WASHINGTON – After toppling the long-dominant Republicans, the Democratic Party’s incoming congressional leaders have found themselves in another difficult struggle – with their own supporters.
Some of the very activists who helped restore the Democrats to a majority in the House and Senate last week are claiming credit for the victories and demanding their due: a set of ambitious – and politically provocative – actions on gun control, abortion, national security and other issues that party leaders fear could alienate moderate voters and leave Democrats vulnerable to GOP attacks as big spenders or soft on terrorism.
The conflict underscores the challenge facing presumed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, the next Senate majority leader, who have pledged in recent days to “govern from the center” following a campaign in which anger over the Iraq war and GOP scandals helped Democrats attract some unusually conservative candidates and a large share of independent voters.
To the leaders of interest groups who are core supporters of the Democratic Party, and who have been barred under Republican rule from the inner sanctums of power, the new Congress means a time for action, not compromise.
Lobbyists for the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, are all but counting on Democrats to repeal the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, the anti-terrorist law that critics charge is unconstitutional. They also want to end President Bush’s domestic wiretapping program.
“We are not going to let them off the hook,” said Caroline Fredrickson, the ACLU’s legislative director, of the newly empowered Democratic leaders in Congress. “We will hold their feet to the fire and use all the tools we can to mobilize our members.”
Similar vows are coming from lobbyists for abortion rights, who want to expand family-planning options for poor women and scale back Bush’s focus on abstinence education, and from gun-control advocates, who hope to revive a lapsed ban on assault weapons. Labor unions, a core Democratic constituency, are demanding universal health care and laws discouraging corporations from seeking cheap labor overseas.
“It’s been kind of a drought for 12 years, and there is some pent-up energy,” said Bill Samuel, legislative director for the AFL-CIO, the labor federation that has long been a Democratic Party stalwart and spent millions of dollars on get-out-the-vote activities.
Several of the labor movement’s goals, such as raising the minimum wage and allowing Medicare to seek discounts on drug prices, are found in the AFL-CIO’s brochures and on a Democratic leadership wish list designed to appeal across ideological lines.
Eli Pariser, executive director of the liberal activist group Moveon.org, warned that Democratic leaders would be ill-advised to ignore the party’s base.
“A huge number of people were involved in putting them over the top,” he said. “There’s a huge group of people engaged and energized and ready to support Pelosi and company when they boldly lead – and to hold them to account if they stray.”
Democrats face especially acute pressure to redirect U.S. policy in Iraq, which many Democrats say was the most important issue driving the party’s victory.
Democratic lawmakers have not unified behind an Iraq policy. If they found common ground with Bush on a continued troop presence, they might fend off future GOP efforts to label them as weak on national security. But they also likely would infuriate a growing anti-war movement that helped propel the party back into power.
“American voters have done their job, now it’s time for Congress to do theirs,” said Tom Andrews, a former House member who is head of the anti-war group Win Without War. “The message couldn’t be clearer. It’s time to start the orderly withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Our eyes are on the new Congress.”
Planned Parenthood, which advocates abortion rights, pointed to victories by like-minded candidates in conservative states and a rejection by South Dakota voters of a sweeping abortion ban. The result, the group says, should be that Democrats view their causes as mainstream, rather than part of a liberal agenda, and should devote greater funding to contraception and other family-planning services that have been opposed by religious conservatives and scaled back by the Bush administration.
“I honestly believe there was no bigger winner in this election than Planned Parenthood Action Fund and women’s health,” said Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, referring to efforts by the group’s political arm.
At the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the leading gun-control advocacy group, Paul Helmke has high hopes for the assault-weapons ban – and he, too, can list races where candidates backed by his organization defeated those supported by the National Rifle Association.
But Helmke, the Brady Campaign’s president and a former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., acknowledged that his challenge is to persuade potentially squeamish Democrats that his cause is not “radioactive.”
Many Democratic strategists have come to believe that supporting gun-control laws alienates rural voters and many independents. “Guns are a tricky issue,” Helmke said. “But the elections show there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
A preview of the tussle that awaits Reid and Pelosi has been playing out on the Internet since Election Day, with liberal bloggers decrying party centrists as out of touch with the Democratic majority. The complaints were serious enough to prompt Reid to host a conference call in the wake of the election with more than a dozen of the country’s most prominent liberal bloggers.
In the Senate, matters are further complicated by at least five Democrats – nearly 10 percent of the caucus- considering presidential bids in which they may need to win the liberal base to gain the nomination but then campaign to the center in a general election.
Some pragmatists in the party are preparing to press for greater independence.
Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, chairman of the committee that designed the party’s Senate campaign strategy, is publishing a book in January expected to lay out a plan for long-term Democratic dominance. He is expected to embrace a philosophy somewhere between the Democrats’ old New Deal reliance on government and conservatives’ outright disdain for government.
Schumer signaled as much after the election when he called on the party to “push aside the special interests and always keep our eye on the average American family.”
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