I SEE WHERE the Democratic Leadership Council invited Martin O'Malley to New York in an effort to suck the young Baltimore mayor into its conservative-leaning, servant-to-Wall Street ranks before it's too late.

Hoping to strike while the iron is hot and forge O'Malley into another pretty but mush-mouthed politician like Bill Clinton, the DLC got the mayor and the former president on stage for some schmoozy photographs and another one of those famous council discussions about the Democratic Party's future.

I hope O'Malley's smart enough to recognize the DLC for what it is - an elephant in donkey hide.

Since the 1980s, the DLC has been promising a New Democratic Party but all it has come up with is Clinton and Republican Lite. (Jesse Jackson calls it "Democrats for the Leisure Class.") It has done little more than move the Democratic Party to the right and, in the process, muddle its identity.

It was after Ronald Reagan's landslide re-election victory over Walter Mondale in 1984 that some Southern, conservative Democrats decided that their party could never win major elections as long as it was identified with unions, minorities, environmentalists and other activist movements. Democrats were considered soft on crime, too, so the DLC embraced the death penalty - a flashcard that its handpicked candidates could use as tough-on-crime bona fides.

O'Malley presents a dilemma for the DLC. His anti-crime crusade in Baltimore has won him national attention, but he opposes capital punishment.

There was no such problem with Clinton, the DLC's golden boy.

As governor of Arkansas, he supported the death penalty, and even approved lethal injection for Rickey Ray Rector, a brain-damaged killer who was put to death in the midst of Clinton's 1992 campaign for the White House.

Clinton demonstrated that the "new Democrat" was capable of just about anything - no matter how morally abhorrent or intellectually dishonest - to lock up voters who had been sliding across to the Republican side.

You could hear an echo of this kind of thinking the other day in his comments to the DLC. Clinton said that in the fall campaigns, Democrats did not press homeland security enough, and he suggested that raising constitutional questions about security efforts allowed right-wing candidates to accuse Democrats of lacking patriotism. "When people are feeling insecure," he said, "they'd rather have someone who is strong and wrong [Bush] than someone who is weak and right."

America's adolescent president has now graduated and he's coming back to give motivational speeches to freshmen. Great.

Clinton is telling O'Malley, in effect, to do things his way - go to the middle, muddle everything up so no one knows what you stand for, cynically talk a good game about being a friend of the poor while padding up the campaign treasury with corporate donations, look at opinion polls before you decide anything - and you, too, can be president someday.

Haven't we had enough of this guy? Clinton stands for everything and stands for nothing. He squandered his mandate and his political gifts. And he left the Democratic Party with an identity crisis.

Martin O'Malley is correct when he says a lack of a clear and well-articulated Democratic agenda shouldn't be confused with a national shift to the right - or with a dismissal of liberal ideas.

The Democrats had plenty of opportunity to make progress with middle-class voters this year. The Enron scandal, the vast disparity in wealth, the growing millions of Americans without health insurance, the Republicans' steadfast resistance to more fuel-efficient automobiles and reliance on fossil fuels, the efforts to relax standards for air pollution - all of this would have provided grand fodder for Democratic candidates had they and their party not been co-opted by the likes of the DLC.

The DLC has spent so much time messing with the body chemistry of the Democratic Party that the head no longer knows what it's doing.

Two years ago, Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone told The Progressive: "There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans. I want us to compete for that great mass of voters that want a party that will stand up for working Americans, family farmers, and people who haven't felt the benefits of the economic upturn."

Martin O'Malley speaks much the same way when he speaks of saving Baltimore from the ground up, broken neighborhood by broken neighborhood. He's a smart coalition builder, and he has a populist vision that has won him fans far beyond the city limits. Here's hoping he doesn't get snookered by all the DLC's schmoozery and flattery.

The road needs to diverge for him at some point, but he needn't take the muddy, middle path. There's no guarantee there. There's no there there.