There they go again. Must Democrats be the party that never takes "yes" for an answer?

For the first time since at least Sept. 11, Democrats have a plausible argument to bring to the voters -- that capitalism will go off the rails unless there are clear rules, fairly enforced, and decent protections for outsiders against insiders. It's an argument that has Republicans worried.

But some Democrats are afraid their party is about to descend into -- shudder -- "class warfare." They say that arguing in defense of "the people" against "the powerful," as Al Gore did in 2000, will turn off middle-class voters who, as Sen. Joe Lieberman put it over the weekend, "don't see America as us vs. them."

In fact, the Democrats may have trouble getting full traction on the corporate issue not because it's unpopular but because Democrats themselves have, over the years, been so eager to grab corporate money themselves.

And to say that it is anti-business to attack corporate abuses is itself anti-business, because it implies that corrupt CEOs and their corner-cutting hired hands are representative of the business class.

This is nonsense. The reason this business scandal has become so important is that rage over the damage it has done to the economy fans out to include not only employees but also investors, small-business people and, yes, even honest CEOs. It is a battle between corporate insiders who skirted the rules and just about everybody else.

Oddly, the very same Joe Lieberman made that case forcefully in his speech to the pro-business Democratic Leadership Council yesterday. He assailed the sound of WorldCom "wringing the last dollar out of their crooked books" and noted that "a lot of powerful people turned into con artists and thieves to satisfy their personal greed."

Lieberman went on to describe the Bush administration's policies as follows: "Give most of the money to the guys at the top. Jeopardize the retirement security of average workers. And use all kinds of accounting tricks and cynical excuses to cover up your debts. Enron accounting has met the Bush budget." Yes, and Joe Lieberman, meet your running mate, Al Gore. That's pretty good "us vs. them" rhetoric, don't you think?

Democrats can't seem to get over arguing about what went wrong during the 2000 campaign. Lieberman criticized Gore over the weekend for moving toward populism and away from a "pro-growth" platform.

Lord knows, Gore offers his critics a lot of targets. But the populism-vs.-economic-growth argument frames the issue in exactly the wrong way. There can be no disputing the polls that showed that Gore's quasi-populist message at the 2000 Democratic convention helped send his numbers soaring past George Bush's.

Where Gore went wrong was in missing the second half of his message, which a Gore campaign insider described to me in detail at the Los Angeles convention. The idea was first to use populism to rally core Democrats, mark out real differences with Bush and also take some distance from Bill Clinton's scandals. Then, in the campaign's final month, Gore would embrace the economic successes of the Clinton presidency and ask voters if they wanted to take the risk of putting Bush in the White House.

But Gore was so angered by Clinton's very real failures that he never took full advantage of Clinton's successes. There is little to learn here about populism vs. its opposite, but much to learn about the Democrats' self-created demons.

Positioning politics is normal and helps build candidacies and organizations. Lieberman and the proud centrists at the Democratic Leadership Council clearly want to preserve their pro-business credentials to differentiate themselves from other kinds of Democrats. And it should be said that Lieberman is one of only a handful of Democrats who has had the guts to call for freezing the Bush tax cut in the interest of long-term fiscal solvency. On this issue, he and his leadership council comrades have shown more courage than many Democrats who would claim to be more liberal.

But why then front for the claim that Democrats are in some danger of becoming a bunch of class-baiting, anti-business socialists?

The truth is that the radicals in the corporate debate are those who never met a deregulation bill they didn't like and claimed that government rules were always the enemy of capitalism. The moderates are the Democrats and progressive Republicans who insisted on the American idea that capitalism won't work unless government has the tools to keep the big boys honest. If Democrats can't make that case plainly, Al Gore's failures will be the least of their problems.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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