The DNC Race Riot: What black anger means for the Democrats.

Maxine Waters was livid. "If Maynard Jackson does not get taken care of so he can represent us inside this party," she told delegates at the Democratic National Committee's winter gathering in Washington, "there ain't gonna be no meeting to elect nobody else!" Waters, the six-term congresswoman and one-time head of the Congressional Black Caucus, was trying to build support for Jackson, the former Atlanta mayor who was a late entry into the race for party chairman. But fundraiser Terry McAuliffe, with the backing of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had already locked up more than enough votes to win. With the election just hours away, Waters made a frankly racial appeal on Jackson's behalf, taking pains to "remind" black delegates that they should vote for the former mayor. And part of her appeal was the threat to disrupt the whole winter meeting. "We had to do it that way," Waters later explained.

Since Jackson was sure to lose, what Waters really wanted was a set of concessions from McAuliffe-a big title for Jackson, new staff, more power within the party-and, in the end, she got most of what she wanted. In return for Jackson's promise to drop his challenge, McAuliffe awarded Jackson the newly created position of "National Development Chair," which gives him control of a variety of equal- opportunity programs inside the DNC, as well as of the party's new Voting Rights Institute. "We are a united party with one mission," Jackson said in a let-bygones-be-bygones statement released after the agreement.

But the Democrats are not at all united. The story of the winter meeting-the late-night negotiating sessions, the demands, and the threats of racial confrontation that led to the Jackson settlement-is an ominous development for the Democratic leadership. The party has within its ranks a group of angry activists who might through sheer force of will chart the party's direction in the next couple of years. The group-made up of a relatively small portion of the DNC's black caucus, plus some white allies-is convinced that Al Gore won the presidential election, and it plans to re-fight the Florida vote for months and years to come, even at the expense of planning future races. For now, centrist Democrats can only hope the firebrands' influence fades soon. If it doesn't, the Democrats, so close to victory last year, may be headed toward a 1980s-style electoral wilderness.

The Jackson candidacy, for all the passion it inspired, was a relatively brief affair. It began in mid December, when, during a conference call of DNC executive-committee members, officials said chairman Joe Andrew was leaving and McAuliffe would run for the job. Waters took that as an announcement of a fait accompli-others on the call didn't hear it that way-and said she was angry that black Democrats hadn't been consulted. She mentioned Jackson as a possible candidate to oppose McAuliffe.

"His phone jumped off the hook after she threw his name out there," says Daniel Halperin, Jackson's business partner in Atlanta who would come to run the Jackson campaign. "But it was an uphill battle." That is an understatement. There are about 450 delegates who are allowed to vote for DNC chairman. By January 1, McAuliffe had in his hand signed endorsements from more than 300 of them, a total that rose as the month went on. In addition, his support cut across racial lines, with at least two-thirds of the 90 members of the black caucus in the McAuliffe corner. Altogether, it appeared that Jackson might not be able to muster more than 40 votes party-wide.

On more than one occasion, Jackson suggested the whole election was rigged; he called it "a Florida inside the DNC." But many delegates looked at it another way: What sense did it make to support a candidate who could barely make a dent in McAuliffe's lead? Wouldn't that be a self-marginalizing strategy? "I couldn't figure out why Maynard was in," says Alice Huffman, a longtime Democratic activist and black- caucus member who became a key McAuliffe supporter. "I didn't see why we should just all team up because we were black and put the party in the position that if Terry won, then we weren't with [the party]."

The winter meeting began on Thursday, February 1, with the election scheduled to take place the following Saturday morning. That gave both sides just two days to avoid a potentially divisive standoff. On Thursday, after a day filled with meetings and cocktail receptions and dinners, Jackson and McAuliffe got together for a negotiating session that began at 11 p.m. in McAuliffe's campaign headquarters on the ground floor of the Capitol Hyatt Hotel. With them were Waters, Huffman, Halperin, Harold Ickes, former chairman Don Fowler, and a few others. It turned out to be a long night.

Waters played the race card almost immediately. "When we sat down to negotiate, Terry McAuliffe brought in the room with him six black people," she recalled later. "[They] started to speak for him and tell Maynard Jackson why he was unacceptable-black folks!-why he was unacceptable to them." According to Waters, pro-McAuliffe blacks in the meeting argued that supporting Jackson would diminish their influence within the party. "We had to tell them, 'You ain't got no power,'" Waters said. "We had to remind African-Americans that this man [McAuliffe] just came in and denied you your power. . . . You've already signed away your power."

Cooler heads tried to find a workable compromise. "Could we find a place for Maynard to work with Terry in the party that would make a contribution and would not undermine any of the other offices in the party?" Huffman recalls thinking. "After all, we had two African- American vice presidents [of the DNC]. We were looking for a win-win agenda." By 4 a.m., the two sides had come up with the basic structure of a deal. But nothing was signed, and the group agreed to meet again on Friday.

