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.
Let me ask you all a question. Does this description of the DLC not also perfectly describe the attitude of ostensibly left-leaning pundits of a certain age, like Joe Klein, Howard Fineman, Tom Friedman, and Chris Matthews? These three factors: obsession with military toughness, a compulsion to attack liberals and progressives, and a pro-corporate attitude…all combine to create a toxic stew.
I was born in 1969. I look at these people and see battered spouse syndrome. Yeah, I know that they are being paid really well to shill for corporate America, but I think they really have internalized a worldview where liberals are out of touch with mainstream American values and conservatives will win elections in perpetuity unless we adopt their rhetoric and a lot of their policies.
These are people that seem to actually believe that Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) brought down the Soviet Union.
What they have not come to terms with is the viciousness of the modern conservative movement. When Bill and Hillary came into office and tried to create universal health care, the right went crazy and so did the corporate press. This is from Haynes Johnson and David Broder’s book The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point, (p.275):
Now Whitewater was everywhere, and affecting everyone. It seeped into conversations, leaped out in daily headlines, blared from television sets, boomed on radio talk show commentary, and became the subject of increasingly venomous conspiracy theories- about Vince Foster, the Clintons, the Rose Law Firm- in broadcasts, in publications, in full-page newspaper ads. In one week in mid-March, at the peak of the press frenzy, the nation’s seven largest newspapers published ninety-two Whitewater stories. During that one month, the three TV networks aired one hundred and twenty-six Whitewater stories. By comparison, from the first of the year to the end of March, the three networks aired one hundred seven stories on Bosnia, fifty-six on the Middle East, and forty-two on the health care debate. More Whitewater newspaper stories were published in major newspapers than on the combined total of health care, welfare, and crime legislation.
These are the same papers and networks that employ pundits like Klein, Friedman, Fineman, and Matthews. If you ask them, they’ll tell you that universal health care was an idea that was too far left for the American public. What they won’t tell you is how the public was completely deluged with anti-health care propaganda-tied to a bogus real estate scandal-by their colleagues, and their employers.
If the DLC and the so-called liberal corporate press would stop attacking liberals and progressives, then maybe we could actually sustain support for universal health care, or a less imperialistic foreign policy, or a more worker friendly trade policy. It isn’t that the American people don’t want these things. When you poll them, they say they do want these things. But, the DLC and the corporate press keep joining with Republicans and business interests to marginalize the left and push their ideas out of the mainstream. That is what has to stop. The blogosphere/netroots is one of the more important vehicles for pushing back against the anti-progressive influences of the DLC and the punditocracy.
