Among Democrats, The Energy Seems To Be on the Left

Washington Post interesting but slanted article that really reflects rebuilding the Democratic Party and taking it away from the wimps who lost the presidential election and have been licking neo-con boots ever since.

"What the Democratic Party stands for hasn't really been looked at for a while. The issues that people care about seem pretty clearly to be solid progressive issues."

"We are the base," said veteran organizer Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future.

"We can't just talk to the true believers; we can't just stoke their anger at George Bush," said Will Marshall, director of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate think tank. "We have to persuade swing voters who right now may not be planning to vote for a Democrat."

Whether the invigorated left is a good or bad thing depends, for many Democratic leaders, on how recent history is interpreted.

Much of the credit for the left's revival goes to President Bush, whose policies and personality seem to touch the nerves of hard-core Democrats like a dental drill. The war in Iraq was a catalytic event, drawing hundreds of thousands of readers to anti-Bush Web sites and filling the sails of the Dean campaign. But this is not just about the war.

Senate Democrats, led by Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), have rallied behind an unprecedented filibuster of Bush judicial nominees. Civil liberties groups are up in arms about the Bush administration's domestic war on terrorism. Environmentalists are rallying against Bush policies on logging in national forests.

The result: Activists who are normally prone to infighting -- "the Democratic Party is Yugoslavia," in the words of one party veteran, recalling years of internecine squabbles -- are instead trying to pool their energy to present a clear alternative to the man they despise.

On leftward Web sites, and in the most liberal campaigns, the DLC has become Democratic enemy number two, trailing only Bush. "The DLC strategy of waffling GOP-lite centrism has been a near total failure for the Democratic Party," said Jeff Cohen, a longtime media critic and spokesman for Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio).

Dean's record as governor is hard to categorize: liberal on such issues as gay civil unions, conservative on guns and fiscal matters. But the juice in his campaign -- the reason he has thousands of volunteers nationwide gathering for monthly "meetups" and millions of dollars in small contributions pouring in to his Web site -- is that he has aggressively criticized Bush and heaped scorn on Democrats who have gone along with Bush's war plans and tax cuts.

Borrowing from the left's most recent fallen hero, the late senator Paul D. Wellstone (D-Minn.), Dean said he speaks for "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" -- in other words, not the "New Democrats." Writing on Buzzflash.com, a Web site for the Democratic left, Stuart Finkel of Austin said Dean's supporters "have been energized by the willingness of Howard Dean to do what the DLC and the Democratic leaders in Washington have been so unwilling to do: match George W. Bush word for word, and call every lie he tells a lie."

Another BuzzFlash mention, pretty soon it will be as well known as the Drudge Report.

"The Democratic Party is perceived as having lost its moorings, as being disconnected from the big values and the big vision of where to take this country and hasn't been projecting that. It turns out there is a large number of people around the country who are looking for ways to participate in the rebuilding of progressive politics."