Democrats’ Old Habits Resurfacing in Plans to Win Congress

Something old. Something old. Something old. Something old.

And, incidentally, something new.

That is what congressional Democrats have produced in the five-point plan they are taking to voters for this year’s midterm election.

In case you missed it, Democrats last month produced a five-point message card meant to show the priorities they would pursue if given majorities in the House and Senate this fall.

It’s a document Walter F. Mondale would have felt comfortable distributing. The plan reflects almost none of the new thinking former President Clinton promoted during his two terms (which is surprising, since the usually perceptive John Podesta, Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, supervised the project).

Instead, it seems inspired more by Al Gore’s ill-fated 2000 campaign, which drifted back toward the old Democratic strategy of wooing interest groups with targeted programs. This new effort is less likely to be remembered as the launch of a Democratic renaissance than as a testament to the party’s confusion 18 months after Gore’s defeat.

The exercise began with private grumbling among key Democratic interest groups last winter, who feared that the party’s message was being lost amid the focus on the war against terrorism and persistent gridlock on the Senate floor. That concern inspired a project, led by Podesta, involving operatives from all of the party committees. Last month, after extensive internal discussion and some national polling, the group settled on five issues it believes Democrats at all levels should stress in the midterm election.

Four of them are long-standing party priorities: protecting Social Security and opposing Republican efforts to partially privatize it; creating a prescription drug benefit for seniors under Medicare; increasing spending on education; toughening enforcement of clean air and clean water laws. The something (relatively) new is a pledge to “provide real pension protection” in the wake of the Enron Corp. collapse.

Not all Democrats will place each of these issues on the marquee. But the plan’s influence is already apparent. On Wednesdays, a group of 22 Democratic senators meet to discuss ways to promote the five issues. The priorities are visible in individual campaigns too, through gambits like the “seniors’ bill of rights”--centered on opposition to Social Security privatization and the promise of a new prescription drug benefit--that embattled Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) released last week.

In producing this list, Podesta’s group labored under several constraints. One was the difficulty of finding issues to unite congressional Democrats, especially Senate Democrats. A bolder agenda--say one that talked about restoring fiscal balance by trimming President Bush’s tax cut--would have inevitably proved more divisive. The plan was also shaped by the conventional wisdom that elderly voters matter more in low-turnout midterm elections; as a result, it’s disproportionately weighted toward seniors.

Yet even with those explanations, the agenda still seems a stunning leap backward into pre-Clinton liberalism. The list does indeed embody broadly shared Democratic priorities. But it is more revealing for what isn’t included than what is. It abandons, without a fight, Clinton’s attempt to identify the party with national strength, government reform and economic growth--foundations of his effort to expand the Democratic coalition.

For starters, the plan offers no ideas on the issue at the top of the public’s agenda: fighting terrorism. As such, it reflects the conventional wisdom among top party strategists such as James Carville, Stanley B. Greenberg and Robert Shrum, who have argued for months that Democrats should talk about terrorism only long enough to say “I agree with the president” and then change the subject to domestic issues.

That calculation seems odd, and risky, for Democrats. It accepts a reversion to the “division of labor” that characterized American politics when Republicans dominated the White House from 1968 to 1988. Democrats seem to be conceding national strength issues to Republicans while placing all their chips on compassion issues, like health care or protecting the elderly, where polls give them a lead.

That leaves Democrats in the incongruous position of focusing least on the subject that most concerns Americans: safeguarding the nation. “Voters will not take Democrats seriously as a party to be entrusted with national leadership if they fail to address the most urgent set of national issues,” the centrist Democratic Leadership Council wrote recently.

Another problem is that the plan says nothing about modernizing government. Clinton usually linked new spending to government reform (think welfare or the balanced budget). But like Gore in 2000, the new Democratic agenda trumpets spending while muting reform. The plan says nothing about how Democrats would restructure Medicare to control costs or how the party hopes to solve Social Security’s long-range financing problems; it merely, like Gore, promises more money. Which could allow Republicans to accuse their Democratic opponents of reverting to big-spending liberalism--as Bush did, with devastating effect, to Gore.

Finally, the plan offers no vision of how to promote economic growth. Last year, House and Senate leaders touted a comprehensive plan to revive growth in the technology economy; Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) last week released a detailed paper on options for spurring the economy by encouraging the spread of Internet broadband technology. Not a word of that appears in the new five-point plan.

Podesta, who understands the document’s limits, has told friends he sees this as a blueprint only for the off-year election, not for winning back the White House. To a point, he’s right: Both parties usually bend toward their base in midterm elections. (Bush and congressional Republicans aren’t lighting the sky with bold new ideas, either.) But the plan underscores the Democratic regression toward old habits that kept the party out of the White House for 20 of the 24 years before Clinton. Odds are the next Democratic presidential nominee won’t be building on this retro agenda; he’ll be laboring to dig out from under it.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/ brownstein.