Hearts & minds: the fight for the Democratic Party.

• Author: Toner, Robin
• Position: National - 2004 presidential candidates

NEWS ANALYSIS: Democrats are torn between sticking with the party's traditional liberal positions, and moving to the center for the battle against President Bush next November.

The nine Democrats running for President in 2004 could be forgiven for wondering if anybody is listening. Despite having crisscrossed the country giving speeches, participating in debates, and even knocking on the doors of voters in key states, no one has pulled away from the pack. Only two months before the caucuses and primaries begin, the party seems divided on major issues ranging from Iraq to the economy to global trade.

But of possibly greater significance than differences over particular issues is the party's continuing struggle to define itself. The party seems to be torn between its heart and its head: On the one hand Democrats want to speak, clearly and without apology, about their beliefs. On the other hand, in a nation evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, Democrats want to put together an electoral majority that can defeat President Bush.

Such conflicts over the soul of a party are not unusual before elections, especially for the party out of power. But this is an old struggle in the Democratic Part> It has resurfaced with each new generation of activists and strategists since the New Deal coalition built by President Franklin D. Roosevelt came unstuck in the 1960s: Should the party move to the center, muting its liberal edge on cultural issues, economics and foreign policy in order to win? Should it promise to roll back just part of the tax cut, for example, and not the whole thing?

Or does that kind of thinking lead to a watery me-tooism, too careful, too calibrated, too uncertain of what it believes to rouse voters or to make a difference if its proponents actually win office? Let Democrats be Democrats, is the thrust of one argument. Speak to the great American middle, not to each other, is the counter. Hearts and heads at war.

Bill Carrick, a Democratic consultant now advising Representative Dick Gephardt, describes it as "the age-old question--some elections, Democrats in the primary cycle vote their passions; some elections, they vote their heads."

So far, the passions have been winning. The primary campaign has been largely framed by the powerful anger at the Democratic grass roots--over the 2000 election and a President elected without a majority of the popular vote; over three years of conservative policies; and concern over a sluggish economy and a war unpopular with Democratic voters from the start. For many of those voters, Democrats in Congress were too reluctant to challenge the Bush administration.

It took the off-beat campaign of former Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, who got a lot of attention for saying that he represented "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," to shake up the race early on. Dean's speeches were bracing affirmations of old-time Democratic values and beliefs; his audiences were moved. He soon led the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, two of the states whose votes in January could be decisive in determining who the...