In search of new faces

Democratic officials and advisers are warning that before their party can reclaim majority status again, it will first have to rebuild its political base, abandon “ideological purity” and reach out to traditional mainstream voters.

Beginning another painful postelection self-analysis of what went wrong in their 2004 campaign that failed to halt the party’s 15-year decline, Democrats interviewed by The Washington Times over the last several days called for new faces to lead their party over the next four years and blamed Sen. John Kerry for “missed opportunities” at their national convention and a confusing, contradictory message.

“We cannot afford to make the perfect the enemy of the good and insist on absolute ideological purity. Anybody who aspires to a leadership role in our party must understand that we cannot afford to continue to appeal to an ever-narrowing part of the American electorate,” former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Steve Grossman said.

“We have to broaden our base and not have everyone agree with every principle of the party platform. People have to see us as more inclusive and more thoughtful than we often appear to be,” said Mr. Grossman, who served as DNC chairman under President Clinton. “We have to broaden our appeal without violating our principles and the values we stand for.”

With their party’s rank and file dispirited and depressed from yet another presidential defeat and deeper losses in the House and Senate, even leaders of liberal organizations that strongly backed Mr. Kerry’s campaign said the Massachusetts senator bears part of the blame for what went wrong.

“The Kerry campaign could have been much more aggressive earlier on. Remember back to the convention, which was entirely devoted to Kerry’s commander-in-chief qualities and Vietnam record, when attacks on the Bush record were forbidden,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal grass-roots advocacy organization.

“Kerry’s people thought they would not have to explain what was wrong with Bush’s record, and for several weeks after the convention they had no message whatsoever. They lost a lot of valuable time and by talking only about his Vietnam record, opened him up to the Swift Boat [Veterans For Truth] attacks,” Mr. Hickey said.

“The other big problem was that Kerry was never quite clear on where he stood on the war in Iraq, which was confusing to voters and easily parodied by the Bush team. We think Kerry could have done a better job as a candidate and could have been much more aggressive and critical of the Bush record than he was in the early part of the campaign,” he said.

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, in a stinging postelection critique of her party, said that “it’s time for Democrats to take a deep look inside themselves and search hard for answers” outside the party’s old big-government orthodoxy.

“There’s no question that it’s time to rebuild America’s oldest political party brick by brick,” Miss Brazile said in a column in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. “The Democratic Party must lay a new foundation and stop spending its political capital defending old programs and initiatives.”

“How can we defend ordinary people when they do not know what we stand for? We must reclaim the mantle of the party of mainstream values,” said the manager for Al Gore’s 2000 campaign.

Miss Brazile is widely considered the party’s pre-eminent minority-voter turnout specialist and under her strategy, Mr. Gore drew more than 90 percent of the black vote, one of its most loyal constituencies.

But Mr. Kerry did not energize the black vote as much as Mr. Gore did, drawing 88 percent of its vote to Mr. Bush’s 11 percent, and now she says that the party “cannot overrely on blacks and other minorities to turn out in record numbers when these voters often are the last to get a piece of mail and the first to be blamed when things go wrong.”

Democrats’ decline

The situation the Democrats now find themselves in is all too familiar for them, triggering what many expect will be another bitter internal battle over what their party should stand for and who can lead it out of the wilderness.

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