ormer President Bill Clinton said yesterday that the Democratic Party had lost the midterm elections because its candidates had failed to offer a convincing case that the party could manage national security during dangerous times.
In his most public and extensive analysis of the state of the Democratic Party since it lost control of the Senate last month, Mr. Clinton told Democrats in New York City that they could break through to the American public only if they directly confronted the issue of national security. He said the party should challenge Republicans on what he suggested was the administration's failure to spot signs of an impending attack before Sept. 11, and what he called a muddled response to the terrorism threat over the last year.
Mr. Clinton said his party's candidates were too often perceived as weak in the face of the continuing threat from abroad.
The former president, in a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, the organization of moderate Democrats that helped send him to the White House in 1992, brushed aside the argument by some Democrats that the party needed to return to its liberal roots to regain power. Several of Mr. Clinton's ideological allies have argued in recent days that such an approach was a recipe for electoral disaster in 2004.
Sounding a bit like a cheerleader stepping out of retirement, Mr. Clinton cautioned Democrats about being too discouraged over the setback in November as he offered suggestions on how to proceed.
"We don't have to be more liberal," he said. "But we do have to be more relevant in a progressive way. We have to have a clear and strong national security stand."
Mr. Clinton, second-guessing the strategy employed by Congressional leaders, said that to many Democrats and independent voters, "we were missing in action on national security and we had no positive plan for America's domestic future." He added: "When people are feeling insecure, they'd rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right."
Mr. Clinton's address came at a time when his party has been roiled by internal debate about what went wrong this year, and how it should proceed entering what appears to be a daunting race to unseat President Bush. It also came as many Democrats have been expressing concern that the party had no compelling leaders to put up against a Republican line-up that in January will include a president, a Senate majority leader and a House speaker.
Even though Mr. Clinton insisted yesterday that there were many Democratic leaders of stature coming up through the ranks, he named none. The attention paid by many Democrats to a president in retirement underscored the difficulties the party has had in finding a new generation of leaders to carry its banner.
Mr. Clinton took care in his speech to avoid directly attacking the man who succeeded him as president, and he did not mention Mr. Bush by name. Nonetheless, the remarks seemed designed to offer Democrats a road they could follow to unseat the Republicans in 2004, while at least suggesting a contrast between the records of these two presidents.
The address, which lasted 54 minutes and which Mr. Clinton said he scribbled out on a trip back from Europe yesterday morning, was one of the most explicitly political he has given since leaving office. And it sounded very much like his case for the success of his presidency.
As his audience sat quietly throughout the address at New York University, he offered statistic after statistic intended to show the successes of his administration on everything from balancing the budget to improving health care for children, saying at one point that many of those accomplishments had gone unreported. His attacks on Mr. Bush's terrorism policy came after a year in which Republicans accused Mr. Clinton of failing to hunt down Osama bin Laden or dismantle Al Qaeda when he was in office.
At the same time, Mr. Clinton scolded fellow Democrats for failing to rally around their leaders when they came under attack by the right — mentioning in particular the attacks on the patriotism of Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic majority leader, after Mr. Daschle raised questions about Mr. Bush's Iraq policy.
Mr. Clinton said the Republicans were benefiting from the support of an "increasingly right-wing and bellicose conservative press," which he contrasted with "an increasingly docile establishment press."
"What was done to Tom Daschle was unconscionable, but our refusal to stand up and defend him in a disciplined way was worse," he said.
"We cannot wilt in the face of higher negative ratings for our leaders," he said. "They have a destruction machine. We don't have a destruction machine. Somebody has got to lead the Democrats, in the House and the Senate, and running for president. And the rest of us have got to stand up for them and stand with them when they are subject to these attacks."
In questioning Mr. Bush's record on terrorism, Mr. Clinton took note of a number of indications investigators said they had before Sept. 11 that something might be afoot. For example, he said two F.B.I. agents had discovered that Middle Eastern men were involved in flight-training schools and had shown no interest in landing or taking off — only in flying.
"There are a couple of thousand flight schools in America," Mr. Clinton said. "It wouldn't have been that hard to check them all."
In fact, just what the hijackers wanted to learn in flight school has been a subject of debate.
Mr. Clinton expressed only the mildest approval for what has been one of the major governmental initiatives signed by Mr. Bush in the wake of the attack, the creation of the Homeland Security Department. He said that the administration should instead be spending money and attention on protecting the security of public places — and that the Democrats had failed to make an issue of that in the campaign.
"You can reorganize all you want, but what are you doing to protect the tunnels, the bridges, the water systems, the utility systems?" he said.
"That's a national security issue. It's a homeland security issue. And it matters a lot more about what our bureaucratic policies are. We didn't say it in the last election and if we had, it would have made a difference in some of these races."
Last night, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, rejected as baseless Mr. Clinton's charges about Mr. Bush's terrorism policies.
"There is a longstanding tradition of presidents, after they leave office, honoring the dignity of the office by not attacking their successors in this manner," Mr. Fleischer said.
Notwithstanding Mr. Clinton's offer of advice and comfort to his party, his own name has come up more than once as party leaders seek to figure out precisely what went wrong on Nov. 5. For one thing, the party's losses took place under the watch of the man he put in as the party chairman, his friend Terry McAuliffe. For another, Mr. Clinton did campaign on behalf of a number of Democratic candidates who lost, and some Democrats have suggested that Mr. Clinton's high profile might have unwittingly hurt by leading to a higher turnout among Republicans.
Still, Mr. Clinton seemed more than happy to be back on stage and talking about politics.
At one point, he noted that Republicans "turned on a dime" in moving to support the domestic security bill once it became clear it enjoyed substantial public support. Mr. Clinton chastised Democrats for letting Republicans get away with that, but he could not suppress a grin at what their adversaries had accomplished. "I admire that, really," he said. "They had a lot of political discipline to pull themselves out of that hole."
His speech to the Democratic Leadership Council was a reminder that the party has come full circle over the last 10 years. Mr. Clinton was elected in 1992 after he and the council argued that the party had lost three straight presidential contests because it had moved too far to the left to accommodate some of the party's traditional constituencies. After this last election, many Democrats argued that the party lost because it had moved too far to the center.
