Fights over a political party's future are common after the party loses a big election. But John Kerry figures to face a fight over control of the party from fellow Democrats even if he beats George W. Bush on Nov. 2.
Influential figures on the party's left wing are planning a long-term campaign to move the Democrats to the left, just as right-wing activists took over the Republican Party and moved it to the right over the past 30 years.
If the left's campaign is successful, it could transform the political landscape of the United States, changing the terms of debate and bringing dramatically different policies on local, national and international issues.
After George McGovern's landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972, some centrist Democrats argued that Democrats had become too liberal to win national elections.
The accusation was repeated after Michael Dukakis' lopsided loss to George Bush in 1988. Leading the charge was the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of centrist Democrats who subsequently pushed the party rightward on crime, economics and foreign policy during the presidency of Bill Clinton, himself a council supporter.
Now, leftist Democrats are planning to challenge the centrists' control. The leftists argue that many Democrats, especially the party establishment in Washington, have become too much like Republicans and too afraid to stand up to right-wingers like George W. Bush.
In the short run, the left-wingers are working hard to elect Kerry, even though they regard him as representing the party's cautious center. In the primaries, most of the left preferred Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, whose populist, anti-war candidacy threatened to wrest the nomination from Kerry, to the horror of the party establishment.
The left is uniting behind Kerry out of a widely shared conviction that a second Bush term would be an unmitigated, perhaps irreversible, disaster. "Four more years of George Bush would destroy the country," Dean said in announcing last summer that he would campaign hard for Kerry.
If Kerry defeats Bush on Nov. 2, the left will probably demand significant roles and influence in the new Kerry administration -- a Cabinet position for Dean, for example, or Kerry's acceptance of the left's position on trade, health care and other issues.
To support its demands, the left will argue that Kerry could not have beaten Bush without its help. And it will have a point, on both ideological and organizational grounds.
After all, it was Dean's clear, forceful criticism of the war and other Bush policies that taught Democrats that standing up to the president and the right wing was not only possible but popular with voters. Without Dean's example, it's doubtful Kerry would ever have found his voice against Bush.
And left-leaning activists are mounting an unprecedented grassroots campaign to educate and turn out voters for Kerry.
The nation's largest labor union, the Service Employees International Union, has joined with the Sierra Club, the NAACP, the National Abortion Rights League and other groups to organize "the largest voter mobilization in American history" through the newly minted alliances America Coming Together and America Votes.
Other supporters to Kerry's left include Democracy for America, the organization Dean created after the primaries to channel the energies of his grassroots constituency, and the AFL-CIO, whose get-out-the-vote work was crucial for Al Gore in winning the popular vote in 2000.
And perhaps no one has attracted more attention than MoveOn, the Internet- based group whose television ads and in-your-face opposition to Bush has driven right-wingers crazy, even as its small-donor fund-raising model has challenged Big Money's hold over democracy.
Call them the Beat Bush Brigades. Collectively, these groups boast a combined budget of perhaps $100 million and tens of thousands of staff and volunteers. And as much as they may obey federal laws that prohibit them from coordinating with Kerry, in effect they operate as an unofficial "Kerry for President" campaign.
Full: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/10/10/INGEF94FCU1.DTL