While change within the party has not always gone smoothly, the top leaders recognize the importance of giving newer members running room. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has passed over more senior lawmakers to give newcomers key committee assignments and speaking roles during high-profile floor debates. For instance, she placed Meek on the Homeland Security and Armed Services panels, to enable him to earn national security credentials. And she gave Rep. Stephanie Herseth (S.D.) a prominent role in fighting a GOP plan to reduce Medicaid spending.
She also put junior lawmakers in charge of the 2006 campaign effort. "They are the future," Pelosi said. "And they are starting to set the pace for where things go."
Perhaps no other newcomer has moved up as quickly as Emanuel, an adviser in the Clinton White House who took command of the Democrats' campaign committee after a single House term.
Emanuel has assembled a 2006 candidate slate that includes a former National Football League player, several veterans of the Iraq war, and many senior state officials, the latest being New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid, who signed on last week to challenge Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R). Madrid was recruited by Rep. Hilda L. Solis (D-Calif.), who is in her third term.
Another standout on Emanuel's recruitment team is Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, 39, who arrived in Washington 11 months ago after a dozen years in the rough-and-tumble Florida legislature. She lined up former Florida state senator Ron Klein (D) to run for the seat next door to hers, now occupied by Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R), a veteran legislator.
When Shaw heard the news, he confronted Wasserman Schultz on the floor and told her that the tradition among members of the Florida delegation is to refrain from working against one another. Wasserman Schultz reminded Shaw that several Florida Republicans had worked against Rep. Karen L. Thurman (D-Fla.), who was defeated in 2002.
"I was really polite and said the pact didn't seem to have held very solidly," Wasserman Schultz recalled. "I guess he thought he was speaking to someone who had just begun their political career that day."
Emanuel says of his newcomer colleagues, "They're willing to dust it up, and that's what it's going to take."
They have run into their share of friction. Pelosi has gone back and forth with Ryan over his abortion proposal, worried that certain provisions could dilute the traditional Democratic position backing abortion rights. And Emanuel got into a spat with senior Hispanic House Democrats over the hiring of a campaign committee aide they were pushing.
In the Senate, newer faces must vie with Democratic presidential aspirants for media attention. Two who are breaking through are Obama, 44, and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), 42, one of 22 Senate Democrats who supported John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice of the United States. Yesterday, Pryor gave the Democratic response to Bush's radio address.
"One of the advantages of having a lot of new blood in the Senate is that we don't necessarily come to the chamber with a lot of baggage from past battles," Pryor said. "A lot of my senior colleagues vividly remember the Bork nomination. I don't care about Robert Bork. That's in the past, and I don't think we ought to dwell on that."
Obama, a former Illinois legislator, voted against Roberts but defended Pryor and other Democratic supporters on the Daily Kos blog. Like many new-generation Democrats, he is impatient with the rigidity expressed by some of the party's old-line liberal interest groups, believing the public takes a more nuanced view of issues such as abortion and affirmative action.
"When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive 'checklist,' then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems," Obama wrote.
Pelosi says House and Senate leaders will soon lay out a slate of new ideas, similar to the "Contract With America" that the GOP used to attract voters in 1994, when it took back control of Congress.
One group that Democrats want to tap is veterans and active military members, who have seen their benefits cut or frozen as part of an ongoing budget squeeze. Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), a second-term House member, believes Republicans could pay heavily at the polls throughout the South for overlooking this crucial voting group.
"When I see white male Alabamians shaking their heads, that tells me there are opportunities for Democrats to make major inroads," Davis said.
