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Politico...
The end of the DLC era
By Ben Smith
February 7, 2011
The centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which fought and largely
won a battle for the soul of the Democratic party in the 1990s, is on
the verge of bankruptcy and is closing its doors, its founder, Al From,
confirmed Monday.
The group’s decision to “suspend operations” marks the conclusion of a
long slide from its peak of relevance in the Clinton era, and perhaps
the beginning a battle over its legacy, as the organization’s founders
and allies argue that it has been a victim of its own success – and its
liberal critics are already dancing on its grave.
“A taproot of contemporary centrist ferment is no longer in business,”
said Will Marshall, who co-founded the DLC and its allied think tank,
the Progressive Policy Institute. PPI, which Marshall still runs, spun
off from the DLC in 2009 and is one of a small handful of self-styled
moderate groups seeking the DLC’s mantle as the true home for moderate
Democrats.
“With President Obama consciously reconstructing a winning coalition by
reconnecting with the progressive center, the pragmatic ideas of PPI
and other organizations are more vital than ever,” Marshall said.
The DLC’s demise is, however, is bringing no mournful elegies from the
liberal groups who made its name a synonym for everything they saw as
wrong with Bill Clinton’s party: what they saw as a religion of
compromise, a lack of principle, and a willingness to sell out the poor
and African-American voters at the party’s base.
“One of the things that’s happening right now in Democratic politics is
that progressives are winning the battle for the party,” said
Progressive Congress president Darcy Burner. “The corporate-focused DLC
type of politics isn’t working inside the Democratic party.”
The DLC was formed in the 1980s - the debacle of the 1984 Mondale
campaign was a key motivator - to wage just that kind of intra-party
war against what From and his allies saw as interest-group liberals
content to consign the Democratic Party to minority status. The group
and its best-known chairman, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, pushed
balanced budgets, free trade, tough-on-crime policies, and welfare
reform – all of which alienated the base, but became a key part of
Clinton’s “New Democrat” agenda and his presidential legacy.
Though it was business-friendly and often cast as a corporate tool –
or, as Jesse Jackson once put it, “Democrats for the leisure class” –
the DLC had at its core an idea, the seed of the international “third
way” movement that produced Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
and other leaders on the center-left. Indeed, its financial collapse
could prove, in a backhanded way, that it wasn’t just the tool of
monied interests since it is shutting its doors for lack of cash.
The DLC’s raison d’etre, though, became less clear once Democratic
moderates had already taken back the party. And after the Clinton
years, it picked what many Democrats still see as the wrong fights.
In particular, its support for President George W. Bush’s invasion of
Iraq – which most Democrats now view as one of the most profound
mistakes of a generation – proved a key break from the emerging
consensus of the party, and one from which it probably never recovered.
That choice echoed through DLC battles with Vermont Governor Howard
Dean in 2004, and From’s support for Joe Lieberman’s independent Senate
candidacy against a Democratic nominee in 2006. Many Democrats never
forgave the group for its compromises during a decade during which
Bush’s slim governing majority was viewed as more an accident than a
cause for rethinking their basic assumptions.
In the Obama era, the group has simply struggled for relevance. Its
leaders remained close to the Clintons, and presumptive Democratic
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton headlined the DLC’s 2006 annual
gathering in Denver. But as Hillary Clinton’s presidential fortunes
waned, so did the DLC’s influence. By the summer of 2008, the
organization was kicking off its annual meeting a mere block from
Senator Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago - but the
candidate didn’t find time to drop by.
The organizational issues that followed, and seemingly delivered the
final blow, were more mundane. DLC CEO Bruce Reed, a former senior
Clinton White House aide, decided in 2009 that the group should be more
of a thinktank and less a networking outfit, sending its sister
organization, PPI, out on its own and splitting the groups’ diminishing
resources and fundraising base. But Reid left last year to become Vice
President Joe Biden’s chief of staff, and the group was unable to
recruit a successor with his – much less From’s – capacity to raise the
money to keep the group alive, people involved said.
Read the complete story at Politico:
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