At End of the Campaign Trail, Democrats Scout Road Ahead

WASHINGTON —  For the nation’s oldest political party, it has been a time of jubilation. But as the hoopla surrounding President Clinton’s second inauguration fades and the Democratic Party eyes the next century, it is also a time for sobering reassessment.

“The 1996 election was just a stopping point, it was not a finish line,” outgoing party Chairman Don Fowler told Democratic National Committee members who assembled here this week to gird for the next lap in the Clinton administration. “This party is at a crossroads.”

The president himself underlined his party’s quandary when he declared in his inaugural address that government was neither the solution nor the problem, and then added, “We, the American people, are the solution.”

It was a quintessentially Clintonian effort to split the difference with Republicans over the role of government. But it is unlikely to resolve his party’s dilemma.

For Democrats, one fork in the road ahead extends the centrist course Clinton followed in winning reelection and concentrates on battling for the same electorate that has decided recent elections--and which amounts to only about half the voting-age population.

The second path leads toward America’s other half, the nonvoters, by stressing issues that would appeal to the low-income citizens among them.

The choice is crucial because electorates define political parties. The second option of seeking to expand the electorate involves the most obvious risks for Democrats, given that it could jeopardize support from moderates that Clinton has won.

But party liberals and their allies claim that sticking to Clinton’s current course is just as much, if not more of, a gamble. This New Democrat direction, they claim, leaves the party hostage to forces it cannot control--the vicissitudes of the economy and the strategy of a GOP opposition that shows signs of learning from its political mistakes of 1995.

Predictably, members of the Democratic hierarchy who gathered for the national committee meeting favored the status quo.

The president “has set a tone of keeping the country together and giving everybody an opportunity to improve their lives,” said Michael King, chairman of the state party in New Hampshire, where Democrats elected their first governor in 16 years. “I think the Democratic Party is doing fine.”

And Gary LaPaille, Illinois party chairman, views low voter turnout not as cause for alarm but as a reassuring signal. “The vast majority of people like to come out and vote against something or someone,” he said. “If you can please them with what you are doing in your administration--be you a state representative or a president--then for the most part those people won’t come out, but your supporters will.”

Liberals, however, claim low turnout rates are evidence of defects in the messages of both parties. And they believe that by broadening the Democratic message to stress such ideas as curbing corporate welfare and toughening U.S. trade policy, the party can shift the political balance of power in its favor.

Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders, a nominal Socialist who sides with liberal Democrats in Congress, contends that if turnout were to rise from 50% to 75% of the voting-age population during the next 10 years, “the composition of Congress and the person who sits in the White House will be fundamentally different from what it is now.”

Sanders earlier this month presided over a grass-roots forum sponsored by the Progressive Caucus, a group of 52 House members committed to mobilizing “tens of millions of disillusioned Americans.”

But University of Texas political scientist Walter Dean Burnham contends that a change in Democratic direction from the path Clinton has charted will first require the election of a Republican president in the year 2000 to go with a GOP Congress.

“Then, if something goes wrong with the economy in a great big way,” he predicted, the Republicans would bear the blame and the Democratic tradition of activist government would come back into fashion.