They are the memos that I think have been part of conditioning the leaders of the Democratic Party to view the liberals, activists, the left...whatever the name...with skepticism.
I believe they came about because someone questioned the leadership of the think tank leaders who wrote the memos. Those policy setters felt threatened in 2003, and they did what they had to do to hold their power over policy.
First the Memos by the DLC leaders.
The first one came in May 2003, not long after Howard Dean reiterated Wellstone's words about the group wanting the party to be kinder and gentler Republicans. They not only attacked him, they went after his supporters.
The Real Soul of the Democratic PartyBy Al From and Bruce Reed.
Not only is the activist wing out of line with Democratic tradition, but it is badly out of touch with the Democratic rank-and-file. In 1996, a survey by the Washington Post compared the views of delegates to the Democratic convention to those of registered Democratic voters. The delegates perfectly mirrored the Democratic electorate in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender. But they could not have been more different when it came to class and education. Democratic delegates were nearly five times more likely than Democratic rank-and-file to have incomes over $75,000, three times more likely to have a college degree, and over four times more likely to have done postgraduate work. No wonder that when the New Yorker recently asked Karl Rove to describe the Democratic base, he said, "somebody with a doctorate."
Comparing the convention delegates to the rank and file of the party....a very strange thing to do. Even stranger is to point out the degrees and salaries of the delegates. Very odd thing to do.
Unlike Gov. Howard Dean, we never forget to give the late Sen. Paul Wellstone credit for coining the phrase, "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." We often disagreed with Sen. Wellstone on the issues, but we always knew he was fighting for the little guy.
But the great myth of the current cycle is the misguided notion that the hopes and dreams of activists represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. Real Democrats are real people, not activist elites. The mission of the Democratic Party, as Bill Clinton pledged in 1992, is to provide "real answers to the real problems of real people." Real Democrats who champion the mainstream values, national pride, and economic aspirations of middle-class and working people are the real soul of the Democratic Party, not activists and interest groups with narrow agendas.
They coined the term "interest groups" and said we had narrow agendas.
This next part is really quite insulting. However the party leaders in DC and many states totally accepted the premise about those at the lower levels of the party.
Clinton understood what too many others are prone to forget: most Democrats are doers, not ideologues. They don't vote to make a statement; they vote in hopes of getting things done. They want social progress, but they're not on a social crusade. Most Democrats aren't elitists who think they know better than everyone else; they are everyone else. They don't swoon when they hear a candidate say it's time for Democrats to dream again. What they want is the American Dream, where everybody who works hard and plays by the rules has the chance to get ahead.
Elitists? Swoon? Social crusade?
The next memo came in July 2003:
It was by the same two fellows who wrote the first.
Activists are out of stepThey had to do this they thought because the party activism and excitement was growing because of the anger over the Iraq invasion.
Most of those party activists the candidates are trying so hard to please are wildly out of touch not only with middle America but with the Democratic rank and file. The great myth of the campaign is the misguided notion that the hopes and dreams of party activists and single-issue groups represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. They don't.
The fact is, "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean likes to call it, is an aberration, a modern-day version of the old McGovern wing of the party, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist interest-group liberalism at home. That wing lost the party 49 states in two elections and turned a powerful national organization into a much weaker, regional one.
When you are an aberration, then people don't have to take you seriously. The choice of words against activists were amazingly insulting.
When Dean dropped out of the race he wrote some scathing things about the way this group was hurting the party. It did not go over very well. Just an example:
Dean: "They turned their back on their core constituencies, in some cases under the guise of being "New Democrats." In fact, they relabeled their "core constituences" as "special interest groups," whose influence, they tried to tell the public, had to be avoided like the plague."
He refers to this quote from Time Magazine in 1995 in which Al From told Time that "a long-term majority will never be created around the interests represented by Jesse (Jackson) and the labor unions".
Dean further states that "the real problem, of course, is that Jesse Jackson and the labor unions form the core of the people who traditionally have elected Democrats. It is not an accident that members of labor unions and African-American voters became less interested in the Democratic Party as we crept to the right......we began to lose elections up and down the ballot with increasing regularity." END SNIP
From You Have the Power, pp. 63, 64.
There was an article in Alternet in 2004 which pretty well sums up the campaign.
The DLC reacted with fury to the Dean candidacy, going all out to torpedo his momentum. Although Democratic nominees soon piled on the "bash-Dean" bandwagon, earlier attacks were carried out by DLC operatives. There was even the smell of scandal when two top Democratic candidates were found sharing information about Dean in an attempt to slow him down.
This is where Dean lost a crucial ally -- the mainstream media also joined in on the anti-Dean feeding frenzy. In his early days, he had flayed big media for caving in to George Bush on Iraq, and media giants never forgave him for this. In the same week, Time and Newsweek ran "Who is the Real Howard Dean?" stories. One cover showed a face covered in dark shadows, another showed an incomplete jigsaw puzzle! Semioticians take note -- bad guys in westerns always have their faces obscured in shadows!
In the end, Dean threatened a troika of powerful institutions. He was a threat to the political parties (because he attacked Democrats' centrist drift), to media (because he criticized their cowardly reporting) and to big business (because he would roll back chummy tax-benefits for corporations). All three institutions responded with venom and destroyed Dean's candidacy. In 1968, a bullet ended Robert Kennedy's anti-establishment candidacy. In 2004, the methods used were more subtle, but just as effective.
The Assassination of Howard DeanIt disturbed the DLC think tank even more when Dean became chairman. His goal was to build activism, to build the party from the ground up. That was not what this group wanted.
The essence of Dean's goalsCritics like to say Dean's 50-state strategy will "destroy the Democratic party" and claim there "is no Democratic establishment." Both claims are specious. There are in fact two parties, one composed of activists who believe in what the party is all about, the other consisting of professionals who say they are trying to implement that vision.
Once people cross the line from just complaining (as bloggers often do) to getting in the line and working (which Dean wants people to do) these lines start to blur a bit. Those who were just complaining start to see the problems more clearly. They may find themselves fighting corporate interests within the party, even waging primary fights, but their involvement is what makes the party go.
.."Dean's 50-state strategy is designed to create activists. It's designed to turn bloggers into activists, to turn people concerned with just local issues into activists, and to connect all these people to the top reaches of the party through the Internet and a self-sustaining pyramid of bloggers acting as a "jungle telegraph" between the bottom and the top.
The activists banding together are starting to have some wins. Not a lot yet, but now and then.
Al From continued the assault on activists after the November 2006 wins. He knew things were still not going his way.
He used the terms "bend knee to noisy activists.". So very insulting.
There's a perception in some media and political circles that Democratic White House wannabes, like their Republican counterparts, must systematically bend the knee to ideologically inflexible and noisy party activists to have any prayer of nomination or election. Democrats must adopt a centrist course I believe that is why it is so hard to get leadership to take activists seriously. They have used the terms against us for years, and I am quite sure the leaders of the party have absorbed them well.
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