Moving Toward the Middle

The trouble with the Democratic Party is that to many voters its national leadership appears to be no more than a collection of shrill special-interest groups. Just look at the way the Democratic National Committee has not merely tolerated but officially recognized seven different caucuses, representing business, women, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Pacific delegates, "liberal- progressives" and even homosexuals.

That, at least, is the bitter complaint of some of the party's prominent elected officials. Their solution? To form another caucus, of course, this one composed primarily of Southern and Western white males and operating outside, if not in opposition to, the National Committee.

To be sure, that is not the official logic of the Governors, Senators and Representatives who have organized the Democratic Leadership Council. Their stated purpose "is to move the party back to the middle," in the words of Florida Senator Lawton Chiles, by developing centrist policy positions. In their view the party must shed its ultraliberal, antibusiness, soft-on-defense image if it is ever to win back the voters who have been defecting and, in particular, if it is to enter future presidential elections without almost automatically forfeiting the electoral votes of Southern and Western states. To accomplish that, say council promoters, requires an organized group arguing within the party for positions favoring economic growth, a strong defense and a tough stance against crime.

One Democratic congressional staffer sympathetic to the council candidly calls it "an anticaucus caucus." Many Democratic leaders sneer that the group is trying to cure the party's excessive factionalism by introducing still more factionalism. "You can't rebuild something that is split by splitting it further," says an official of the AFL-CIO, which suspects that the council is out to reduce labor's influence in the party. South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings calls the group "divisive and harmful." Others suspect that the council is likely to become a vehicle for the 1988 presidential ambitions of some of its founders, notably Virginia Governor Charles Robb and Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt.

The criticisms have been accompanied by some blunt pressure. AFL-CIO officials warned that the labor federation might reduce its support of Democratic congressional candidates if the council was formed. Later, the 28- member California Democratic House delegation caucused and, says a participant, "virtually ordered" California Congressman Tony Coelho, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, to stay out of the group.