Searching for the Democratic Moses Why the race for Democratic National Committee chair matters BY ADAM REILLY

THE DEMOCRATIC Party is in crisis. Frozen out of the White House and hemorrhaging seats in both chambers of Congress, ambivalent about its core principles and edging toward permanent irrelevance, the party of Clinton, Kennedy, and FDR is at its lowest point in decades.

Just less than a month from now, the 447 members of the Democratic National Committee — once and future elected officials, deep-pocketed fundraisers, stalwart local activists — will gather at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC, to try to fix its troubles. Their primary task: picking a new Democratic National Committee chair. Ordinarily, this would be consummate inside-baseball stuff; while well-informed voters might know that Terry McAuliffe is the current DNC head, his predecessors generally have been relegated to the ash heap of history. (Anyone remember Augustus Schell? Thomas Taggart? Jean Westwood?) But this year is different. Forget the esoteric drama: the non-candidacies of Clinton favorite Harold Ickes and Kerry favorites Tom Vilsack and Jeanne Shaheen; the backroom maneuvering by Tim Roemer and Howard Dean; the late speculation that Terry McAuliffe, who’s led the DNC since 2001, would change his mind and keep his job. When party insiders pick their new leader on February 12, they’ll be telling the rest of us what they think is wrong with the Democratic Party and how they plan to fix it. And that’s something worth watching.

SKEPTICS CONTEND that the DNC chair’s job really doesn’t matter much. In a December article in Slate, Chris Suellentrop, the magazine’s deputy Washington-bureau chief, argued that presidential candidates — not DNC chairs — are the ones who determine the Democratic Party’s identity and direction. He bolstered his case with damning quotes from some ex-chairmen, including a bit of enraged impotence from Ed Rendell, the party’s titular head during Al Gore’s 2000 presidential run. ("I basically take orders from 27-year-old guys in Nashville who have virtually no real-life experience," Rendell kvetched to the New Republic.) The DNC chair, Suellentrop concluded, is "Washington’s political eunuch."

Even some DNC members downplay the significance of their organization’s top job. Debra Kozikowski, a Chicopee resident who’s one of 10 DNC members from Massachusetts, claims the biggest item on the DNC’s February agenda is a series of rules amendments proposed by former chairman Don Fowler. (One would create an oversight committee to monitor the new chair’s guidance of the party; another would democratize the selection of the DNC’s 100 at-large members, most of whom are now picked by whomever happens to be chair.) "Not that the new chair is not important, but I think those rule changes are more emblematic of future change," Kozikowski says. David O’Brien, a DNC member from Concord, is similarly skeptical. "I think some candidates are going to make the argument that we’re battling for the heart and soul of what it means to be a Democrat, and I think that may be slightly overstated," he says. "The idea that two and a half or three years from now, we’re going to have a nominee who’s been impacted by who the national-party chairman is, I think, a bit of a stretch."

It’s true — and worth remembering — that the next DNC chair won’t have untrammeled freedom to remake the party. There are just too many alternate bases of power — Kerry, the Clintons, the Senate and House minority leaders, and the Democratic Governors’ Association, to name just a few. On the other hand, given general Democratic desperation and the absence of one clear standard-bearer, the new chair may well be vested with more authority than his or her predecessors were. Even more important, the election itself will signal whether the most powerful Democrats are content to fine-tune existing ideas and structures, or want instead to go for a more extreme makeover.

Exhibit A: the candidacy of Tim Roemer, who represented Indiana in the US House from 1991 to 2002 and who recently served on the 9/11 Commission. Roemer has some obvious enticements. He’s a Midwesterner running at a time when the Democratic Party is desperate to shore up support between the coasts. He also has solid national-security credentials. Yet there’s also the touchy matter of Roemer’s opposition to abortion. The current Democratic platform urges that abortion be used rarely, but also insists that the right to have one remain legal: "[W]e stand proudly for a woman’s right to choose.... [W]e stand firmly against Republican efforts to undermine that right." Roemer, who is Catholic, opposes legalized abortion, though he says he respects the position of pro-choice Democrats.

Some DNC members think this should doom Roemer’s candidacy from the outset. "The Bush administration is going to try to put right-wing, anti-choice people on the Supreme Court over the next few years, and their number-one domestic agenda is repealing Roe v. Wade," says Massachusetts Democratic Party head Phil Johnston, who also leads the state’s DNC delegation. "It makes no sense to have a party chair who agrees with Bush. It’s a question of values and principles, and I don’t think you sacrifice those just because you lost an election." Yet given the widespread belief that Democrats are suffering from some sort of values gap — that George Bush was re-elected because most Americans believe the Republican Party is more morally in tune with the country as a whole — other Democrats find the idea of forging connections with more-conservative voters highly appealing. In light of Republican inroads among Catholics and Latinos, they say, where better to start than on the hot-button issue of abortion? Not surprisingly, pro-life Democrats are delighted by Roemer’s candidacy, which they think portends a larger shift. "We just think it’s very encouraging," says Kristen Day of Democrats for Life. "In the presidential race, all the candidates seemed to be trying to see who could be the most pro-abortion, but now it seems most of the candidates for DNC chair are talking about inclusion. It just shows a big change in the party." Roemer may not have Johnston’s imprimatur, but he does have the backing of some powerful patrons: Harry Reid, the new Senate minority leader from Nevada, is supporting his candidacy, as is House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.