Liberal Groups See Ample Room for National Shift to the Left : Economy, ideological vacuum among Democrats give activists cause to hope they can win public favor.

The call issued by America’s most powerful labor chieftain did not lack for ambition.

“Sisters and brothers, will you stand with me and the 13.1 million hard-working men and women of the AFL-CIO as we take our country back?” John Sweeney, president of the labor federation, demanded.

The thunderous applause from the more than 1,500 faculty, students and assorted activists who packed the rotunda of Columbia University’s Low Library and spilled onto the campus outside echoed in the chill Manhattan October evening, providing all the affirmation Sweeney could have wanted.

Given the frustrations and divisions that have bedeviled liberals over the last three decades, the notion of taking on the towering challenge proclaimed by Sweeney might seem implausible, if not downright impossible. But a combination of circumstances--an uneven economic recovery and what some perceive as an ideological vacuum within the Democratic Party--has given liberal activists new reason to hope that the tide of public opinion might be ready to turn in their direction.

That, in turn, has spurred a flurry of muscle-flexing and brainstorming on the left. Indeed, even as Republicans continue to use “liberal” as a disparaging term, the leaders of this hoped-for resurgence see a double-barreled opportunity.

The once-triumphant GOP seems in disarray in the wake of the budget battle on Capitol Hill. And President Clinton’s Democrats, while poised to retain the White House and perhaps retake control of Congress, appear to lack a coherent credo for governing afterward, in the view of many analysts.

“I have a pretty good historical Geiger counter,” feminist leader and writer Betty Friedan told the assemblage at Columbia. “Thirty years ago, my Geiger counter was clicking about the beginning of the women’s movement. My historic Geiger counter is clicking again.”

Fostering such optimistic reckonings is the condition of the economy, which despite its rebound from recession has left millions of Americans fearful of corporate downsizing and frustrated by wage stagnation.

“We are in the sixth year of the recovery, and yet the economy still doesn’t work very well for millions of Americans,” said Robert Borosage, co-founder of the Campaign for America’s Future, an organization of academics, labor leaders and consumer and social welfare activists that seeks to shift public debate to the left.

The continued crunch on wage earners provides a powerful rallying point for this effort, a point Sweeney deftly drove home at Columbia. With an allusion to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book on rearing children, “It Takes a Village,” Sweeney declared: “While it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a union to get a raise.”

But organized labor, with its ranks dwindling as the U.S. economy changes, is not the powerhouse it used to be in the heyday of the left. For a liberal revival to succeed, today’s activists say, they must look beyond trade union resources and strive to recast the public’s image of the left from a collection of special-interest groups competing for the favors of government into a movement tuned to the concerns of the middle-class majority.

Borosage contends this shift toward a focus on economic security and inequity is already well underway. “Among the progressive movements that have provided the Democratic Party with its energy and conscience--whether it is organized labor, women’s movement or civil rights movement--you have greater coming together around the need for a lunch-bucket message as a centerpiece,” he said.

As evidence of this new understanding, the mere presence of Sweeney at the Low Library podium with Friedan and such other liberal eminences as Harvard theologian Cornel West--both the sort who would previously have been unlikely company for a labor leader--was deemed “an extraordinary event” by the sponsors of the gathering, one filled with momentous possibilities. It was the split between labor and much of the rest of the old liberal coalition in the 1960s--born of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the lifestyle upheavals of that turbulent period--that drained the strength of the left just as it faced the onslaught of the resurgent legions of the right.

The end of the Cold War eased some of these tensions. And the shock of the 1994 Republican counterrevolution provided a powerful incentive for reunification.

“If we can reconstruct an alliance of labor and intellectuals and traditional liberals, we will tilt the way political debate takes place in America,” declared University of Virginia professor Nelson Lichtenstein, co-chairman of the Committee for a National Teach-In, which organized the two-day conclave at Columbia and encouraged similar gatherings at a dozen or so campuses around the country.

Many at the forefront of this effort believe much remains to be done if liberalism is to overcome its preoccupation with so-called identity politics, which tended to define issues mainly in terms of race, ethnicity or gender. “I think liberalism in some ways got off track by thinking so much about the rights of particular groups or about their causes,” said Harvard University political scientist Theda Skocpol. Along with Clinton’s 1992 pollster, Stanley B. Greenberg, Skocpol is organizing the New Majority Conference, intended to bring together academics and activists to formulate a new “progressive vision.”

Acknowledging that such issues as racism, abortion rights and environmental safeguards “are all relevant,” Skocpol added: “What got lost is some sense of what Americans have in common and what we need to do to build some strong national community that everybody is part of.”

Still another challenge facing the attempted liberal comeback is that its leaders must avoid letting their own passions outrun the interests of their potential supporters.

“The labor movement is made up of real people, real individuals,” Bob Master, New York-New England political coordinator for the Communications Workers of America, cautioned at a Columbia Teach-In discussion of social and political reforms. “If you asked the average member of my union whether they joined to transform American society, they would tell you absolutely not. They joined a union because it is going to defend their contract, their day-to-day rights on the job.”

And Ruy Teixeira, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, reminded his fellow activists at one Teach-In workshop that the economically discontented blue-collar workers who might seem the obvious targets for a reawakened liberalism will not be easy to win over. “These are people who simultaneously hate the government and hate the corporations, who simultaneously want a balanced budget and want to protect Medicare,” he said.

Though almost all of the liberals involved in Teach-In are likely to vote for Clinton this fall, most don’t see their hopes as directly connected with his presidency. Instead, they are more concerned with the overall direction of the Democratic Party and with influencing its presidential contenders in 2000. “You can’t assume that some president is going to carve out a vision for himself,” Skocpol said.

As for Clinton himself, many liberal activists remain dubious about what he would do in a second term. “People say, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll see the real Clinton in his second term,’ ” said Eric Foner, who led the Columbia Teach-In’s opening session. “I say, ‘That’s what I am afraid of.’ ”