Will Marshall puts down Gore, Kerry, and Dean in the Guardian blog.

It's true. Unimaginative pollsters and consultants managed to make the charisma-challenged candidates Al Gore and John Kerry even less exciting, by saddling them with a "message" best described as generic Democrat. Bereft of big, audacious ideas or honest passions, Democratic candidates really do come across as little more than vessels for a hodgepodge of interest group commitments.

So Democrats are looking for authenticity, passion and transcendent purposes, and here's where things get interesting. Liberal activists and bloggers - strangely empowered by the "mainstream media" they profess to despise - demand that Democrats fight harder for their principles, as if the party's core problem was a sudden pandemic of cowardice. Their model is Howard Dean, who swept to exactly one victory - the primary in his home state of Vermont - in the 2004 presidential primaries. That's not exactly an encouraging market signal.

It would be refreshing to find Democratic candidates who are willing to tell the party's imperious constituency and pressure groups where to put their questionnaires and litmus tests. But the real problem is not lack of courage, it's that Democrats disagree on some very fundamental questions of party identity and principle.

Take the most important issue in US politics: national security. The ghastly carnage in Iraq has inflamed liberals and anti-war activists who already loathed President Bush with unusual intensity. Some Congressional Democrats are hinting that, should the party regain power in this year's midterm election, it will be payback time. The White House can expect investigations into everything - faulty intelligence on Iraq, prisoner abuse scandals and allegedly "illegal" domestic spying - and who knows, maybe a push to impeach the president as well.