Mike Lux, over at OpenLeft explains why he has a problem with the Democratic Leadership Council:
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.
