Democratic presidential candidates are straying further from centrist policies than their Republican counterparts, which could make it harder for them to win over moderates next year.
“On national security, they’ve definitely moved farther to the left,” said Democratic strategist Dan Gerstein, a former aide to centrist Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the former Democrat who is now an independent. “And that’s troubling.”
By contrast, the Republican candidates have hewed more closely to the center, drawing criticism from some party activists that they are not conservative enough. GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani, for instance, supports abortion, gay rights and gun control.
Although candidates from both parties have played to their base constituencies, the Democrats have done more to curry favor with liberal interest groups than Republicans have with conservative activists.
Democrats spurned an invitation from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council but attended forums sponsored by blacks, Hispanics, gays, big labor, pro-abortion rights advocates, left-wing bloggers and the liberal group Take Back America. Republicans have shown up at only one conference sponsored by a special interest group — the Conservative Political Action Committee.
“The Democrats are not only moving really far to the left, but as they do these forums, they are getting themselves on the record as pandering to pressure groups,” said Republican strategist Rich Galen, an adviser to potential candidate Fred Thompson. “The Democrats are creating a body of evidence, in effect, that is almost guaranteed to get the Republican base vote — and moderate vote — charged up.”
For example, Democratic candidate Barack Obama has promised liberals that if elected president, he will meet without preconditions with the leaders of nations including Cuba and North Korea.
“So far, not one of the major Democratic candidates for the White House has stood up in any major way to any of the liberal interest groups,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “This was precisely the image that hurt Democrats in the 1980s.”
Gerstein countered that the Democrats were practicing politics the way Willie Sutton approached banks. “They’re going where the votes are,” Gerstein said.
“All the energy in American politics right now is on the left, particularly the online activist left,” he said. “The danger for Democrats is just to go too overboard in proposing too much big government, and not understanding that there’s still, in the strong middle of American politics, this healthy skepticism toward government’s ability to deal with some of these problems.”
