These days, Democrats act as if they're so far gone they've forgotten where they're from.
Every weekend, yet another special-interest group hosts a candidate forum to pressure the presidential candidates into praising its agenda. Some of the candidates seem intent on running applause-meter campaigns, measuring success by how many times they tell the party faithful what they want to hear.
There's one big problem with this strategy: Most of those party activists the candidates are trying so hard to please are wildly out of touch not only with middle America but with the Democratic rank and file. The great myth of the campaign is the misguided notion that the hopes and dreams of party activists and single-issue groups represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. They don't.
The fact is, "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean likes to call it, is an aberration, a modern-day version of the old McGovern wing of the party, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist interest-group liberalism at home. That wing lost the party 49 states in two elections and turned a powerful national organization into a much weaker, regional one.
The great Democratic tradition is not one of ambivalence and disengagement abroad and reflexive outrage at home. The tradition of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Clinton is built on hope, not fear. Those presidents defined the Democratic Party's mission not simply by what we're against but by what we're for.
Ironically, party activists are out of line not only with their party's historic tradition but with their fellow Democrats. In 1996, a survey by the Washington Post compared the views of delegates to the Democratic convention with those of ordinary registered Democratic voters. They might as well have come from different parties. On every single social and economic issue, the views of the registered Democrats were closer to those of all registered voters than to those of Democratic delegates.
Almost two-thirds of Democratic delegates wanted to cut defense spending; most registered Democrats did not. A majority of Democratic delegates opposed a five-year time limit for welfare benefits; two-thirds of registered Democrats supported it. Democratic delegates were split on the death penalty; registered Democrats favored it by a margin of more than 2 to 1. These weren't delegates to the Green Party convention; they were delegates committed to reelecting Bill Clinton, who had sided with rank-and-file Democrats on each of those issues.
