Democrats Want to Stick with the Political Center
The following is a Charles Roos column in the Denver Rocky Mountain News of March 27, 2001:
Yo! Rank-and-file Democrats! In case you hadn't noticed, the Democratic Party of 2001 isn't your father's Democratic Party anymore.
I try to keep track of such things, but this one sneaked up on me, too. And I don't think the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Jack Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey is ever coming back.
This could be good news or bad news. The good news: Democrats of all stripes might be able, finally, to get on the same page and seize control of the middle of the road, where most of the new votes are. The bad news: Traditional Democrats - liberal, union and minority voters, fast becoming the underdogs - could go on fighting with self-styled "New Democrats" for years, delighting Republicans from San Francisco all the way to Washington.
In this space recently, I suggested the policy of the "new" Democratic movement - spawned by the Democratic Leadership Council - is simply this: Abandon the party's traditional base and focus on taking over the middle of the road from the GOP.
Denverite Jim Gibson, who leads the DLC in Colorado, took exception. As evidence of what's really happening, he dug up a 3-year-old poll indicating a fair degree of party unity - and dwindling Democratic sentiment for a return to "FDR New Deal-style" government, as he put it.
Well, I'll admit the answers to two poll questions made me sit up and take notice:
First on affirmative action: Among Democrats polled, 19.4 percent "strongly agreed" that affirmative action programs "are no longer necessary and are a form of reverse discrimination." Another 28.2 percent "somewhat agreed." With that degree of opposition among Democrats, can such a policy long survive?
Second, on the role of labor: Among Democrats, 15.4 percent "strongly agreed" that "labor unions have outlived their usefulness" and 23.4 percent "somewhat agreed."
Now, that folks, is hard to believe.
This poll of 806 Coloradans (including an over-sampling of Democrats) was commissioned by the DLC and conducted by a research program associated with the University of Colorado at Denver. It was taken during the 1998 election cycle, amid the Bill-Monica uproar.
To Gibson, the poll suggests that Colorado voters as a whole "are overwhelmingly centrist, mainstream and pragmatic in their political choices." More than 40 percent of unaffiliated voters told pollsters they considers themselves neither very liberal or very conservative.
Among Democrats polled, just 11.3 percent called themselves "very liberal" and 32.9 percent "somewhat liberal."
When this same group was asked about future choices, only 11.6 percent said they'd like to move to the left and a whopping 78.7 percent favored moving toward the center.
Questioned about the role the government should take, 11 percent said they'd favor a New Deal-style government "that protects people from adversity," 60 percent said a government "to help people equip themselves to solve their own problems" and 30 percent favored a libertarian approach "that merely stays out of our lives."
A caution: Remember who paid for this survey. Remember, too, that a key word here and there in questions asked can make a lot of difference in the response.
We get more precise answers in the congressional and legislative campaigns of 2002. Here in Denver, for instance, will organized labor back a Democratic challenger of U.S. Rep Diana DeGette? It's not that Democrat DeGette has identified herself with the DLC, but labor was furious about her free-trade votes.
Whatever Gibson may say, whatever his numbers may indicated about Democratic thinking, I still think the DLC is writing off its traditional base - labor, minority voters, teachers, liberals - by its ardent, persistent and almost exclusive targeting of upper middle-class techies and suburbanites.
Maybe the Democrats think they have to become a second white-bread party to win. Maybe they's lose anyway. We'll see.
Charles Roos, retired political editor at the News, writes a weekly column.