What’s so bad about the DLC?

The DLC’s mission is to erase the last vestiges of social democracy from the Democratic Party, so that the corporate consensus will never again be challenged in the United States. Acting as a Republican Trojan Horse in the bowels of the Democratic machinery, the DLC claims the “real” party lives somewhere off to the right, where George Bush dwells, and that minorities, unionists, environmentalists, feminists, men and women of peace – virtually every branch of the party except corporatists – must be purged or muzzled.

the early DLC in an excellent 2001 article – dole out millions of dollars from Republican corporations to buy the party out from under its core constituents. In a now infamous May 15 memo titled, “The Real Soul of the Democratic Party,”DLC founders Al From and Bruce Reed shamelessly steal the people’s very language to advance the corporate cause:

But the great myth of the current cycle is the misguided notion that the hopes and dreams of activists represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. Real Democrats are real people, not activist elites. The mission of the Democratic Party, as Bill Clinton pledged in 1992, is to provide “real answers to the real problems of real people.” Real Democrats who champion the mainstream values, national pride, and economic aspirations of middle-class and working people are the real soul of the Democratic Party, not activists and interest groups with narrow agendas.

Republicans have nothing on the DLC when it comes to slinging code words. In truth, this “rump faction” has no soul. It’s just a big, white corporate pocket. The only masses that count for the DLC are massed dead presidents, stacked high. The From-Reed crowd operates on a cash for favors basis, only. When a corporate deal is brokered for hungry Democrats, the DLC considers the agreement binding, on pain of later impoverishment.

Dreyfuss laid out the “New Democratic Network” fund-raising process in his American Prospect piece, “How the DLC Does It.”

NDN’s brochures sound like investment prospectuses. “NDN acts as a political venture capital fund to create a new generation of elected officials,” says the PAC. “NDN provides the political intelligence you need to make well-informed decisions on how to spend your political capital. Just like an investment advisor, NDN exhaustively vets candidates and endorses only those who meet our narrowly defined criteria …”

To ensure that liberals don’t slip through the cracks, NDN requires each politician who seeks entree to its largesse and contacts to fill out a questionnaire that asks his or her views on trade, economics, education, welfare reform, and other issues. The questions are detailed, forcing candidates to state clearly whether or not they support views associated with the New Democrat Coalition, and it concludes by asking, “Will you join the NDC when you come to Congress?” Next, [the DLC] interviews each candidate, and then NDN determines which candidacies are viable before providing financial support.

It is a textbook model of 21st Century political accountability – not to voters, but to corporations that spend most of their dollars with Republicans. The DLC is, at root, a candidate shakeout mechanism for big business, a clearinghouse for betrayal. Candidates must agree to support the “narrowly defined criteria” of the boardrooms, rather than the needs and aspirations of their constituencies. Every candidate that embraces the DLC has signed off on very specific points of the corporate agenda – a kind of political receipt for services rendered.

Democratic elected officials and candidates from Congress to city council and in practically every state of the union complete detailed questionnaires probing their views on war and peace, on criminal justice, on trade, tax policy and corporate welfare. Their answers are funneled to the national organization where they are meticulously examined. The Democratic incumbents and hopefuls that pass muster are called in for personal interviews by senior staff. Democrats who clear the rigorous screening process are highly recommended to the organization’s corporate constituents as worthy of their wholehearted and generous support.

The DLC doesn’t represent any Democratic Party voters. Its masters include American and United Airlines, Aetna and New York Life Insurance, Microsoft, DuPont, the agribusiness and pharmaceutical industries, Citigroup and, until recently, Enron, among many others. The DLC is an organization conceived in the boardroom and dedicated to the proposition that moneyed interests trump all others. About two hundred corporations comprise its Board of Advisors (fee: $5,000), and nearly 100 pay the cost to be the boss on the DLC’s Policy Roundtable ($10,000 each). For $25,000, around 30 corporate executives pretend to be Democrats as members of the DLC Executive Council. Enron sat there, along with Philip Morris, Texaco, Chevron, and Dupont.

The Democratic Leadership Council is the mother of all corporate Trojan horses, and despite its incompetence at persuading Democratic voters to come to the polls it has come to dominate today’s Democratic Party. These “New Democrats” bring their corporate assets to Philadelphia, July 19, for what they call a “National Conversation” – one in which money does all the talking. Look around for the black faces – they’re under contract or, as DLC founder Al From puts it, “on display”:

The National Conversation is the premier event for New Democratic elected officials from around the country, where rising political stars gather to hear from leading national voices and discuss the ideas and strategies that will shape the country’s future. It is always a great testimonial to the strength, depth, and vitality of the New Democrat movement. Democrats who run, win, and govern in every region of the country, including many swing states and red states, will be on display here.

DLC boss From expects about 300 “New Democrat” elected officials to show up in Philadelphia. That’s about the same as the number of corporations represented in the national DLC, whose “ideas and strategies” the elected officials have signed on to serve. Theoretically, each elected “New Democrat” can buddy up with a corporate executive in Philadelphia, to carry on their own “national conversation” free from meddling by actual voters and, in Al From’s words, “the narrow concerns of interest groups and activists so visible in party caucuses.”

