With the nomination long since decided and the vice-presidential pick probably just days away, it's a good time to think about where we've come in the last year, and where the Democrats are going not just in 2004, but for the next decade-plus.
I don't think many saw it this way at the time, but the party really presented the country with an interesting selection among the six most viable presidential contenders this year.
On one side you had the throwback choices: Dick Gephardt the robotic populist, whose paleoliberalism and panders for every audience would have fit right in--and, in fact, did--with every loser Democrat from the dark years of the 1980s, and Joe Lieberman, who just wanted to get along with the Republicans despite the political swirlie they gave him in the stolen election of 2000. Lieberman's accommodationist stance would have been okay with Dwight Eisenhower's Republican Party, but it amounts to unilateral disarmament with madmen like Cheney, Rove and DeLay running things.
On the other side, we had forward-looking Democrats who took Bill Clinton's winning formula of centrism and fiscal conservatism and tried to marry it with core progressive principles. I'm talking about Howard Dean, Wes Clark and John Edwards, three guys who almost made it seem cool to be a Democrat again. If the party is going to regain a durable majority, their views will lead the way. (It's not a coincidence, by the way, that these were the three most charismatic contenders.) I don't doubt that their stance eventually will define the party, but I'm not sure their time has come yet.
You'll notice I haven't included the nominee in either of these camps. The fact that he won probably indicates success in blurring those differences, as well as his greater credibility on national security. But I'm also just not really sure where John Kerry stands on this question.
Is Kerry a "special-interest Democrat" in the mode of Mondale, Dukakis and Gephardt, or a pragmatic progressive as Clinton could and should have been, as Robert Kennedy once was? The vice-presidential pick could give us the answer, and that answer could determine the outcome of the election.