(George Frey/Getty Images/DNC Chairman Tom Perez speaks April 21 to a crowd of supporters at a Democratic unity rally in Salt Lake City. He and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are holding several rallies to unify the Democratic Party)

Before fighting the latest Republican attempt to undo the Affordable Care Act, progressive Democrats had a tiff with former president Barack Obama and the ethics of his two $400,000 paid speeches, including one at a health-care conference put on by the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

“It just speaks to the power of Wall Street and the influence of big money in the political process,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an interview with Bloomberg News.

“I was troubled by that,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a radio interview. “The influence of dollars on this place is what scares me.”

Locked out of power in Washington and most states, Democrats have shaken off the stupor of their 2016 defeat. They’ve fought Republicans to a stalemate on some of President Trump’s campaign pledges. In special elections, they’ve turned out voters and forced the GOP to spend millions of dollars defending once-safe seats. Their most vulnerable senators, facing a daunting 2018 map, have broken their fundraising records.

But like Republicans after Obama’s victories, Democrats are in a state of constant tension. An energized left-wing base is waging and winning arguments about messaging and strategy. Like the tea party in 2009 and 2010, that base quickly determined the congressional party’s style of opposition; like the tea party, it sees messy public fights as the way out of the doldrums.

“Democrats have to have an argument,” said Robert Borosage, a progressive organizer whose Campaign for America’s Future merged last year into the new group People’s Action. “What Sanders has made clear is that there be a real debate on the left about what our agenda is, and as we debate, we drive that into the Democratic Party.”

The Obama speaking gigs were bound to start a fight. Hillary Clinton’s fees for speeches between her State Department career and presidential bid were a point of contention throughout the 2016 campaign, fueling the primary with Sanders and letting Trump portray his opponent as a corporate puppet. In defending Obama’s speeches, the former president’s team used language that had not worked for Clinton.

“Regardless of venue or sponsor, President Obama will be true to his values, his vision, and his record,” Obama spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement Wednesday evening. “In 2008, Barack Obama raised more money from Wall Street than any candidate in history — and still went on to successfully pass and implement the toughest reforms on Wall Street since FDR.”

With few Trump victories to celebrate, Republicans are highlighting intra-Democratic spats over abortion, accusing the party of being run by its fringe, and taking solace in its lack of leadership. As Trump and congressional Republicans punted on their health-care bill, the Republican National Committee and several party surrogates insisted that it was the Democrats — fresh off a Democratic National Committee “unity tour” with Sanders and DNC Chairman Tom Perez — who were listless.

“I have no idea who the leader of the Democratic Party is,” scoffed White House counselor Kellyanne Conway this past week, on the Trump-friendly morning show “Fox and Friends.” “Is it Tom Perez . . . who was booed routinely through his profanity-laced appearances last week on his disunity tour? Is it Bernie Sanders who won 22 states last year in the Democratic Primary but refuses to call himself a Democrat?”

To Democrats, the mockery sounds like projection. Trump won 46 percent of the popular vote last year; according to CNN’s polling, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s favorable rating has fallen from 46 percent to 38 percent since the start of the year.

But Democrats have not gained much from the contrast. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released last week found that just 28 percent of Americans say that the Democrats were “in touch with the concerns of most people,” 10 points below the number who thought that of America’s wealthiest president. Three years ago, 48 percent of Americans thought the party was “in touch.”

The Democrats’ messaging problems were visible throughout last week, when leaders in Congress held meandering news conferences to attack Trump on his “broken promises.” The muddle started with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who used a “Meet the Press” interview about the use of her image in Republican attack ads to haltingly set up the Democrats’ campaign against Ryan (R-Wis.).

“I think it’s really important for the voters in those districts to know who the candidates will be voting with,” she said. “Will they be voting with Paul Ryan, who wants to eliminate the guarantee of Medicare, who has voted to privatize Social Security, who’s there to dismantle Medicaid?”

The rest of the week’s messaging events made few headlines, apart from an intraparty argument about whether to demand health-care money in the resolution to fund the government. Yet as Republicans had done for years, Democrats in the first 100 days lost faith that mainstream media and Washington news cycles could be fair or worth winning.

“Ultimately I just don’t believe a voter in a competitive district is going to be turned out by a leader in Washington that they don’t see on the news,” said Guy Cecil, the chief strategist of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA.

Boxed out of the national headlines by Trump, Democrats have grown more concerned with what animates their base. Republicans had a field day mocking the Perez-Sanders speaking tour, with cable networks playing footage of Perez being booed by loud minorities of audience members, and abortion rights groups coaxing an apologetic statement out of Perez after Sanders campaigned with an antiabortion candidate for mayor of Omaha.

But Democrats spent much of 2016 watching a Republican Party that looked hopelessly divided, hyping every instance of a Republican criticizing Trump.

“Sometimes things get bumpy,” said Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who narrowly lost the DNC chair’s race to Perez despite being backed by Sanders.

Today’s energy, however, comes from a left that continues to challenge the Democrats to move. Last Tuesday, Connecticut Democrats, who had nearly lost control of their state senate during the Obama presidency, watched a member of the progressive Working Families Party take a safe blue seat. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he was hiring staffers not just for his 2018 reelection, but also to work with the progressive “resistance” groups springing up around the state.

For the most part, Democrats spent the first months of Trump’s presidency responding. Republicans hoped that eight red-state Democrats would feel pressure to confirm Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court; just three did. Smatterings of House Democrats have voted with Republicans to roll back regulations unpopular in their districts; no other Trump agenda item has won bipartisan support.

To the extent that Democrats have a competing agenda, it’s driven by the left. Last week, while Trump announced his tax priorities, Sanders held a rally with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) to introduce the Raise the Wage Act of 2017, which would increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024. It was sponsored by 22 Democrats and no Republicans.

As Sanders criticized Obama’s speaking fees, the academic and left-wing activist Cornel West was asking Sanders, in a column, to “build on the ruins of a dying Democratic party” and start his own third party. West specifically endorsed a “People’s Party” that a few veterans of the Sanders campaign are trying to launch, using every Democratic misstep to make the pitch.

Even while criticizing Democrats, and while refusing to join the party, Sanders has refused to abandon the party. “If there are places in this country where somebody wants to run as an independent, go for it,” he said. “But right now, what’s absolutely imperative is that the Democratic Party be completely reformed.”

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