Fading passion. (The Word from Washington).

During the lead-up to the primaries, the Democratic candidates get out and talk to party activists, union members, and the rest of the hard-core base, give hell-raising speeches at pep rallies for progressive politics, and try to drum up some excitement. Then the party establishment picks a nominee. With the extremely front-loaded primary schedule in 2004--the whole show will be effectively over by March--it is hard for candidates with little money or name recognition to compete. And with the ever-rising ante in campaign fundraising, a lot of candidates are skipping the barnstorming speeches at state conventions and union halls to focus almost exclusively on courting big donors so they can advertise their way to victory in all those simultaneous nationwide contests.

Still, this summer the convention hotels are packed with voters itching for a fight, and you can hear the candidates compete in poetry-slam-style head-to-head speeches, making the case for why each is the one to take on George W. Bush.

Wisconsin, which this year moved its primary up to February 17, attracted Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, and John Kerry to the statewide Democratic convention in Milwaukee in June. The event underscored the differences between the hell-raisers and the establishment. Some of the most progressive legislators in Washington warmed up the crowd: Representatives David Obey and Tammy Baldwin, and Senator Russ Feingold.

Speaker after speaker brought the crowd to its feet by condemning the weak-kneed centrism of Democrats afraid to take a strong, oppositional stance to Republican politics.

"Where are the Democrats?" asked Baldwin. "If I had a dime for every time I hear that question it would break my piggy bank.... We must all see ourselves as the ones to fill that void," she told the crowd.

Obey expressed the frustration of "watching the Democratic Party and its leaders throw away our chance to elect a President three years ago." Like the Democratic base, Obey believes the last election was stolen by state officials in Florida and the Supreme Court. But it was also lost by a lousy candidate, he added. "When the chips were down, our candidate lost the debates because he appeared not to be comfortable with himself," Obey said. "I'm not interested in tired debates about New Democrats or Old Democrats. I want a real Democrat." (That crack was a reference to the Democratic Leadership Council, the group that gave us Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and the New Democrat philosophy that leftwing candidates can't win general elections.)

Feingold got a rousing cheer from the crowd when he said, "My friends, we will not get there by being Republican Lite." As Feingold mentioned his votes against NAFTA, GATT, and most favored nation status for China, the union members in the audience went nuts. "Yeah!" There you go!" they interjected.

"We do ourselves no favor by meekly accepting the Bush Administration's confused foreign policy," Feingold continued, explaining his votes against the war in Iraq and the Bush Administration's domestic anti-terrorism efforts.

The very votes that isolated Feingold in the Senate were his biggest applause lines at the convention: his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, his lone vote against the USA Patriot Act, and his resistance to other anti-terrorism measures that infringe on civil liberties.

To the Democratic Presidential candidates who spoke after him, Feingold said, "We won't win the Presidency if we simply take a pass or say that George Bush is doing a pretty good job on the fight against terrorism and foreign policy, but we're better on domestic issues and the economy."

Dean scored huge applause for praising Feingold's lonely vote on the Patriot Act, and for trumpeting a series of liberal positions--opposing the Iraq War and overreaching anti-terrorism measures, as well as supporting gay rights. "We are not going to beat George Bush unless we stand up for who we are and are proud of it," he said to cheers.

Kucinich, further to the left than Dean, gave the most passionate and most well-received stemwinder of the evening, focusing especially on labor issues and a strike by Tyson workers in Wisconsin. "This is the place to start to take power back to the people," he shouted, "workers' rights! ... Corporations are using trade laws to break workers' rights, to break unions, to ruin the environment."

Everyone is for fixing NAFTA, Kucinich said, but "the only way to fix NAFTA is to return to bilateral trade.... It's time, Democrats, for us to clearly stand up for economic justice." Everyone is for health care, he said, "but I'm the only candidate standing before you who supports guaranteed, single-payer health care once and for all."

Many Democrats are now asking where are the weapons of mass destruction, but, Kucinich pointed out, he led the effort in the House against the war, getting 126 Democrats to vote against it.

The crowd was stirred up and on its feet shouting by the time Dean and Kucinich were done.

Then came Kerry.

"We've reached the point in the evening when everything has been said, but not everyone has said it," Kerry began with a wry smile. He continued with a series of Jay Leno-style jokes. Maybe it was an off night. Maybe Kerry judged he was better off shifting to a lighter tone since he didn't speak until last, at 10:00. But there were other telling differences between his speech and those that preceded him. His patrician, New England style seemed out of place among the dairy farmers and union workers. He emphasized his Yale education. He said little about labor.

"At the center of this struggle," he said, "is the effort not to go backward on the Violence Against Women Act, on Title IX ," issues that, while worthwhile, hardly seem central in the current political context. Another key plan of Kerry's: compulsory community service for high school students, and a corps of volunteer mentors.

To be fair, Kerry hit many of the same progressive points his colleagues hit: "It is long since time we stopped being the only industrialized nation on the face of the planet that does not recognize health care is a right," he said. He praised alternative energy over oil drilling and pointed out that 54 percent of Bush's tax cuts go to the top 1 percent of Americans. And he did have one good rhetorical point on labor issues: "I will remind those Republicans so quick to praise the heroes of 9/11 that every one of those firefighters and emergency medical workers was a member of organized labor and believed in the right to organize and strike," he said.

Still, the fading passion from the speeches of the early evening foreshadowed, I'm afraid, the trajectory of the whole election season. Kerry was better than Graham, who sent his daughter to hold up a picture of the candidate as a boy in a 4-H uniform, posing with a cow: "Isn't he cute?" she said, and confessed that the largest group she'd spoken to before was a PTA meeting debating the relative merits of pizza and fish sticks. "And this election, as we all know, is a lot more important than fish sticks." I didn't stick around to hear what Joe Lieberman's stand-in had to say.

There is a struggle going on right now between conservative party leaders like Lieberman and the more progressive base. Certainly, the deck is stacked against the base when it comes to fundraising and the power to anoint a nominee. But from a purely pragmatic standpoint, it makes sense for the leadership to listen to the warnings of David Obey, and to take note of the sparks of genuine passion and enthusiasm from the people who care about things like state party conventions. Forget about abandoning principle. Abandon these folks and there will be no hope of rousing voters to turn out George W. Bush.

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.