Redefining liberalism Progressive Democrats want to take back America. They'll have to take back their party first. BY RICHARD BYRNE

WASHINGTON, DC — The Omni Shoreham Hotel is tucked neatly into one of the leafier parts of the nation’s capital, right on the border of Rock Creek Park near the Woodley Park Metro stop and the National Zoo. After a wet spring, it’s brimming with lush verdancy. The shaded green setting was a fitting locale, perhaps, for the three-day "Take Back America" conference, put together by Campaign for America’s Future — a Washington, DC–based progressive organization and think tank committed to forging a progressive political agenda.

More than a thousand activists attended the three-day confab, where they soaked up hours of virulent attacks on the Bush agenda and sized up all but two of the nine announced Democratic presidential candidates. In 2000, sufficient numbers of these activists and their kind were so turned off by the muddy centrism of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman that they stayed home or pulled the lever for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.

America has had a good look at what such antagonism helped to build — a right-wing governing class in Washington, DC, led by President George W. Bush. The bashing administered to the Bush White House over the conference’s three days was mind-numbing. The event’s panels (which included offerings like "Shrubbed: The Radical Project of George W. Bush" and "Reversing the Right’s Hold on Media") were so crammed with long-winded speakers that the microphones scattered throughout the audience grew cobwebs. There was little give-and-take between the bullying pulpiteers and their audience.

Indeed, the conference all too often preached to the converted, with the many sermons blurring into one hard-core mantra: "Rescind the massive Rove tax cuts/Oppose Ashcroft’s war on civil liberties/Fight the Cheney war on organized labor/Throw out the radical conservative DeLay minority that has seized power/Unite to build a movement/Expose Rumsfeld’s weapons of mass distraction in Iraq!"

These are all worthy progressive goals, of course. And every presidential candidate who showed up rang out at least one or two songs from the progressive hymnal. North Carolina senator John Edwards took on Attorney General John Ashcroft. Massachusetts senator John Kerry stood up for organized labor. In a videotaped appearance on Friday morning, Missouri representative Richard Gephardt called for a total recision of the tax-cut package.

Yet it was Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich who whipped up the crowd’s most fervent response. Introduced late Thursday afternoon as "one of the few vegans in Congress," Kucinich served up progressive red meat — anti-war, anti-NAFTA, and pro-single-payer health care — to repeated standing ovations. Even more than Friday’s speech by the Reverend Al Sharpton or the early-Thursday-morning speech by former Vermont governor Howard Dean, Kucinich’s remarks managed to press every progressive button he could find — including a few that had been gathering dust. He took the stage to John Lennon’s "Imagine" and noted that his first move as president would be to kill off NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. The Iraq war was "wrong" and "fraudulent," he declared. As for health insurance, "People are already paying for universal health care," Kucinich argued. "They’re just not getting it."

In some ways, Kucinich’s words marked the reawakening of a dinosaur. The trend in Democratic politics over the past two decades has been to sideline unvarnished liberalism and secure America’s elusive political center. To call the results of this experiment "mixed" would be charitable. The tactic didn’t work in 1988. It worked in 1992 only because a freewheeling Texas multimillionaire named Ross Perot siphoned lots of votes away from incumbent George H.W. Bush. In fact, only in 1996 did progressives hold their noses, swallow hard, and toe the centrist line to re-elect a Democratic incumbent. And 2000 and 2002? We know those stories all too well.

Thus, the "take back" theme that dominated the conference was directed as much at the centrist wing of the Democratic Party as it was to the GOP. The progressive message at the Omni Shoreham was pointed: we’re not shutting up this time. It was a war cry that grew sharper in light of the pre-emptive attacks already launched against progressives by centrists at the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) over the past few weeks.

WAR HAS BEEN waged within the Democratic Party since the 2002 presidential debacle, but it is taking on a new intensity as the 2004 campaign heats up. On May 15, the DLC’s chief executive officer, Al From, and its president, Bruce Reed, launched a stinging attack on progressives, titled "The Real Soul of the Democratic Party." The DLC took particular aim at presidential candidate Howard Dean — the centrist governor of Vermont who vaulted to prominence via his vocal opposition to the Iraq war. "What activists like Dean call the democratic wing of the Democratic party is an aberration: the McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home. That’s the wing that lost 49 states in two elections, and transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one."

The DLC’s interpretation of party history is fairly broad — and highly disputable, given the lack of Democratic success since the DLC’s agenda became the party’s dominant force. And the group’s thrust at Dean was targeted as much at his acerbic personality as at his record, a move that can only undermine its effort to rebuild party principles. In a May 19 response to Dean’s counterattack calling on supporters to "annoy the DLC," the group noted that "[i]f [Dean] were running for president the way he governed, we would be praising him now. But you don’t have to be a centrist to grow weary of a campaign so quick to attack others’ views and scream foul whenever others challenge its own."

Yet the DLC’s target is much larger than Dean. The group is also targeting Dean’s anti-war supporters (many of whom came to the "Take Back America" gathering). That much was made clear in a sneering broadside the DLC launched to coincide with the opening of last week’s "Take Back America" conference. A memo titled "Democrats Need To Talk," the DLC’s attack was a call for just the opposite. The message from the DLC to progressives was to let the Clintonesque center do the thinking and the talking — especially on national-security issues: "We cannot regain the White House if we raise new doubts in Americans’ minds about Democrats, or if we deepen, rather than rebut, the lingering doubt that Karl Rove and company exploited in the midterm elections: that too many Americans don’t much trust us to protect them against terrorists and other threats to our national security. We’re not convinced that your panel on ‘Next Stages for the Peace Movement’ will reassure the country on this count."

The DLC attack memo’s snide closing reference to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Newman’s organic cookies ("If you join us in the effort to make Democratic support broader and deeper, there will be more than enough of that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Newman’s organic cookies to go around"), which were served at one of the gathering’s evening discussions, signaled a pronounced distaste bordering on outright contempt.

The return fire was just as sharp in its invective and sneering in its tone. In an "op-ad" published in the New York Times on the same day, progressive Web site TomPaine.com dubbed the DLC "Middle of the Road Kill." The advertisement took issue with the DLC’s corporate funding and "poll tested principles," and then charged ahead:

George Bush is beatable. Liberals and progressives gathering this week in Washington for the "Take Back America" conference know that. The question is: Will the Democratic Party favor the DLC, which has plenty of money, but is otherwise bankrupt? Or will it adopt the vision, passion and values needed to get out the vote?

The good news for Democrats is that George Bush is indeed beatable. One of the highlights of the conference’s first day was noted Democracy Corps pollster Stan Greenberg’s report that the Bush administration’s policies are far to the right of American public opinion. On issues from the massive tax cut to energy policy and health care, Greenberg’s numbers had the public solidly in favor of Democratic positions. Bush’s own job approval — with the bumps of wartime support taken into account — is also within striking distance of a concerted challenge. In short, the numbers showed a potential bonanza for progressives. The sobering news, however, was that the DLC’s warnings about security matters are on target. Greenberg’s numbers found that Republicans still held commanding leads on issues of homeland defense and national security, as well as of moral values.

The open window to a strong challenge to Bush could easily be slammed shut by internecine Democratic sniping. What happens when the first dirty trick of the 2004 Democratic primary pops up? Will Democrats turn on each other and forget about Bush? If a progressive wins the nomination, will the DLC fall dutifully in line behind that candidate — or vice versa? The current divide appears doomed to exhaust the candidates, frustrate the losing side, and leave behind easy pickings for a popular incumbent. Progressives and centrists alike seem so focused on winning the battle between them that they’re in danger of losing the war with the GOP once again.