DEMOCRATS Dean puts truce in peril

Former President Clinton had brought competing party factions together.
NEWSDAY
WASHINGTON -- The decade-long internal truce former President Clinton imposed on his fractious party is rapidly eroding as the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination approaches a decisive phase.
If there was any doubt of that, it ended Thursday when front-runner Howard Dean delivered a wide-ranging attack on the party's moderate wing -- and seemed to link Clinton to the minimalist philosophy he was rejecting.
"While Bill Clinton said that the era of big government is over, I believe we must enter a new era for the Democratic Party, not one where we join Republicans and aim simply to limit the damage they inflict on working families," Dean said. "I reject the notion that damage control must be our credo."
Dean went on to outline an agenda of greater governmental activism that includes new spending on health insurance, child care, college financing and retirement savings, along with stricter regulation of and higher taxes on corporations.
Facing criticism
Dean's rivals, as well as former Clinton aides working for those rivals, pounced on the Vermont governor's reference to Clinton as emblematic of his rejection of policies that had produced economic prosperity for the nation -- and political prosperity for their party in the form of its first two-term president since Franklin Roosevelt. "Did Howard Dean live through the same eight years as the rest of us?" said retired Gen. Wesley Clark.
Dean spent much of Friday doing some damage control of his own. He telephoned the former president to assure him that his comments hadn't been directed at him, and later went out of his way in a speech in Iowa to include Clinton in a pantheon of Democratic heroes that included Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
Clinton's office maintained a stony silence about the affair. But former aides weren't accepting Dean's olive branch.
"The references can't be misinterpreted," said Mickey Kantor, Clinton's secretary of commerce, who is now an adviser to Clark. "If he's not trying to alter in a significant way the Clinton approach to the economy which was so successful, why would he reference the Clinton era vs. a new era? ... I am really having trouble understanding why he would make the reference and pick the fight."
Conflicting interests
One New York Democratic activist answered Kantor's question by pointing to the conflicting political interests of the two figures. Dean, as the potential nominee, needs to make himself the focal point of the party if he is to run a competitive race against President Bush. But Clinton is reluctant to yield his central role and, while neutral in public, has privately signaled his unease about Dean's candidacy, the activist said.
"There's no question in my mind that Dean reflects a threat to Bill Clinton's and Hillary Clinton's plans for the future," said the activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "That's the bottom line here. It's not about policy. The Bill Clinton team wants to freeze the party where it was during his presidency."
Beyond the egos and interests of the central players lies an ideological fault line that once bitterly divided Democrats until Clinton managed to unite the party behind his brand of "New Democrat" centrism in 1992. He argued that no Democrat could win the White House without persuading voters that they were not the weak-kneed, dovish, tax-happy spendthrifts of countless Republican caricatures.
Centrist strategy
"The Clinton approach was at least stylistically to move to the center and go after swing voters," political analyst Stuart Rothenberg said. "It worked because the liberals thought that in his gut he was with us and the moderates said that intellectually he's with us."
But even as Clark, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., and other rivals attack Dean for veering to the left, others note that the actual policy differences among the Democratic candidates are not that great. "We're not to the point where we were with McGovern or Goldwater, where we saw major defections among officeholders," said Rothenberg, referring to two notoriously unsuccessful presidential nominees who caused major splits in their parties. "Nobody thinks the gulf is that deep."
The New York party activist agreed, and added that the differences could disappear quickly if there were a real prospect of victory over an incumbent most Democrats truly despise. "Any nominee will be able to unify the party because of the singular focus on George Bush," the activist said. "But Dean has got to show electability to unify the party, too. If Dean shows that he can win, they'll be falling all over themselves."