The Democratic presidential candidates for 2004 will descend upon New York City early next week. Senators Daschle, Lieberman and Kerry will speak Monday morning. Senator Edwards and Rep. Richard Gephardt will speak Tuesday morning. (Absent, at least according to the official conference schedule as it now stands, will be Al Gore, who fetched up Thursday in Washington arguing for America to delay in ousting Saddam Hussein. Mr. Gore has plenty of experience to draw on with this topic, having delayed for eight years on the Iraq front himself, at great cost to the Iraqi people and to the national security of America and of Israel.) They are here for a convention of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that represents the centrist or right wing, such as it is, of the Democratic Party. Intriguingly, the keynote address at the meeting will be given by New York’s junior senator. Mrs. Clinton has long been caricatured as her New Democrat husband’s liberal conscience, but the reality is that she has shown some encouraging signs as a senator. She has pressed to build on the Clinton-Giuliani legacy of welfare reform, for instance. And, if a report by John Nichols in the Nation magazine online is to be believed, Mrs. Clinton has been trying to stem some of the excesses of the more ridiculous campaign speech limitation advocates, telling Senator Feingold, “Russ, live in the real world.”

It is to the real world that, however haltingly, the New Democrats have been trying to adjust, backing free trade and a tough line on crime, as well as a recognition, if sometimes only a rhetorical recognition, that government is not always the solution to every problem. Many of the New Democrat solutions strike us as thin gruel. For that matter, many of the solutions of the Republican Party strike us as thin gruel — not bold enough when it comes to marginal tax cuts, not aggressive enough when it comes to tort reform, too prone to compromise on education reform. But the New Democrat solutions are an improvement over the old Democrat solutions. So we greet the New Democrats in town with a warm welcome.

Would that the same could be said for the city’s own Democratic Party leadership. The New Democrats “don’t have any foothold here,” a leader of Democrats on New York’s City Council, William Perkins, told our Benjamin Smith for a news article we ran last month about the upcoming convention. Indeed, with the exceptions of Council Member Eva Moskowitz of Manhattan, Rep. Greg Meeks of Queens, and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, New Democrat politicians in New York are few and far between. More common are New Democrat voters. And that disconnect between the New Democrat voters and the old Democrat politicians is a big reason why Democratic mayors and governors of the Empire State have been so scarce in recent years.