Back in April 2001, Robert Dreyfuss wrote and excellent article in The American Prospect on how the DLC goes about their business. I want to quote a big chunk of it here so people can get a sense for what the DLC is really all about.
Representative Gregory Meeks, an African-American lawyer and assistant district attorney elected to Congress in 1998 to represent a middle-class black neighborhood in Queens, New York, was undecided last year on the divisive issue of trade rights for China. Lobbyists for big business were battling the AFL-CIO and environmental groups on Capitol Hill for every vote, and Meeks, who’d previously voted against granting fast-track negotiating authority to President Clinton, was a prize.
Sensing an opportunity, Representative Cal Dooley, a moderate California Democrat closely allied with that state’s high-tech sector, moved in. As co-chairman of the House New Democrat Coalition, a bloc allied with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Dooley was targeting fence-sitters to vote aye. Along with fellow New Democrats Harold Ford, Jr., of Tennessee and Bob Matsui of California, Dooley hooked Meeks up with a stream of corporate officials from Silicon Valley and the New York financial district. “My boss made sure there’d be support for Meeks from the business community,” says a Dooley aide. “He spread the word, through groups like the Business Roundtable, that here was a guy who deserved their support.”
“Congressman Dooley helped bring in businesses who otherwise Congressman Meeks would not have known, and didn’t have a relationship with, to knock on his door. As a result, scores of meetings were held with the congressman,” says an aide to Meeks, citing sit-downs with the CEOs of American Airlines and New York Life Insurance Company. High-tech executives helped ensure that Meeks would be one of two undecided members to accompany President Clinton on his high-profile trip to China before the vote, the aide said; and Meeks also won significant backing from industry political action committees, which ended up nearly matching labor’s donations to Meeks’s campaign treasury. Included were $5,000 PAC contributions from American Airlines and New York Life. And in the end, Meeks voted business’s way.
The DLC’s effort to win Meeks’s vote was part of a vigorous campaign by New Democrats to assure legislators that business groups would replace campaign contributions from labor lost by a pro-business China vote. In The New Democrat, the DLC’s monthly magazine, Washington’s most powerful business lobbyist, Thomas J. Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote that even though some members of Congress risked losing the AFL-CIO’s support, “business will stick by Democrats on the China trade vote.”
Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, “We’re trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way,” he adds, “they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win.”
Part of this is fairly straightforward. The DLC works to make sure than any Democrat that wants to vote against the interests of labor unions will not suffer because their campaign contributions will be made good by corporate donations. It’s a straight co-option of the Democratic Party by corporate interests.
But, things are a bit more complicated than that. The DLC was formed in 1985 after the crushing defeat of Walter Mondale. Many Democrats, correctly, determined that something needed to change in how the party functioned because it was getting its ass handed to it in presidential elections. It’s not easy to define exactly what they thought the problem was…but it became common wisdom that the party was perceived as soft on defense (remember the nuclear freeze movement?) and overly beholden to Great Society programs.
The solution was to move to the center on economic issues, soften our stances on social issues, and talk tough on foreign policy. But, there was a problem. How to remain competitive financially?
It’s probably a chicken and egg argument at this point, but the New Democrats found corporate America happy to fund them and make up any losses from more traditional activist groups. Some might argue that corporate interests were behind the movement from the start, but I believe the DLC’s corporate ties developed organically and symbiotically.
The DLC’s desire to appear tough on defense (represented by support for large military budgets and an interventionist and expansionist (NATO) foreign policy) certainly appealed to defense contractors. And Clinton continued George H.W. Bush’s policy of privatizing military functions.
It shouldn’t come as enormous surprise, then, that when it came time to vote on authorization to use military force against Iraq in 2002, all the New Democrats in the Senate (except Kent Conrad and Debbie Stabenow) voted to give authorization.
The New Dems were suffering from a toxic brew of compelling interests. They felt the Democrats had hurt themselves by opposing the first Persian Gulf War, they supported an interventionist foreign policy, and they had developed a financial stake in the game.
