Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Last updated 1:42 a.m. PT

Anxious Dems divide over path forward

By
POLITICO

Mounting anxiety about their prospects in next year's elections is suddenly reviving a debate that has split the Democratic Party for a generation: Should it tack to the political middle to claim centrist swing voters or remain true to liberal principles to motivate the base and other change-hungry voters.

It's an argument that, thanks to former President Bush's unpopularity and the widespread appeal of President Obama's candidacy, remained dormant for much of the general election last year.

But with their poll numbers dipping, a handful of their senior House members retiring and one freshman abruptly changing parties, majority-party Democrats are once again grappling with all-too-familiar questions about the way forward. Chief among them: how to reconcile an ambitious policy agenda that party loyalists expect to see fulfilled at a time when concerns about government spending are on the rise.

William Daley, commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, brother of the Chicago mayor and long an influential voice for moderation in the party, went public last week with what is on the minds of other centrist Democrats in an opinion piece in the Washington Post.

Sounding the alarm after the party-switch of Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama, Daley laid out a stark choice. "Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come."

Democrats ought to "acknowledge that the agenda of the party's most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, based on that recognition, to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan," Daley argued.

A response came from longtime Democratic strategist and former top AFL-CIO official Steve Rosenthal, who without citing Daley by name, wrote in a piece Tuesday for POLITICO that such fretting amounted to what Obama campaign manager David Plouffe famously described as the "bed-wetting" of party elites at any real or perceived down moment during last year's campaign.

Rosenthal offered his own prescription for the party: "Stop overanalyzing 2009 losses in Virginia and New Jersey, where Democrats had two candidates with serious 'issues.' Stop talking about needing to move to the center to win back independent voters. Stop complaining that the Obama surge voters — those younger voters, African-Americans, Latinos and single women who came out in record numbers in '08 — didn't vote in '09 and won't vote again in 2010. Start legislating, start organizing and start mobilizing."

But for some centrist Democrats, it's exactly how much the party has been legislating, or at least spending, that has them worried.

"If we want to keep the majority, we have to tend to the moderate instincts of moderate districts like my own," said freshman Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia, who represents an affluent suburban seat just outside Washington. "We ignore them at our own peril."

Connolly, formerly the top elected official in populous Fairfax County, noted that he supported the stimulus package, the energy bill and healthcare reform -- but opposed a jobs bill the House passed before the winter recess because it meant yet more red ink.

"We have to marry a progressive agenda with fiscal moderation and responsibility," Connolly said.

If that's not what voters see from Democrats, Daley argued, the party will pay a steep price.

He cited the Democrats' losses in Virginia and New Jersey and the worsening poll standing of Obama and congressional Democrats. In both cases, Daley noted that independents were taking flight from the party.

"There is not a hint of silver lining in these numbers," wrote Daley. "They are the quantitative expression of the swing bloc of American politics slipping away."

But Rosenthal makes the case that it's the voters who elected Obama last year who will slip away, or at least stay home, if the party does not continue pursuing an aggressive agenda.

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