Last night I attended an event hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Democrats. The speakers included my friends Duncan Black, aka Atrios, and Chris Bowers of MyDD,
Michael Nutter, a probable mayoral candidate in 2007, Joe Hoeffel (Arlen Specter’s opponent in 2004), congressional candidates Lois Murphy, Patrick Murphy and Dennis Spivack (for Delaware), and State Senate candidate, Paul Lang.

All the speakers were excellent. But Dennis Spivack and Chris Bowers made the most important points. Both of them talked about the problems with the Democratic Party. Chris talked about the political landscape. He focused on two things: we are going to break the record for the most contested Congressional seats this year, and the polls and fundraising look excellent. But, he urged Democrats to get involved in the machinery of the Party in order to assure that the polls and money translate into victories.

Spivack gave a long speech. But the part that resonated with me was when he discussed the culture of the Class of 2006. That would be the collective group of Democratic candidates that are running this year to unseat Republicans. This group is a lot different than the party of Biden, Hillary, and Lieberman. They are unabashedly anti-war, anti-domestic spying, anti-torture, anti-extraordinary rendition, and anti-culture of corruption. They are not compromised by previous votes, they are not (yet) beholden to powerful Washington interests. They have the potential to be a latter-day Class of 1974. The Class of 1974 was better known as the Watergate Babies.

The members of the Class of 1974 were young, relatively new to public office and remarkably certain they could remake Washington in their own image. They viewed Congress as ossified, beholden to powerful interests, unresponsive to the people and ripe for the taking.

The Class of 1974 had 75 Democrats to just 17 Republicans (the “Contract” Class of 1994 would have 73 Republicans and just 13 Democrats). This huge influx of Democrats was known as the “Watergate babies.” The label derived from the scandal that, less than three months earlier, had caused President Richard M. Nixon to resign under threat of impeachment.

So strong was the tide running that fall — especially after Nixon was pardoned by successor President Gerald R. Ford — that Democrats were elected in districts all over the Northeast, the Midwest and the West that had voted Republican for generations.

The two most senior members of the then-minority Republicans were defeated. In Massachusetts, Paul E. Tsongas became the first Democrat elected to the House from his district in the 20th century. The bookish Andrew Maguire in New Jersey and the street-savvy organizer Toby Moffett in Connecticut captured suburban Republican districts.

In the West, Timothy E. Wirth won the Colorado district based in Boulder, Les AuCoin became the first Democrat from Oregon’s northwest corner since the 1800s and California elected a crop of young legislators that included George Miller, Henry A. Waxman and Norman Y. Mineta.

The new victors were a Kiddie Corps, half of them under 40. Tom Downey of New York, just 25, was the youngest member of Congress since the early 1800s. “We were young, we looked weird. I can’t even believe we got elected,” Moffett would say two decades later.

This new generation of Democrats offered a new image for their party. Far more than their senior colleagues in the House, they understood the social trends and beliefs that had typified the previous 10 years. Most of them supported the Supreme Court decisions that had legalized abortion and outlawed prayer in schools. Most of them backed busing to achieve racial balance in the schools.

Few were true populists. They were college-educated and professionally credentialed. “We were the children of Vietnam, not World War II,” said Wirth. “We were products of television, not of print. We were products of computer politics, not courthouse politics. And we were reflections of JFK as president, not FDR.”

They were more likely to have been part of the anti-war movement than of the organized labor movement, and few were creatures of the party establishment. One new member, from the suburbs of Philadelphia, was a 31-year-old Methodist minister named Bob Edgar who had begun his campaign by looking up “Democratic” in the phone book to find the local headquarters.

The Class of 1974 was unique. It did not change the leadership of Congress, but rather, it increased the Democratic majorities and infused the Democratic Party with liberals with a zeal for reform. They threw out some of their own Committee Chairmen, enacted campaign finance reform, did thorough investigations of our intelligence agencies, reopened the investigation of the JFK assassination (and deemed it a conspiracy), and passed the FISA act (the law being flouted by Bush today).

At times it seems like the Bush/Cheney administration has made it their mission to undo all the reforms of the Class of 1974. But, for all the people that are frustrated with or have given up on the Democrats in Washington, the lesson of 1974 is that big electoral gains in 2006 will bring change. Not just a change in the leadership of the Congress, but change in the very nature and makeup and agenda of the Democreatic Party. And that is what we need.