Take a look at the financial stake.
While the DLC will not formally disclose its sources of contributions and dues, the full array of its corporate supporters is contained in the program from its annual fall dinner last October, a gala salute to Lieberman that was held at the National Building Museum in Washington. Five tiers of donors are evident: the Board of Advisers, the Policy Roundtable, the Executive Council, the Board of Trustees, and an ad hoc group called the Event Committee–and companies are placed in each tier depending on the size of their check. For $5,000, 180 companies, lobbying firms, and individuals found themselves on the DLC’s board of advisers, including British Petroleum, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Coca-Cola, Dell, Eli Lilly, Federal Express, Glaxo Wellcome, Intel, Motorola, U.S. Tobacco, Union Carbide, and Xerox, along with trade associations ranging from the American Association of Health Plans to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. For $10,000, another 85 corporations signed on as the DLC’s policy roundtable, including AOL, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Citigroup, Dow, GE, IBM, Oracle, UBS PacifiCare, PaineWebber, Pfizer, Pharmacia and Upjohn, and TRW.
And for $25,000, 28 giant companies found their way onto the DLC’s executive council, including Aetna, AT&T, American Airlines, AIG, BellSouth, Chevron, DuPont, Enron, IBM, Merck and Company, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Texaco, and Verizon Communications. Few, if any, of these corporations would be seen as leaning Democratic, of course, but here and there are some real surprises. One member of the DLC’s executive council is none other than Koch Industries, the privately held, Kansas-based oil company whose namesake family members are avatars of the far right, having helped to found archconservative institutions like the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy. Not only that, but two Koch executives, Richard Fink and Robert P. Hall III, are listed as members of the board of trustees and the event committee, respectively–meaning that they gave significantly more than $25,000.
The DLC board of trustees is an elite body whose membership is reserved for major donors, and many of the trustees are financial wheeler-dealers who run investment companies and capital management firms–though senior executives from a handful of corporations, such as Koch, Aetna, and Coca-Cola, are included. Some donate enormous amounts of money, such as Bernard Schwartz, the chairman and CEO of Loral Space and Communications, who single-handedly finances the entire publication of Blueprint, the DLC’s retooled monthly that replaced The New Democrat. “I sought them out, after talking to Michael Steinhardt,” says Schwartz. “I like them because the DLC gives resonance to positions on issues that perhaps candidates cannot commit to.”
What this really amounts to is the purchase of the Democratic Party by international corporations. At the same time, there are a plethora of formerly liberal journalists and talking heads that monopolize the public debate for the left. You won’t see populists or union activists or truly progressive minorities speaking for the party on your television and you won’t read them very often in your newspapers.
They are implacably opposed to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and will use every opportunity to denigrate and marginalize us, or to buy us out.
And the problem is, aside from the fact that they haven’t brought us electoral success in recent elections, this pro-business, pro-interventionist wing of the party has capitulated entirely in the era of George W. Bush. They are nearly as responsible for our present catastrophe at the neo-conservatives that took their project off its rails.
It’s my firm belief that the New Democrats would have taken us down this path sooner or later on their own, although it would have taken longer and would have had softer edges.
This is what Hillary Clinton offers us in the 2008 presidential elections. To be sure, she is not a robot and she has her own idiosyncrasies. She will not govern exactly like her husband, nor will she be indistinguishable from George W. Bush. But she is not a break with the past. She is a continuation of the past. Bill Clinton was a successful president in many ways, but his policies are not appropriate for new times.
The American experiment with the New World Order needs to be re-examined, not perpetuated with a friendly face.
The blogosphere represents a truly populist turn in American politics. No longer can the corporate media and the DLC provide an unrebutted and one-sided and distorted picture of the aspirations of the left in this country. Our voices are being heard. We are moving the debate back to the left, which is making it possible for truly populist and non-interventionist Democrats to win again on a state-wide and national level.
We must recognize our enemy before it is too late. We cannot settle for another DLC presidential nominee. Say no to the New Dems…locally, statewide, and nationally.
