ANTA FE, N.M., June 19 - More than two dozen witnesses, from former cabinet secretaries to unemployed textile workers, spent hours on Friday attacking President Bush's domestic policies and no time squabbling among themselves in the last of three public hearings to help the Democratic Party write its 2004 national platform.

There were no flare-ups, rude banners or angry disagreements. Not even a whisper of discontent. It was a far cry from the days when Democrats regularly savaged one another over issues like the Vietnam War, civil rights and abortion.

"That's due to such an overwhelming flood of feeling in the party at the moment that we've got to trim our differences and do whatever is necessary to beat Bush," said Don Fowler, a South Carolina lawyer and former national Democratic Party chairman who was among those listening in the audience. "It's not as much fun this way, but I've never seen the party so united."

The polite and sparsely attended event - the audience never exceeded two dozen - took place here in the gymnasium at the Indian School, established in 1890 to educate the children of American Indians.

The Democratic Platform Drafting Committee had already met in May in Portland, Ore., to hear testimony about domestic security, then on June 5 in Baton Rouge, La., to focus on foreign policy and national security.

A June 11 hearing in Ohio, was canceled after the death of former President Ronald Reagan, forcing the committee to schedule a day and a half of testimony in Santa Fe to cover the remaining domestic issues.

On July 9, the group will present its proposed draft to the 186 members of the Democratic Platform Committee, who will in turn approve the document that will be presented to delegates to the party's national convention in Boston in late July.

In reality, party platforms carry no authority beyond providing a kind of snapshot of the leadership's thinking and a distillation of its assessment of the public's mood.

William Perry, a defense secretary in the Clinton administration and a member of the drafting committee, said the process offered at least one concrete benefit. "It gives people who want to have a voice a chance to have a voice," Mr. Perry said. "It invests them in the process."

For eight hours on Friday, and then four more on Saturday morning, speaker after speaker belittled recent signs of job growth and economic recovery as far too modest, and derided the president's stewardship of the environment and civil liberties. They painted a bleak picture of working-class and middle-class life under the Bush administration.

On Friday, two women who lost their jobs asked for help keeping jobs from going overseas. American Indian leaders objected to program cuts. Educators called for more money and attention. And small-business owners asked for help with rising health insurance costs.

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico asked the committee to include a substantial section on education. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas did the same for health care. And Gov. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin pressed the case for stem-cell research.

Then on Saturday, committee members heard testimony about energy ("Deregulation wasn't just a bust, it was theft," said Jim Dushaw of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), the environment (Democrats must save America from "a wholesale abandonment of environmental standards in order to appease the president's campaign contributors," said Leon G. Billings, a former Maryland state legislator) and civil liberties ("We're not asking for wholesale repeal of the Patriot Act," said Laura Murphy, director of the Washington, D.C., office of the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're saying fix it").

Comments from Robert B. Reich, former labor secretary in the Clinton administration, came in written form because a late plane caused him to miss the event. But Mr. Reich offered an impassioned attack on the president's economic agenda.

"In a time of terrorism, war and continued economic hardship for many households, these policies are shameful," he said. "Republicans preach we're-all-in-this-together patriotism but practice what is, in fact, scathing divisiveness. The cruel irony of our time is that they're getting away with this by diverting the nation's attention to external threats."