LOS ANGELES -- Like the Republicans before them, Democrats have signed off on a roadmap for governing America, a platform that defines what the party stands for yet forces no candidate to follow the course.
Democrats ratified theirs Tuesday in a show of harmony with few hiccups. But they got a scolding from one of their leading campaign finance reformers that had less to do with the party's principles than the way it does business.
The platform was approved after several hours of cheerleading from Democrats presenting planks from the stage of their national convention.
"This is a platform for all of America," said Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, an author of the document. "This is a platform that unites the many voices and ideas of Americans into a shared vision of our future."
Republicans said the Democrats tried so hard to have it both ways that their platform ended up without much vision at all. "You can't be everything to everyone," said Rep. Sue Myrick, a GOP platform leader.
Adhering to presidential candidate Al Gore's agenda, the platform favors a more ambitious -- and expensive -- role for the federal government in education, a prescription drug benefit for Medicare, expanded health coverage for children, a tax-credit match for people's retirement savings and tax breaks for child care and college savings.
It opposes the across-the-board income tax cuts, partial privatization of Social Security and limited private school vouchers proposed by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.
From the stage, Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin upbraided his party for taking unregulated soft money for the convention even as he spoke in favor of Gore's position on money in politics.
Feingold, Republican Sen. John McCain's partner in pushing for limits on campaign money, spoke of his "concern and dismay that soft money fund raising has become so much a part of this convention. It should not be."
He urged the party to ban it for future conventions.
With their platforms, Democrats and Republicans are both trying to win favor from moderate voters without coming so close on issues that voters can't tell them apart.
The documents are also meant to inspire party activists who tend to be strongly ideological, and so contain some of the prescriptions of the Democratic left and the Republican right. Presidential nominees, as indeed all candidates, have no obligation to run on platforms.
Delegates in Los Angeles did not have to draw their map, but essentially laminate it.
The platform was debated and in some ways amended by committees meeting in the Midwest well beforehand, and presented to the convention as a package with no further opportunity to challenge its specific parts.
The Republicans operated in similar fashion, but held their platform meetings in Philadelphia and on the eve of their convention there. As a result, much more attention was paid to the GOP's factional debates.
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