| Here are the reasons for my more nuanced feelings. The first is purely a reflection of my insider status, that I know a lot of the folks over there, and like a lot of them personally. Bruce Reed, for example, is as friendly and as decent a guy personally as anyone I know in D.C. Al From, when he's not reflexively attacking liberals, labor folks and peace people, can actually be an interesting person to talk to, and has some fun wonky qualities. But beyond personal considerations, I have appreciated a couple of things historically about the DLC: one is that they did champion some unconventional thinking that, in its day, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, did challenge some Democratic conventional wisdom in a positive way, and resulted in some good policy-making in the Clinton era. National Service, a big increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit, re-inventing government (which despite its reputation among progressives, was a really important thing: Gore really did shrink bureaucracy, reduce paperwork, open up government processes to citizens, and make the federal government programs easier to navigate), and 100,000 cops on the streets were all really good things in my view, and they probably wouldn't have happened without the DLC. They were the kind of new ideas that made middle-class swing voters in the 1990s more comfortable with the Democratic Party.
The other thing I appreciate is that Democratic politicians in many red and purple states sometimes need to be able to say they are moderates, and the DLC has given lots of politicians, including ones who were pretty progressive such as Al Gore and Tom Vilsack, the kind of moderate label they felt they needed to govern as progressives in those red/purple states. And, while I know some will disagree with this, at the end of the day, I don't give a damn what label a politician feels like they need to give themselves as long as they vote and govern on a mostly progressive agenda, especially if they're from a red or purple state.
If the DLC had positioned themselves as a centrist think tank that would take on the entrenched Democratic sacred cows and give Democratic politicians the centrist credentials they needed to win in tough states, I would still have disagreed with them much of the time, but would be fine with that contribution to the political dialogue. And if they were as conciliatory toward progressives as Ford was early in the Meet the Press discussion, before he went to the anti-Semitic bullshit, all the better. But the tragedy of the DLC, what has made them radioactive to the vast majority of the Democratic Party, is three things that are locked into their DNA:
First, it's the obsession with being "tough" on foreign policy at all costs. As David Sirota and others have written, there was a whole generation of tough-on-the-Commies Democrats who saw the McGovern campaign in 1972 as their ultimate vindication- if Democrats weren't "tough" enough on foreign policy, we would get beat like McGovern did. You see this philosophy in the Ford attack on Harry Reid.
Second, the intrinsic tendency, which they just won't walk away from, to trash progressives and most other Democrats time and time again since their founding in 1985. From and other DLC spokespeople have launched one verbal assault after another against labor, peace groups, and other progressive forces, as well as against mainstream and progressive Democratic politicians. They go out of their way to pick these fights. When Vilsack, who had governed as a progressive and had great ties to unions, was chair, he asked From to meet with union folks to work out at least some of their differences, but since Tom has left, I've seen no evidence of even that kind of outreach.
They can't seem to help themselves, even when they pick the right side of the issue. Classic story: Grover Norquist and his fellow right-wingers launched a massive assault at the heart of the labor movement with the so-called "paycheck protection" ballot initiative, a.k.a. Proposition 226, in California. Carefully drafted to sound like it was protecting union members from nasty union bureaucrats, it started out at the mid-70s in the polling, and it would take a huge coalition effort to beat it. I was at PFAW at the time, and we took a position against it, and I volunteered to help work on getting as many groups as possible to come out against it. I decided to go to Al From, because I figured that this initiative was far enough right-wing that Al would be against it, and getting a centrist group aligned with business to do a letter against it could be helpful in isolating this initiative as truly extreme. I also thought Al might see this as a good chance to build a bridge to the labor movement.
To my delight, he agreed to send a letter opposing Proposition 226. But when the letter came, I had to laugh. I don't have a copy still lying around to quote directly from it, but it started out saying that the DLC disagreed with labor on a great many things, and then proceeded to list them, going on for perhaps four paragraphs. Finally, at the end, the letter said that in spite of all the disagreements, they had concluded that Proposition 226 was not a good idea. It was like they couldn't bring themselves to just say that labor had a legitimate right to exist and organize its members politically, they had to write a letter that insulted labor even as they took their side on an issue.
Which brings me to my third point. Because they have never built a mass base for their style of centrism, their entire operation has, by its nature, relied almost entirely on corporate elites for its financial support. As a result, the DLC-style of centrism is a quintessentially big business-style of centrism. That's why their pollsters, principally Mark Penn, whose main clientele is also big business, are so determined to never find any evidence of populism among the electorate. In fact, many of their financial supporters are not Democrats at all.
Another quick story: I'm sure many of you remember, because I've blogged about it multiple times, my strong loyalty to my old friend Tom Vilsack, who chaired the DLC before Ford. Tom lives in a small Republican town in a very Republican county, and was the first Democratic governor elected in Iowa in over 30 years. Given that, he always wanted to be seen as a moderate, even though he governed as a progressive, and given that he was a small-state governor who never paid attention to the reputations of the various groups, when he was approached to chair the DLC, he thought that having moderate credentials wasn't a bad thing. So he agreed to do it. I still wish he hadn't, but I understand why he did it from his perspective.
Anyway, as a result of being friends with Tom, I occasionally traveled around with him in 2006 when he was DLC chair, so I went to some DLC events that year. Some of them were classically wonky events about local infrastructure and small business issues where some decent ideas surfaced. (If these were the kind of events the DLC really focused on, I would like them a lot more.) But the fundraisers were funny (at least to me), because so many Republicans showed up for them. I was with him at one in California where we were chatting with a DLC donor who said that they thought Schwarzenegger was a great governor. Tom laughed, thinking he was kidding, and the guy said, "No, I'm serious." And a couple of other people in the circle jumped in to say they liked Schwarzenegger, too. I thought Tom was going to have a stroke. He replied, "If you think Schwarzenegger is a great governor, you clearly have no idea what a good governor is capable of. You should get out more."
If the DLC's centrism was more based in the real concerns you actually find in swing voters in purple states about the progressive agenda, in their sense that too much government spending was wasted, in their fears that liberal coastal elites don't share the same values about religion and family and being tough on terrorists that they do, I could respect that centrism more, because as I've written, I do believe that we need some Midwestern and Western working class voters to win national elections. The problems are real for Democratic politicians, but the big business centrism espoused by the DLC doesn't play with those swing state, swing voters at all. There just aren't that many swing voters in Ohio worried about how health insurance, drug or oil companies are being unfairly beat up by Democratic candidates. This corporate-centered centrism, steeped in the culture of caution on every major issue that I wrote about a couple of days ago, has little connection to anything other than the financial base of the DLC.
I think the DLC is in a defensive crouch that they may never get out of. On the one hand, as they always have been, they are afraid of Republicans every time they call Democrats soft of terror, soft on defense or when they say we are class warriors. But I also think, as Ford's opening indicates, that they are realizing that they have lost the battle over the soul of the Democratic Party, and that their only hope for influence is if they can seem like they are reaching out to us. If they were sincere in that effort, I would be glad to work with them on issues where we can agree. But when they say they want to reach out, and then attack Harry Reid as playing into the terrorists' hands, or attack DailyKos for its "anti-Semitic" comments, it's hard to take them seriously.
I'd be interested in knowing what the OpenLeft.com community thinks about this analysis, and whether you agree. |
