ublished on Saturday, December 16, 2000 in the Washington Post
Fissures Widening Among Democrats
After Gore's Loss
DLC charges that the populist themes of Gore's campaign were a
major
factor in his loss
by Thomas B. Edsall
The war between the populist and centrist wings of the Democratic
Party broke out into the
open yesterday as they struggled to set the direction of the
party.
The opening guns were fired by officials of the Democratic
Leadership Council--a bastion of
loyalists to Vice President Gore's running mate, Connecticut Sen.
Joseph I. Lieberman, a
centrist and possible candidate himself for the White House in
2004.
At a morning briefing, the DLC charged that the populist themes of
Gore's campaign were a
major factor in his loss to George W. Bush, scaring away just the
voters he needed to
achieve victory.
"Bush won the white working class [with household incomes below
$75,000 a year] by 13
points," said Will Marshall, head of the the DLC's Progressive
Policy Institute headquarters.
"The message does not seem to have prevailed with the group it was
supposed to be aimed
at."
The DLC had been a key Gore backer this year, and the loss of the
group's support could
damage his prospects to run again in four years.
Major proponents of the populist message, including Gore's
pollster Stanley Greenberg,
counterattacked. This left-progressive wing, which is likely to
back House Minority Leader
Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) in 2004, argued that the populist
message worked fine but that
Gore was undone by the conservative moral and cultural attacks on
the Clinton
administration that began in 1992 and continue to the present.
The Democratic fault lines that reemerged yesterday are an
extension of an internal battle
that began in the elections of 1968 and 1972, continued unabated
with the unsuccessful
candidacies of Walter F. Mondale and Michael S. Dukakis in 1984
and 1988, but were
successfully muted by Bill Clinton through the 1990s.
The battles have been fought over racial issues, especially busing
and affirmative action;
over crime and welfare; and most recently over the identification
of the key constituencies to
win elections. The populist wing argues that white voters without
college degrees hold the
balance of power while the centrist wing contends that "wired
workers" who use the Internet,
and in many cases own stock, are the key voting bloc.
"It's no secret that I think the populism approach hurt us with
critical swing voters,
particularly wired voters and men in the new economy. We were hurt
because we were
viewed in this election as being too liberal and too much in favor
of big government," said
DLC head Al From.
Greenberg sharply disputed the DLC claims. "Gore's attacks on Bush
and the thematic and
issue contrasts successfully defined Bush as a candidate of the
wealthy and most
privileged, who would potentially endanger Social Security, oppose
a woman's right to
choose and whose Texas record left him with uncertain experience
for the job."
While Greenberg acknowledged that this year "Democrats lost ground
with noncollege white
voters, particularly with noncollege white women," he argued, "the
populist theme was very
attractive to the white, noncollege electorate. But populism is
not just a material concept, it
has a strong values component."
The Gore populism theme of the "people" against "the powerful"
worked effectively during
the convention, winning the support of down-scale whites, but,
Greenberg said, these gains
were quickly eroded as Republicans focused on issues of trust and
honesty, and Gore
faced intense criticism for a series of misstatements and
exaggerations.
"Gore began to lose that margin when trust and values issues were
raised at end of
September," Greenberg said. Noncollege educated whites began to
"hold back because of
the culture war to bring down Clinton that has been waged since
1992."
Ruy Teixeira, a leading advocate of the importance of appealing to
white, working-class
voters to build a Democratic majority, contended the problem was
not that Gore used a
populist message, but that he failed to fill it out beyond
promising to protect such existing
social insurance programs as Social Security and Medicare.
Teixeira said that because
Bush was able to stake out positions that quieted fears of GOP
assaults on these
programs, Gore needed to present programs, especially in
education, showing how he
would help working-class voters and their children in ways the GOP
would not.
From contended that Gore's populism was the equivalent of a retail
store's "loss leader," a
way of building up temporary support among Democratic base voters
that carried the high
cost of alienating moderates who dislike polarizing messages based
on class divisions.
Mark Penn, who polled for the DLC, said: "The populist message is
by itself a limiting
message. . . . It had a lot of negative resonance with precisely
the voters Gore had to win to
get above 50 percent on Election Day."
From and Marshall argued that the nation's rising affluence and
the declining share of the
work force employed in traditional manufacturing jobs makes
populism increasingly
irrelevant. Almost none of the 22 million new jobs created over
the past eight years are in
manufacturing, they said, and the ratio of low-income voters
(below $30,000) to
upper-income voters (over $75,000) has changed from 3 to 1 over
these eight years to a
slight edge for upper-income jobs.
2000 The Washington Post Company
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