Analysis
Party must redefine what it means to be a Democrat

By Paul West
The Baltimore Sun

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The man who led Democrats to their fifth defeat in the past seven elections, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, probably is finished as a party leader. But a defeated primary rival might not be.

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean could emerge as a major contender to become the party's new national chairman, Democrats say. The tussle for that job likely will be the opening skirmish in a prolonged struggle to redefine what it means to be a Democrat.

Critics say Dean and his anti-war army of bloggers, Internet donors and Michael Moore enthusiasts would be the wrong face for Democrats as they attempt to broaden their appeal in vast areas of the country where the national party has ceased to exist as a political force.

"We simply can't write off small towns and rural areas and the people who live there," said David Axelrod, a Chicago-based Democratic consultant. "Bill Clinton was successful not simply because he was a Southern Baptist but because he looked at every person with respect, whether they wore overalls or a pinstriped suit.

"It's not simply a matter of issues of gay marriage or abortion. It's really something more basic than that: Do we 'get' their lives," said Axelrod, whose clients have included North Carolina Sen. John Edwards in his presidential campaign and Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama, elected to the U.S. Senate this week.

Tuesday's vote exposed several glaring deficiencies that can't be remedied overnight, according to party strategists. A surge of votes by evangelical Christians, a key to President Bush's re-election, caught Democrats by surprise.

Moral issues, which exit polls identified as a leading factor favoring Bush, never popped up in Democratic campaign surveys.

"We're going to have to come to grips with the religion and morality issues, which we still have not confronted as a party in the post-Monica Lewinsky age," said Elaine Kamarck of Harvard University, who helped manage the Clinton administration's drive to "re-invent" government.

Among myths demolished by the election was the notion that higher voter turnout always works to the advantage of Democratic candidates.

Twelve million more Americans cast ballots this year than in 2000. But the widening electorate produced a huge swing in favor of Bush, who went from a 500,000-vote deficit four years ago against Al Gore to a 3.6 million-vote surplus over Kerry.
 
"Democrats are going to have to face up to this. What happened was not simply a personal victory for George Bush. It was a party victory," said William Galston of the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. "The Republican Party is now broader and deeper, and the Democratic Party is narrower and perhaps shallower, and this is an urgent matter."

Galston, a former Clinton White House aide and centrist party theorist, pointed to a gaping hole in the map. As the Democratic Party has shrunk to minority-party status, it has vanished from a broad swath of the United States, giving Republican tickets a built-in "electoral lock" in the South and West.

"It's the culmination of a very long political cycle that began with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964," Galston said.

That year's presidential election "was a catastrophic defeat for the Republican Party, but it sowed the seeds of future renewal," he said. Among the few Democratic bright spots in 2004 were victories for Senate candidates Ken Salazar in Colorado and Obama in Illinois, "who are the future of a Democratic Party that is ethnically and culturally diverse" and "dedicated to the idea of one America."

In an age when fighting terrorism is the top priority on the nation's agenda, "the Democratic Party does not have a coherent answer on security," said Kenneth Baer, a speechwriter who advised Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman's presidential campaign.

Some critics within the party contend that Democrats have an institutional problem: There's a new generation in the party whose outlook was not shaped by the Cold War and whose ideas don't mesh with those held by older party activists and strategists.

"There's a whole generation of Democrats who came of age and entered politics during the Clinton era and not during the anti-war movement of the '60s or the anti-nuclear movement of the '80s," Baer said. "In many ways, their outlook is not affected at all by the Cold War, and therefore on security and on other issues they can be more forward looking."

Paul Maslin, the Dean campaign's pollster, said a polarized electorate proved this week that "we do have two countries, and theirs [the Republicans'] is a little bit bigger than ours."

He said Kerry's defeat masked the emergence of a new Democratic base in the Southwest. In states such as Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, a growing Hispanic voter population and migration from California pushed up the Democratic presidential vote by a few percentage points.

"It's not rapid movement, but it's enough to plant a flag," Maslin said.

Ultimately, a Democratic turnaround may require the rise of a presidential candidate who can synthesize the party's apparently conflicting tendencies, as Clinton did in the period of soul-searching that followed the defeat of former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis by Bush's father in 1988.

"The last thing a minority party can afford to become is sectarian," said Galston, who hopes disputatious Democrats can avoid a bloodletting. "The message of 2004 is that our country, and by extension our party, [is] in the grip of much broader forces."