Liberals are
antsy. They haven't seen Democratic voter enthusiasm like
this in a long time, and they'd rather not wait until the
party's August convention to harness it to the party's
presidential nominee.
Hillary Rodham
Clinton and Barack Obama are still fiercely competing just
when liberal activists and labor leaders wanted to mobilize
voters and gear up their message for the general
election in November.
Activists who
gathered at a Washington hotel this week said Obama and
Clinton have energized the electorate with their prolonged
contest, but several warned that a convention fight
could be fractious and leave little time to mount a
general election campaign against Republican
nominee-in-waiting John McCain.
''There is always
that danger,'' said Karen Ackerman, the political
director for the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor
federation. ''The way that this plays out in terms of
how the nominee is eventually chosen matters a lot.''
Lately, the way
it has been playing out is with hot rhetoric -- the
Clinton camp points out Obama's ties to an indicted
businessman who was a political patron, and the Obama
camp responds by demanding that Clinton release her
tax returns. Meanwhile, neither candidate can win the
nomination with delegates selected in state primaries or
caucuses, and so they conduct parallel campaigns
wooing party leaders who will also get a say at the
convention.
''It's a bit of a
high wire act,'' said James H. Dean, chairman of
Democracy for America, a group that recruits ''fiscally
responsible and socially progressive'' candidates.
''Is it competitive? Yes. Is there some sniping going
on? Yes. But many if not most of the voters say they
would be happy with both candidates. So I'm really pretty
confident that this is going to work out one way or
another.''
But when asked
when he would like the contest resolved, Dean said: ''It
would be easier if it gets settled before the convention.''
The race ''is not settled yet,'' he said, ''and
psychologically that gets people nervous.''
Nowadays,
liberals see 2008 as a reverse image of the 1980 election
that galvanized conservatives and put Ronald Reagan in
the White House. This time, the energy is on the left
and the ennui is on the right, but the political
conditions are similar -- economic turmoil and an ordeal
overseas.
And though Reagan
locked up the nomination early, liberals note
optimistically that the 1980 Republican convention was not
without drama, as Reagan negotiated with former
president Gerald Ford to be his running mate before
settling on George H. W. Bush. Reagan won the general
election decisively.
''So that kind of
internal division doesn't necessarily keep you from
having a sea-change election when people are ready to throw
the bums out,'' said Robert Borosage, codirector of
the Campaign for America's Future which organized this
week's Take Back America conference for progressives.
The long slog to
the nomination might have its benefits by forcing some
political quagmires to bubble up early, some activists
maintain. On Tuesday, several of the Take Back America
participants crowded into a press filing center to
hear Obama deliver an address on race. The speech came
after Obama repudiated comments from his church's former
African-American pastor and after he encountered questions
over his loss of white support in some recent state
contests.
''It's good that
this particular controversy is being aired right now and
the public gets to hear his response before the general
election,'' said Roger Hickey, the other codirector at
the Campaign for America's Future. (Jim Kuhnhenn,
AP)
