Divided Democrats: The Post-Clinton Party

The American Enterprise ^ | March 2001

[Valin]

On Sunday May 4, 2003, the nine Democratic candidates for President sat down in South Carolina for their second primary debate.
In the end, no clear frontrunner emerged. The party’s future course remains murky.
In the March 2001 issue of The American Enterprise, Jerry Brown, Nat Hentoff, Chris Matthews, Dick Morris, and others discussed the long-term effects of the 2000 election,
the parties’ strengths and weaknesses, and what Al Sharpton needs to do to be a viable candidate:

Whither the Democratic Party? Have eight years of Clintonism and prosperity made it the party of Middle America? Or, in the wake of the Gore defeat, is it a mere agglomeration of interest groups rolling down the path blazed by Walter Mondale?
Can the party win back the White House if it continues to excommunicate gun owners and those opposed to abortion? (Arguably, Al Gore lost the 2000 election not in Florida but in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas, where his association with the Million Moms and other gun control advocates cost him heavily among rural male voters.)

To assess the state of the Democratic Party after Clinton and Gore, TAE interviewed several of the most provocative and perceptive critics of the Democratic Party—most of them Democrats themselves.
TAE’s John Meroney, Bill Kauffman, and Evan Gahr spoke with Mike Barnicle, a columnist for the New York Daily News
Jerry Brown, the mayor of Oakland, former governor of California, and thrice a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination
Nat Hentoff, longtime civil libertarian and columnist for the Village Voice; a Democrat who voted for Ralph Nader
Ron Klink, a four-term congressman from western Pennsylvania who narrowly lost a 2000 Senate race to Republican Rick Santorum—in large part because the national Democratic Party was reluctant to support him as a pro-life, pro-gun Democrat
Ed Koch, the former Democratic mayor of New York City
Mark Lewis, the current mayor of El Cajon, California, who changed his party registration from Democrat to Republican in the wake of the Gore-Bush post-election battle
Brian Lundy, executive director of the Democratic National Committee in the mid-1980s who broke party ranks in 2000 and supported George W. Bush
Chris Matthews, a former aide to House Speaker Tip O’Neill and currently host of “Hardball” on MSNBC
Dick Morris, the former advisor and image-maker of President Clinton
Tim Penny, a former six-term Democratic congressman from Minnesota who is now a director of the Hubert Humphrey Institute Policy Forum
Harry Stein, author of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace)

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I hope NRA bashers will take note of the above narrative.