They didn't. Instead, on Friday evening, the conflict took a turn for the worse during an angry and contentious meeting of the party's black caucus. Waters wanted the entire caucus to endorse Jackson. The McAuliffe forces refused. The Jackson team accused the McAuliffe supporters of having a plantation mentality. And then McAuliffe himself came in and made matters worse. Discussing allegations of voter intimidation in Florida, he inadvertently referred to black voters as "colored people" instead of "people of color." Waters's troops made a big deal of that perceived slight, extracting multiple apologies from McAuliffe. "It was just horrible," says one person present.

And it was all for nothing, because after the yelling was over, Jackson still didn't have many votes. A few hours later-at one o'clock Saturday morning-the negotiating teams gathered again in the Hyatt's closed cocktail lounge. The formal deal came at 3 a.m., with the final handshake at a 6 a.m. breakfast. An hour later, the party sent out a press release with Jackson's we-are-united statement.

McAuliffe had won, but at a cost. Most people who heard his acceptance speech on Saturday had no idea of the jarring-and exhausting-racial battle he had just gone through. But the story helps explain the extraordinary tone of his speech, which at times sounded as if it had been written by Maxine Waters. In a way, it had been.

"Racial profiling on the highway has now moved to the voting booth!" McAuliffe boomed, beginning a string of racially inflammatory accusations about the 2000 election. "George Bush says he's for election reform. Well, reform this: I say, park the state police cars, take down the roadblocks, stop asking people of color for multiple forms of identification, print readable ballots, open the polling places, count all the votes, and start practicing democracy in America again!" And finally, this: "We won that election. If Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, Jim Baker, and the Supreme Court hadn't tampered with the results, Al Gore would be president, George Bush would be back in Austin, and John Ashcroft would be home reading Southern Partisan magazine!" Waters couldn't have said it any better if she had delivered the speech herself.

In practical terms, McAuliffe's concessions to Waters and Jackson meant that a significant portion of the party's energies will be committed to a post-Florida emphasis on "voting rights." The DNC will concentrate not only on making voting easier, and vote-counting more reliable- bipartisan concerns-but on proving allegations that minorities were somehow "disenfranchised" in Florida and elsewhere. One of McAuliffe's first announcements as chairman was that the DNC, along with several civil-rights groups, will hold hearings on charges of racism and voting irregularities in Florida in coming weeks.

The preoccupation with re-fighting Florida worries some centrist Democrats. "It's very important that we deal with the kind of electoral problems that popped up in Florida but not maintain the grievance forever," says Ed Kilgore, policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council. "For one thing, the kind of people the Democrats need to win over in '02 and '04 are not going to be terribly exercised about this a year from now. Second, it tends to keep you from the kind of self- criticism necessary to win in the future. And third, it makes your message a long, undifferentiated yell."

Kilgore and his colleagues got a taste of the base's anger last month when the DLC held a forum on the 2000 presidential defeat and what the party should do in the future. "We got a lot of letters and e-mails after the symposium," Kilgore says. "People were absolutely beside themselves with anger at us for suggesting that Gore lost."

Party leaders don't like to discuss it, but the anger splits roughly along racial lines. "It's a divide between white Democrats who wanted Gore to win and who accept the outcome and black Democrats who wanted Gore to win and think they got completely screwed," says one party strategist. "To ignore it or pretend like it's just going to go away by itself is really dangerous." It's particularly worrisome when the group that is angriest gave the party more than 90 percent of its votes. And that's why Terry McAuliffe gave the acceptance speech that he gave.

There will no doubt be more. If anything, it appears the winter-meeting battle emboldened Waters to push for greater influence in the party. After the negotiating had concluded, Waters, Jackson, and some of their followers moved across town to another hotel where Tavis Smiley, of Black Entertainment Television, was holding a forum called "State of the Black Union." Waters took her place on stage and began to tell the story of the last 48 hours. "We created a fight inside the party," she told the crowd. She explained that it was only when she threatened to disrupt McAuliffe's carefully planned coronation that she and Jackson got the concessions they demanded. "We went and negotiated and as of today, as of this hour, Maynard Jackson is the National Development Chairman of the party, with a ten-million-dollar budget, a new voting-rights institute, the authority to give assistance to state parties and divide up the money that goes into coordinated campaigns, new opportunity guidelines, and some other things that we fought for. We challenged the party."

The villains in Waters's story were the black delegates who had supported McAuliffe. At the end of her talk, she gave the (mostly black) audience a bit of advice. "If you don't have the courage to stand with us, to be with us," she said, "don't ever go into a room to provide a shield for a white man against a black man. Don't ever do it."

A short time later, Jackson took the stage amid great applause. "This could not have happened without Maxine Waters," he said, with real gratitude. "This is without a doubt the baddest sister in America." The former mayor was, as usual, smooth, good-natured, and relaxed. But his message was a warning shot, just in case McAuliffe needed one more. "I want you to know that you and I have been complaining for years about being taken for granted by the Democratic party-and it's absolutely true," Jackson told the crowd. "I give you my promise that will never happen again. Never happen again. The Democratic party is going to respect us, respect our power, respect our vote, and I'm going to help Terry McAuliffe to see to it."

No doubt he will. And Democrats might find themselves re-fighting the last election until they lose the next one.