Party May Be Over for Centrists

In November 1987, Al Gore, then a senator and presidential aspirant, appeared at a political dinner in Iowa roughly two months before the state’s Democrats were scheduled to attend party caucuses and pick a presidential favorite. Iowa was politically important to Gore, but he acted aloof, nonchalant, almost as if he didn’t care whether he won over the state’s stalwart liberals. Indeed, instead of singing the activists’ praises, Gore jabbed a finger into their eyes by vowing to fight for free trade, raise the U.S. profile abroad and govern as a “raging moderate.”

“I will not do what the pundits say it takes to win in Iowa -- flatter you [liberals] with promises, change my tune and back down from my convictions,” declared Gore.

When Bill Clinton selected Gore as his running mate in 1992, Democrats nationwide knew the party’s moderate wing was in the ascendant. Gore’s selection allowed Clinton to cast himself off from “the party of George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Mario Cuomo,” noted the New Yorker’s Louis Menand.

Then, on Dec. 9, 2003, 11 years after Gore and Clinton barnstormed America in a bus in a “New Democrat” crusade to capture the White House, the former vice president turned his back on this past and endorsed a maverick outsider who claims to be the only candidate of “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” Howard Dean was the first major candidate in the race to oppose the Iraq war. His home state, Vermont, routinely elects a socialist, Bernard Sanders, as its lone representative in the U.S. House of Representatives.

By endorsing Dean, Gore waved goodbye to the moderate Democratic politics that had defined his decades-long political career. His “people versus the powerful” theme in his 2000 presidential campaign suggested which way the wind was blowing for Gore. But by coming out early for Dean, Gore announced, in the most dramatic way yet, that he has embraced the antiwar views, pro-civil liberties positions and anti-incumbent, anti-Washington rhetoric of the Dean wing of the party.

After Gore’s surprise endorsement, many political commentators noted that his decision was part of a power struggle between party insiders and outsiders, between the Clintonites and the much-heralded Deaniacs. Still feeling rejected by the Beltway types who had criticized his 2000 presidential campaign performance as weak, Gore, it was said, wanted to shed his image as a slave to the politics of caution. But there is another way to read Gore’s bombshell. It is a commentary on the fortunes of Democratic moderates.

The moderates are losing the battle to define the post-Clinton Democratic Party, for four reasons.

First, they have ceded the insurgent mantle to Dean and his supporters on the Internet, student activists and antiwar acolytes.

When Clinton and Gore became active in the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, they saw themselves as insurgents battling entrenched left-wing political interests. Clinton ran as an outsider on a vision of a New Democrat who shunned party orthodoxy on such issues as welfare reform, free trade and balanced budgets. By re-energizing the party, he inspired the grass roots -- students, (Remember MTV), stay-at-home moms and African Americans.

Eleven years later, it is Dean who has embraced Clinton’s pedigree as an outsider, incessantly flaying opponents as Washingtonians too cozy with President Bush to fight him effectively. His charges are specious. Candidates Rep. Richard A. Gephardt and Sens. John Edwards, John F. Kerry and Joe Lieberman all oppose Bush’s handling of postwar Iraq. But Dean’s attacks on them have reminded voters that this quartet supported the use of force in Iraq in the first place. Dean didn’t, and that has fueled his insurgent campaign.

Second, Democratic moderates in Congress and on the campaign trail have failed to develop a clear, consistent national security strategy. They have put forward good policies, but a coherent strategy and a simple message have proved elusive. In 2002, Democrats decided to fight the midterm elections on domestic matters, ceding security as an issue to the Republicans.

But in the world after Sept. 11, 2001, defense is the paramount issue. In 2003, Democratic moderates have scored points in attacks on Republican policies on Iraq and Afghanistan; they have noted, to the administration’s embarrassment, that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are still at large. But Republicans have mastered the art of bumper-sticker politics: pro-war, pro-defense, pro-freedom. In contrast, Democratic foreign policies are too complicated to fit on a sticker. Moderates are still struggling to find their voice in foreign affairs.

The moderates’ third problem is that liberal interest groups rushed in to fill the power vacuum created when Clinton stepped down in 2001, significantly diminishing the moderates’ institutional authority. Groups such as the National Organization for Women, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and the AFL-CIO long to defeat Bush in 2004. But, above all, they act as if their most important goals are to advance their narrow agendas regardless of the broader implications for the country. In putting out press releases, hosting candidate forums and bickering over whom they should endorse, these organizations want a candidate most committed to their special issues, a poor basis for a presidential platform.

Finally, moderate think tanks and idea factories are divided on issues of politics and policies.

The Democratic Leadership Council makes headlines when it says Dean is unelectable, but the centrist New Democrat Network praises the former Vermont governor as a leader who has redefined politics.

Talk radio sympathetic to Democratic causes will counter Rush Limbaugh’s invective, but the fuel will be hatred for Bush, not a fresh infusion of center-left ideas.

Democratic moderates still have a chance to defeat Dean. A Gephardt win in the Iowa caucuses Jan. 19 might position him as the anti-Dean alternative. And retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark could finish second or third in New Hampshire, giving him momentum and cash heading into the Southern primary states in early February. To beat Dean, the anti-Dean forces must unite around a single candidate and ride him all the way to the Democratic convention.

This debate is more than just an inside-the-Beltway parlor game. When Gore endorsed Dean last week, he called the Iraq invasion the “wors[t] foreign policy mistake ... in [America’s] 200-year history.” Worse than Vietnam (more that 57,000 Americans dead), worse than the Bay of Pigs (1961), worse than the CIA-sponsored coups that toppled Iran’s nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh (1953), Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954) and Salvador Allende in Chile (1973). According to Gore, it was Dean’s courageous and prescient opposition to the Iraq war that won over the former vice president.

As he had at the political dinner in 1987, Gore threw down a gauntlet to his Democratic opponents last week, only this time it was aimed at his former bedfellows in the party’s moderate wing. His hyperbolic endorsement rhetoric might fire up the Dean faithful, but it is no basis for a presidential campaign in a post-9/11 world.

Democratic moderates must take up Gore’s challenge and revitalize their wing of the party by following Dean’s trailblazing footsteps.