Democrats divided on issues of faith, family

INDIANAPOLIS -- At the Democratic Leadership Council's fifth national convention last week, the pro-business centrist group focused on how to bring socially conservative voters into the fold.\nWhile the 650 or so in attendance harped on the liberal wing of the party for alienating constituents, they had few kind words for those across the aisle. Many speakers -- including Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee -- delivered stem-winding speeches to the party faithful at the Westin Hotel in downtown Indianapolis June 16.\nMany Hoosier Democrats attended, including Bloomington Mayor John Fernandez and City Councilman Tim Meyer. Council officials asked attendees -- among them about 250 elected officials across the country -- to consider recent Democratic electoral successes in Indiana, which is a heavily conservative state.\nSen. Evan Bayh and Gov. Frank O'Bannon were held up as the future of the party -- fiscally conservative and generally moderate on social policy. Bayh and O'Bannon have repeatedly won statewide elections in a state that hasn't given its electoral college votes to a Democrat since 1964, when incumbent Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, who was widely considered an extremist. \nThe Democrats' loss of the White House last fall has caused many centrists to reassess where the party stands on social issues. Al From, the South Bend native who founded the leadership council in 1985, told reporters and anyone else who would listen that the party needs to reach out to gun owners and churchgoers.\nBut McAuliffe, an Irish-Catholic New York businessman who was elected chairman of the DNC this February, sees it in another light. He views former Vice President Al Gore's loss as a rallying cry for the true believers.\n"We had a megaphone in the Clinton-Gore administration," he said. "We don't have that anymore, and we need the practical political tools to run and win elections. We need to help candidates at all levels of government."\nMcAuliffe, a firebrand public speaker known for his fund-raising, said President George W. Bush should give the Democrats all the political ammunition they need. He cited Sen. Jim Jeffords, who threw control of an evenly split Senate to the Democrats this spring when he abandoned the Republican Party after a tiff with the White House.\nJeffords had represented Vermont in the U.S. Congress as a Republican since 1975.\n"He had been through Nixon and Watergate," McAuliffe said. "He had been through Newt Gingrich's right-wing revolution in 1993. But he only lasted four months into George Bush's administration. \n"We can use this to show that we're fighting for things that working families care about."\nMcAuliffe echoed the class warfare rhetoric that Gore used in his campaign this year, rhetoric that From frowns upon. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the vice presidential candidate, regrets that the campaign often came off as a courier of unreconstructed liberalism.\n"We are the party of upward mobility and economic prosperity," he said at a Monday morning press conference. "But I don't think that came through. The rhetoric was often not New Democratic, and our view of the role of government could have been made more clear.\n"We could have better shown that we're not about social programs, but people."\nBayh, recently elected DLC chairman and considered a likely future presidential candidate, despaired over the fact that 70 percent of churchgoers and 60 percent of married couples parted ways with the Democrats in the last election. He urged fellow Democrats to reach out to the cultural mainstream.\nBut McAuliffe and other party stalwarts hope to energize the party's grassroots. And that means tub-thumping populism, the sort that often turns off rural and suburban voters.\n"It's a disgrace what happened in the last election," McAucliffe said, alluding to the prolonged recount in Florida, which Bush carried by a slender margin. "We need to let the people know about the disenfranchisement of the voters. \n"I'm going to do to them what they did to Clinton. We're going to show Bush the door in 2004"