Gore a Favorite With Moderates’ Group

RALEIGH, N.C. — When Democratic presidential candidate Albert Gore Jr. lectured Iowa Democrats last weekend about their exaggerated impact on the nominating process, the line could have been written by the Democratic Leadership Council.

And in fact, the group’s director acknowledges that the Tennessee senator has emerged as virtual standard-bearer for the DLC, a policy organization formed in 1985 by moderate Democrats who were concerned that their party’s leftward drift had doomed it to defeat in presidential races.

Gore, in his Iowa speech, said the liberals’ domination of the Democratic Party in the state, combined with the early date (Feb. 8) of Iowa’s presidential preference caucuses, has given the state “the loudest voice” in choosing the Democratic nominee, but is producing “candidates who can’t even carry that state” in the general election.

Takes on the Establishment

“We need to move the Democratic Party in a new direction,” said DLC executive director Al From. “What I like about Gore is that he is willing to take on the party establishment, an establishment that has made Democrats losers at the presidential level because it focuses too much on maintaining the status quo for its interest groups.”

Although Gore is a charter member of the Democratic Leadership Council, so are two other Democratic presidential candidates--Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt and former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt.

But while From is careful to say that both he and the DLC board are neutral in the ’88 race, he does not disguise his satisfaction with the way Gore has recently articulated the council’s cause.

When, for example, Gore took a more hawkish stand on national defense in a DLC-sponsored debate in Miami last month, From said he saw what he has been looking for ever since the Democratic presidential field shaped up.

“We provided an opportunity in that debate for a Democratic candidate to present a different (and more conservative) view on defense than you saw at the debate a week before in Iowa,” From said.

‘Took That Opportunity’

“Al took that opportunity and Dick and Bruce did not.”

Gore also pushed one of the DLC’s four major themes at a recent debate on social programs in New Orleans.

In From’s words, what Gore said was “that people who get something from the government have an obligation to make a contribution to society. This whole idea of the responsibilities of citizenship is a primary interest of the DLC.”

The DLC can offer little in the way of tangible help to candidates espousing its views. Its real value--and the reason its fondness of Gore is significant--is that it has skillfully attracted attention to its goal of making the Democrats less liberal in 1988.

“The debate we sponsored on defense made news,” From said. “We are sending a signal to American voters.”

Irritating to Gephardt

Gore’s emergence as a favorite at the DLC does not sit well with the Gephardt and Babbitt campaigns. It is especially irritating to Gephardt, whom From credits with being a leader in forming the group after it became clear that the Democrats were going to get their second consecutive trouncing by the Republicans in the 1984 presidential race.

It was Gephardt and the late Rep. Gillis Long of Louisiana who, in the early 1980s, argued that if more Democratic elected officials--and fewer liberal activists--were delegates to the national conventions, the party would come up with nominees and a philosophy that could win the White House.

Out of that effort, explains DLC policy director Will Marshall, came “a clear ideological profile for a Democratic Party that can win: We stand for economic growth, expansion of opportunities, military strength and citizenship.”

Gephardt himself took out after Gore at the Miami debate last month, accusing the Tennessee senator of sounding liberal on arms control in Iowa but going to the right in Miami. Gephardt suggested that Gore’s hawkish pronouncements in Miami were aimed at influencing a poll the DLC was conducting of Southern voters who watched the debate.

But From thinks Gephardt and other Gore critics are splitting hairs.

Who Can Keep Nation Strong

Gore, From contends, has “grasped the realization that presidential elections are fought over who can keep the country strong and who can keep it prosperous.”

The DLC poll after the Miami debate found that Gore had distinguished himself in the debate with his more aggressive stand on defense and was the preferred Democrat among swing voters.

It is the swing voters that From says the DLC is trying to reach as it attempts to push the Democratic field toward the middle.

“We have had an impact on the Democratic race,” From argued, “because we have put the emphasis on a group of voters who are much more numerous and important than the (liberal) Democrats in Iowa.

“We take credit for the fact that the Washington Post and St. Petersburg Times, to name just two newspapers, have started doing focus groups with swing voters,” From said, referring to a technique in which scientifically selected voters are interviewed at length by reporters.

Importance of Swing Voters

No one disputes the importance of swing voters--people liable to vote for either party in a close election--but there continues to be disagreement over the DLC’s impact on the 1988 presidential race.

Robert Kuttner, a leading liberal economist, assails attempts to push the Democrats toward the middle in his new book, “The Life of the Party: Democratic Prospects in 1988 and Beyond.”

Echoing criticism of the DLC voiced by some other liberals, Kuttner argues that the Democrats are truly doomed if they try to copy the Republicans just because of President Reagan’s “personal success” in the last two elections.

But try telling that to a Southern Democrat these days.

Here in North Carolina, state Rep. Robert Hunter says he is witnessing the success of the DLC.

“The DLC has had an impact because a moderate Democratic philosophy is emerging and Southern Democrats like what they are hearing,” Hunter said. “The candidates are spending more time down here and they are listening to Southern voters.”