Adam Clymer of The New York Times offers the second of its two-part series on the future of the Dems. It's a good summary of common wisdom on the subject, offering vague hope that the party can stem a conservative juggernaut with its "layers of affiliated political groups, research groups and like-minded media organs that the Republicans have fortified over the decades".

Clymer quotes a consultant who despairs at the gaggle of candidates for the Democratic nomination: "Sometimes we're so respectful of our diversity that we take completely preposterous people seriously. We always run the risk of the follies of the absurd when people want seriousness." Yeah. But that's typical of any political silly season when a party is out of power. This year's campaigns of Dennis Kucinich and Carol Mosley Bruan are only as silly as what the Republicans offered at the same time four years ago with folks like Allan Keyes or Steve Forbes.

At least the Democrats aren't yet suffering from a front-runner syndrome wherein the press annoints a single candidate as most important and focuses on that one candidate to the exclusion of others. At this point, Bob Graham, for instance, is still able to garner air time on the talk-fests when he criticizes intelligence failures of the Bush administration. Graham hasn't yet managed to get the press as a whole interested in the issue. Unlike -- say Dean or even Kerry -- Graham has the credentials and experience to be able to frame the questions in ways that might attract the interest of those rare journalists who are willing to look underneath the rhetoric of "The President". Graham's campaign may be a forlorn hope, but he could weaken one flank of the administration's platform. By honing in on that one issue that he is uniquely qualified to discuss because of his years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Graham is able to offer whoever eventually becomes the nominee a stronger flank on the "security" issue.

So too, Al Sharpton shows other Dems how they might appeal to urban voters. His rhetoric about the devastation to city and state budgets caused by conservative economic policies hasn't yet attracted great interest partly because the early primaries force candidates to focus on Republican strongholds in rural and small-urban states, but the attack move other candidates to focus on a natural constituency.

Clymer's story notes that the Democrats are an essentially different organization that today's Republicans. Although their hat is smaller these days, it is still a big-hat party that includes multiple ideologies within its ranks. He quotes two seemingly contradictory criticisms of the party. One set of analysts argue that Democrats are perceived as pessimistic while another say that the problem is that Democrats "lack the killer instinct that it takes to sell blunt, demagogic messages". In other words, they're too negative and not negative enough.

Perhaps. They certainly don't seem to have the wherewithal to change language and bend it to their will as conservatives were able to do with their long-term campaign to change the meaning of the word "liberal".

But at least they now have an opportunity to hone their multiple messages. If each of the candidates in the current gaggle were to hammer away at one issue, they might have a chance of revealing an overall strategy. The headline of Clymer's story suggests that the Democrats need a "stonger focus", but we'll all be better off if that focus reveals itself rather than being imposed by a set of campaign consultants.