The DLC is the corporate-funded right wing of the Democratic Party. It was founded in the mid 1980s by a small group of mostly white, male, largely southern Democratic politicians, corporate lobbyists and fundraisers. The original clique included Tennessee Congressman Al Gore, Senators Chuck Robb of Virginia and Sam Nunn of Georgia, and Al From, a former political operative from the Jimmy Carter Administration. To them, the Democratic Party had become too open to the political voices of African Americans and Latinos, too respectful of the rights of working Americans and the labor movement, too responsive to the justice, peace and environmental movements. “The DLC thundered against the ‘liberal fundamentalism’ of the party’s base – unionists, blacks, feminists, Greens, and cause groups generally,” wrote Dreyfuss.

Most alarming of all, in their eyes, was the 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, in which the black candidate received a percentage of the vote considerably higher than the proportion of black votes in several states, and sparked a significant expansion of the party’s base constituencies among minorities, labor, and even some white rural voters. The Democratic Party was actually growing – but in the wrong direction to suit the “rump faction” centered in the white South.

Today, after almost two decades of DLC cash subversion and seduction of Democratic candidates and office holders, there is less difference than ever between Democrats and Republicans in state houses and legislatures, in City Halls or on the bench, in Congress or among the so-called “serious” candidates for president. Once again, actual and potential Democratic voters have been deterred from entering a political process that does not address their needs. For its next triumph, the DLC threatens to eviscerate or neutralize the very heart, soul and base of the Democratic Party – the Black Consensus.

The hustlers that founded the DLC noted that vast amounts of corporate money were flowing into the state and national bank accounts of the Reagan-era Republican Party. To qualify for a cut of that largesse for themselves they would have to hijack the Democratic Party and move it to the right, away from its Democratic voting base.

The clique’s objectives were

(a) to move the Democratic Party to the right in order to attract contributions from the oil and insurance industries, from Wall Street and military contractors and whoever else could write the big checks, and

(b) to tailor the Democratic Party’s pitch to attract upwardly mobile conservative white and suburban “swing” voters.

Bill Clinton, the ambitious young governor of Arkansas, was an early DLC star recruit, and Al Gore was its anointed presidential candidate in 1988. Super Tuesday, a multi-state mega-primary centered in the former Confederate states, was engineered by the DLC/New Democrats to be their first electoral coup. By concentrating the weight of the South, Super Tuesday was designed to preemptively narrow the range of choices available to Democratic voters nationwide early in the presidential nominee selection process. It was also deliberately intended to swing the advantage to the candidate who could spend big bucks on simultaneous media campaigns in several states. However, the strategy backfired when Jesse Jackson, on the strength of an unprecedented mobilization of the Democratic “base” vote, won the South Carolina primary outright.

Funded by an impressive array of corporate backers, the DLC/New Democrats founded their own think tank, the elegantly misnamed Progressive Policy Institute, and ground out reams of press releases, corporate-friendly position papers, consultant referrals, in-person and on-air advice to Democrats that they’d better become more like Republicans if they wanted to remain “competitive” – an invitation to make themselves fitting recipients for corporate bribes, a.k.a. big campaign contributions.

The insurgent DLC tinkered with the delegate selection process at Democratic conventions to frustrate the participation of grassroots party activists. They developed their rightist corporate message and they stayed on it. They built an impressive machine to boost each other’s careers and publicize the alleged “new ideas” and “innovative approaches” of their star politicians. Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt and Bill Clinton all served as DLC chairs. Jimmy Carter was involved, as was every southern Democratic governor.

Clinton was the DLC/New Democrat candidate in 1992. Rather than answer the Reaganite myth of the welfare queen, Clinton pandered to it and gave us a “welfare reform” more punitive than anything Reagan-era Republicans could have wrested from the Congress. Following the advice of his DLC advisors to not appear too close to his party’s base – which had nowhere else to go, anyway – New Democrat Clinton took a couple days off during the campaign to fly back to Arkansas and pull the switch on a mentally impaired black convict, and attended an Operation PUSH event specifically to upbraid young black activist Sista Souljah. Once in office, it was Bill Clinton’s DLC advisors who prevailed upon him to make passing NAFTA his first priority rather than working to fulfill his campaign promise to make medical care available to everyone. So it was that during his first two years as president, the only years during which Democrats controlled the Congress, Bill Clinton called in all his chips to get DLC/New Democrats in Congress to vote against the majority of their party caucus and join with the Republican minority to pass NAFTA, directly causing the loss of millions of US jobs to low-wage labor markets elsewhere in the hemisphere.

By 2000 the DLC/New Democrats were firmly in control of the Democratic convention, as well as the process of selecting delegates and the party’s nominees – their old retread from the 80s, Al Gore, and a piously pandering senator and former DLC chairman from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman. DLC/New Democrats at the convention used any means necessary to shut down the “national conversation” that hundreds of grassroots delegates wanted to take up. John Nichols provided a valuable account in the September 2000 issue of The Progressive, “Behind the DLC Takeover.”

“‘We have all these progressive Democrats here ready to fight on issues of economic and social justice, Democrats who know these are the winning issues and who know that when we fail to run on them we lose,” said Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., Democrat of Illinois. “But, in the leadership positions of the party, we have the DLC trying to pull us in an entirely different direction.”

Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone echoed Jackson’s view. “There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans,” he said. “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.”

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The DLC is trying to run the same game in 2004.