Reply #48: Blueprint quote, that's why I disagree! [View All]

[sandnsea]

http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/7/dreyfuss-r.html Look, I'll most likely vote for Kerry. I just do not agree with the DLC.

"I listened to Gore's speech at the convention with incredulity," says William Galston, a longtime DLCer who served as domestic policy adviser to President Clinton and who is currently a special consultant for Blueprint....

After his populist turn, Gore surged in the polls in August and early September, and many analysts credited his fiery attacks on pharmaceutical companies, HMOs and health insurers, Big Oil, and George W. Bush's tax cuts for the rich. "When I came on in July, Gore was already beginning to move in a populist direction," says Stan Greenberg, Gore's pollster for the last few months of the campaign. Brought in to replace Mark Penn, the chief pollster for both Clinton and the DLC, Greenberg helped move Gore to the left, targeting the candidate's message to recapture white working-class voters in the $30,000-to-$50,000 income range. On the ground, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, and other components of the Old Democrats' traditional voter base--organized labor, African Americans, Hispanics, abortion rights activists--conducted intensive voter education and the get-out-the-vote drives, and these groups now take credit for delivering Gore's popular vote victory.

But the DLC is having none of it. While acknowledging the importance of the old Democratic Party base, after the election Al From blasted Gore for alienating upscale "wired workers" in the new economy, the swing voters in comfortable suburbs who, he says, were turned off by Gore's populist message. In a special issue of Blueprint entitled "Why Gore Lost," From issued a scathing broadside against his former New Democratic ally. "By emphasizing class warfare," wrote From, "he seemed to be talking to Industrial Age America, not Information Age America."

Key to the DLC's political strategy is its belief that American workers are no longer attracted by the Democrats' support for the New Deal and the Great Society because they are entering the upper-middle class in droves. "You can't have class warfare without classes," says Peter Ross Range, the editor of Blueprint. "All these guys have boats in their backyards."