the minority party, it’s important that we Democrats move quickly to air out our closets, display the skeletons and admit to the republic exactly who we are.

With that clear and in the open, I must add this, too: I’m no insider. I’ll swear to that on one of Ralph Reed’s Bibles, right after I’ve boxed him upside the head with a copy of the Bill of Rights. I’m so far out of the loop that the only beltway I’m familiar with is the one that girds my pants. Still, I am proud to be part of that thinning majority of Americans that wakes up eagerly in anticipation of the exercise of our civic duty on the first Tuesday of November. There are 364 other days of the year to run my errands; on election day, I actually go out and vote as if my country and its future depended on it.

So, why have I been feeling so poorly of late about the state of my party’s and America’s prospects for the millennium? To listen to James Carville, the force-of-nature strategist behind President Clinton’s 1992 campaign, tell it, it’s because we voter-registration-card-carrying Democrats have simply allowed ourselves to be co-opted. We’ve let the Republicans shout us down, define who we are, frame the issues, set the agendas, establish the rhetoric and basically bully us into forgetting what we stand for and what we’ve accomplished.

In “We’re Right, They’re Wrong,” Carville tries to level the playing field. Consider this slim manifesto his contract on “the contract.”

The title’s a fitting one. It’s drawn from a speech that Harry Truman delivered at the 1948 Democratic convention--and remember how the Republicans tried to make him one of their own last go-round, a political dirty trick that Harry would have no doubt given ‘em hell for. But it’s the book’s subtitle--”A Handbook for Spirited Progressives”--that makes its contents so intriguing.

“I don’t know what the hell has gotten into us,” Carville scolds, “but we Democrats are too eager to give ground. We’re a bunch of well-meaning weenies. We whine and anguish in public. . . . Democrats do these things all the time. I’ve had enough of it.” His tract, then, is a primer in how to stop.

Like Carville himself, its style is populist and direct, regularly funny, often angry and laced throughout with common sense. He imagines a big Republican-held Fourth of July barbecue with himself the only Democrat present. His best defense is a good offense, and the weapons he chooses to aim at the hard-charging pack of elephants he’s surrounded by are wit and fact with an occasional recipe, chart or anecdote tossed in. If his guidelines for cooking pork tenderloin seem high on fat, his prescriptions for reinvigorating the party and reinventing government appear generally healthy.

Carville systematically examines--and shoots down--what he sees as the myths the Republicans have both propped up and propagated, primarily the one that insists that the majority of the nation’s problems will be cured by taking an ax and whacking the budget. He comes out swinging at Republican positions on the economy, welfare, health care and taxes, while defending with true-believer vehemence such programs--all dangling by threads--as Head Start, AmeriCorps, Medicare, the Clean Water Act and even the earned income tax credit, which was originally enacted by a Republican administration. He enters--if too briefly--the debates on race and family values, chastises the inability of the press to get truly complex policy issues across to the people and writes passionately about the increasing gulf that splits America’s working class from its wealthy. And he throws in footnotes to back his arguments. (Take that, Rush Limbaugh.)

But what Carville mostly does is stand up proudly--and defiantly--for his belief in the tradition of a strong and active federal government, one that can be good enough to see and responsive enough to help the needs of the nation and its people. In his reading of history, it’s the Fed--not the states and certainly not private enterprise--that has consistently done the unpopular dirty work of trying to form that more perfect union the Founding Fathers envisioned in the Constitution.

Sure, Carville’s an unabashed liberal with a bleeding heart; he’s the first to cop to that. In his world, it’s not the government-devolvers like Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich or Bob Dole who’ve given liberalism the stench it’s been emitting for the past decade, it’s the liberals themselves. As a group, we’ve cut our consciences to fit the whims of the electorate. And isn’t that the definition these days of a moderate Republican?