A lot of Democratic time and energy is being poured into the discussion about who should succeed Terry McAuliffe as chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and what that person should represent. Some are hoping to present the right face, strike the right tone, send the right message.
Joe Lieberman wants a bridge-builder who can bring the party together. Über Democrat Arianna Huffington says, “Anyone raising the idea that the party needs to ‘move to the middle' should immediately be escorted out of the building. Better yet, a trap door should open beneath them, sending them plummeting down an endless chute into electoral purgatory -- which is exactly where the party will be permanently headquartered if it continues to adopt such a strategy.”
No moving to the middle, in case you were wondering what she thinks.
Some just want to see a lot more kick in the donkey. "We can't be the pussycat opposition," says former Michigan Governor Jim Blanchard.
There are those who want the DNC chair to serve as a TV evangelist for the party, and those who would like to see the job turn into one held by an efficient CEO type -- someone who is “operational,” in the words of Nancy Pelosi -- who leaves the proselytizing to others. The real dreamers in the party want the emphatically uninterested John Edwards, while others want anybody but the once-again surging Howard Dean.
And so the list of possible candidates that began with Dean and former Clinton Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes keeps getting longer. It includes Blanchard, New Democrat guru Simon Rosenberg, and two black former big-city mayors, Ron Kirk of Dallas and Wellington Webb of Denver.
“We've got everybody from D.C. technicians to former presidential candidates,” says a DNC member who prefers not to be identified. He adds that the field has to get smaller before the real choices are clear. “There has to be a winnowing process,” he says. “Blanchard has to get out, he's not real. Donnie Fowler has to get out, he's too young. Kirk and Webb have to work that out because it's not helpful to have two black candidates in the race.”
In recent days, former Congressman Tim Roemer, with his freshly polished September 11 commission credentials, announced that he was thinking about making a run for the chairmanship. The Roemer development is interesting, not only because it seemed to come completely out of the blue (or out of the red, actually) but because it seems to represents an effort by Capitol Hill leaders (Pelosi, Harry Reid, and John Kerry) to assert themselves and, at the same time, to remake the face of the party. Roemer, an Indiana Democrat who served in the House for 10 years, is said to be their candidate. In addition to being a savvy television personality from a red state, Roemer is decidedly anti-abortion; his election would alter the Democratic debate on choice and abortion, issues that continue to bedevil the party nationally. “He's the flavor of the morning,” says one state chair, “but he's not going to fly. He's way too pro-life to be head of this party.”
Whatever the outcome of the possible Roemer candidacy, it presages a debate within the party about who and what is helping and hurting the coalition, and, more specifically, about the future of abortion-rights activism within the party. Reid, the new Senate minority leader, is pro-life. And Kerry, who had one of his worst moments of the campaign during the second debate in St. Louis when Sarah Degenhart asked him to defend spending federal tax dollars on abortion, even though some people thinks it's murder, is said to be advocating the election of more anti-abortion Democrats.
At a post-election meeting of party activists, Kerry, in response to a question from Ellen Malcolm, president of the pro-choice Emily's List, said that Democrats need to elect more anti-abortion candidates, and that they should find ways of letting voters know that they do not actually like abortion. "There was a gasp in the room," Nancy Keenan, the new president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, told Newsweek's Debra Rosenberg.
So whatever duties are foisted on the new party chair, he or she will have to moderate a debate between some of the party's most loyal constituents and some of its most dedicated loyalist and those who find their cause, choice, an obstacle to victory. The 447 members or the DNC will decide the new chair when they vote on February 12 in Washington, but the work of the party chair will, by necessity, be an outside the Beltway exercise. Nearly all the candidates in the race are talking about rebuilding the state parties and developing a “50-state strategy.”
Says one DNC member, “Frankly, there are 30 pissed-off states out there, because there is a sense that the Kerry campaign targeted too much, and one of the first things the new chair will have to do is reach out to all the pissed-off people.”
He added: “It used to be that when you're targeted you got a lot, and if you were not you got a little. This time if you were targeted you got everything you needed, and if you weren't, you got nothing.” That strategy, many activists believe, cost them not only the election but House and Senate seats, along with state legislative, county commission, and city council seats. If it continues, they say, it'll cost the party its future.
“We need to turn to the mayors and the governors and the county commissioners,” says former DNC Vice Chairwoman Lynn Cutler. “People who know how to win elections.”
Your move, Mr., or Madame, Chairman! Be careful of the trapdoor.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.