Origins and History
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/demleadcoun.phpThe Democratic Leadership Council was established in the wake of President Reagan’s landslide victory (winning 49 states) in 1984 over the Democratic Party’s candidate, former Vice President Walter Mondale. During the Democratic convention in San Francisco, Mondale successfully beat back a challenge from Gary Hart, who predicted that unless the Democratic Party adopted a new image it would be decisively defeated. Mondale proved unable to respond effectively to charges from the Republican right and neoconservative Democrats that the Democratic Party was the party of progressives
“Mondale’s landslide defeat exposed as a dead end the vision of regaining the White House by mobilizing an army of the disaffected with a message of unreconstructed liberalism.”
Pondering the Mondale defeat, a gathering coalition of Southern Democrats and northern neoliberals expressed concerns that the Democratic Party faced extinction, particularly in the South and West, if the party continued to rely on its New Deal message of government intervention and kept catering to traditional constituencies of labor, minorities, and anti-war progressives. In 1985 Al From, an aide to Rep. Gillis Long of Louisiana, took the lead in formulating a new messaging strategy for the party’s centrists, neoliberals, and conservatives. Will Marshall, at that time Long’s policy analyst and speechwriter, worked closely with From to establish the DLC and then became its first policy director. Today, Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the DLC think tank he founded. (11)
In his “Saving the Democratic Party” memo of January 1985, Al From advocated the formation of a “governing council” that would draft a “blueprint” for reforming the party. According to From, the new leadership should aim to create distance from “the new bosses”—organized labor, feminists, and other progressive constituency groups—that were keeping the party from modernizing. From’s memo sparked the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in early 1985.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of neoliberal technocrat Dukakis opened up new political room for the DLC and validated its claim that a conservative agenda was the only hope for reviving the Democratic Party. Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who accepted From’s request to become DLC chairman in 1990, helped synthesize the various currents driving the Democratic Party to leave both “New Deal” nostalgia and “New Politics” of the Sixties’ progressives behind. Clinton successfully redefined the Democratic Party, molding it into an organization led by New Democrats, who seized hold of the political center by targeting swing votes of the middle class and advocating the politics of growth rather than redistribution and safety nets. Clinton leaned heavily on polling of Yale University political scientist Stanley Greenberg and on the policy framework outlined by two analysts from the Progressive Policy Institute in their 1989 paper The Politics of Evasion.(8)
In many ways, it was Bill Clinton—not the DLC—who succeeded in giving a human face and viable political program to the New Democrats. Although Clinton adopted most of the DLC platform as his own, he softened its hard ideological edge through compromise and inclusion, drawing in the party’s left-center and center-right. Ralph Nader and other critics of Clinton and the DLC contend that Clinton was a creature of the DLC. But Clinton proved larger than the DLC ideologues, and it was Clinton who made the DLC a major force in the Democratic Party rather than the other way around, as the DLC leadership implies when it takes credit for the 1990’s presidential victories.
Writing shortly before the November 2000 election, John Nichols observed that the DLC had been founded “with essentially the same purpose as the Christian Coalition,” namely, “to pull a broad political party dramatically to the right.” According to Nichols, “the DLC has been far more successful than its headline-grabbing Republican counterpart.” (9) Although the DLC can rightly claim to have yanked the Democratic Party to the right, it has repeatedly failed to sideline what Progressive Policy Institute President Will Marshall has disparaging labeled “the party traditionalists.” Since its founding the DLC has aimed to subsume all Democrats under its ideological umbrella. But persistent (and resurgent) resistance to neoliberal prescriptions, neoconservative foreign policy, and social conservative domestic policies has curtailed DLC ambitions and obliged it to operate more as a powerful agenda-setting and lobbying group within the party. In effect, the DLC has focused on controlling the party’s platform and leadership rather than on selling “big tent” politics to all Democratic Party constituencies.
When Vice President Al Gore, himself a DLC member since its first years, chose Senator Joseph Lieberman, the DLC chairman, to be his running mate, the DLC staff felt triumphal. Although Gore was not a neoliberal “true believer” and national security militarist like Lieberman, in the lead-up to the 2000 party convention, From predicted that soon “we’ll finally be able to proclaim that all Democrats are, indeed, New Democrats.” (9)
More recently, candidate Howard Dean’s criticism that the DLC and its “New Democratic agenda” constituted “the Republican wing of the Democratic Party” highlighted long-running tensions between the party’s center-left and center-right. Dean was roundly criticized for dividing the Democratic Party when unity was needed to defeat President Bush. The party’s leading conservative and recent DLC chair, Joseph Lieberman, lambasted Dean, claiming that his rival for the nomination “essentially pushes Bill Clinton out of the Democratic Party” along with “hundreds of governors and local officials” who consider themselves part of the New Democrat movement. Throughout his campaign, Dean characterized his candidacy as representing “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party
Some Current members....
The DLC’s “leadership team” is, as follows: Senator Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), chairman; Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.); Al From, chief executive officer; Bruce Reed, president; Chuck Alston, executive director; and Holly Page, vice president and political director. From and Reed, together with Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, are the main architects of the DLC center-right political agendas, which are laid out in more detail in the reports of the Progressive Policy Institute and in articles in the DLC’s journal.
The DLC comprises three main clusters of New Democrats. The largest is a group of nearly four-hundred national, state, and local legislators and government officials. This contingent includes a wide range of centrist and conservative Democrats, including the following senators who sought the party’s presidential nomination: John Kerry, John Edwards, Bob Graham, and Joe Lieberman.(6) Perhaps the boundaries of the DLC’s political thrust are more precisely demarcated by mentioning prominent Democrats who have not lent their names to the DLC, including such figures as Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and Dennis Kucinich.
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