Why The Democratic Party ACTS THE WAY It Does

[Segami]

Today, From’s and Clinton’s political children are everywhere. To pick a random state, Rhode Island, financier Gina Raimondo is now Governor, and Clinton advisor Ira Magaziner’s son Seth Magaziner is now the state Treasurer. Most senior advisors in the Obama White House were trained in the Clinton White House. Institutionally, the party is dominated by a DLC approach to the legislature where the Presidency is utterly dominant. Even when the Democrats won majorities in the House and Senate from 2007–2011, they looked almost entirely to leadership from the White House. This is in stark contrast to the New Deal era, when legislative initiatives often came from Congress (as did oversight). The DLC approach to governing, which leads to concentrations of economic power in the private sector and concentrations of power in the White House, is simply what the American public now thinks is the system. There is no organized competition to the DLC, which is why its political heirs still hold power domestically and globally despite bailouts and corruption. That is the strength of the architecture From helped create.

~snip~

Everything is put on the table, except the main course — policy. Did the Democrats run the government well? Are the lives of voters better? Are you as a political party credible when you say you’ll do something? This question is never asked, because Democratic elites — ensconced in the law firms, foundations, banks, and media executive suites where the real decisions are made — basically agree with each other about organizing governance around the needs of high technology and high finance. The only time the question even comes up now is in an inverted corroded form, when a liberal activist gnashes his or her teeth and wonders — why can’t Democrats run elections around populist themes and policies? This is still the wrong question, because it assumes the wrong causality. Parties don’t poll for good ideas, run races on them, and then govern. They have ideas, poll to find out how to sell those ideas, and run races and recruit candidates based on the polling. It’s ideas first, then the sales pitch. If the sales pitch is bad, it’s often the best of what can be made of an unpopular stew of ideas. Still, you’d think that someone, somewhere would have populist ideas. And a few — like Zephyr Teachout and Elizabeth Warren — do. But why does every other candidate not? I don’t actually know, but a book just came out that might answer this question. The theory in this book is simple. The current generation of Democratic policymakers were organized and put in power by people that don’t think that a renewed populist agenda centered on antagonism towards centralized economic power is a good idea. The book, however, is not written by a populist liberal reformer. It’s written by one of the guys who put the current system in place. And it’s a really good and important story. The New Democrats and the Return to Power is the book, and Al From is the man who wrote it. From was one of the key organizers of this anti-populist movement, and he lays out his in detail his multi-decade organizing strategy and his reasons for what he did. Now, of course it’s an exaggeration to say that Al From created the culture of the governing class in the modern Democratic Party. But not by much. Don’t take it from me, take it from Bill Clinton. In 2000, at Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s Hyde Park residence, Clinton said of From, “It would be hard to think of a single American citizen who, as a private citizen, has had a more positive impact on the progress of American life in the last 25 years than Al From.” Clinton overdoes the rhetoric sometimes, but not in this case. From helped put Clinton in the White House.



So who is Al From?

Most people who consider themselves good Democrats don’t know the name Al From, though political insiders certainly do. He was never a cabinet member. He worked in the White House, but in the 1970s, for as a junior staffer for Jimmy Carter’s flailing campaign to stop inflation. He’s never written a famous tell-all book. He hasn’t ever held an elected office, his most high-profile role was as a manager of the domestic policy transition for the White House in 1992, which took just a few months. He doesn’t even have a graduate degree. From fits into that awkward space in American politics, of doer, organizer, activist, convener, a P.T. Barnum of wonks and hacks. Such are the vagaries of American political power, that those who are famous are not always those are the actual architects of power. Because From, a nice, genial, and idealistic business-friendly man, is the structural engineer behind today’s Democratic Party. To give you a sense of how sprawling From’s legacy actually is, consider the following. Bill Clinton chaired the From’s organization, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and used it as a platform to ascend to the Presidency in 1992. His wife Hillary is a DLC proponent. Al Gore and Joe Biden were DLCers. Barack Obama is quietly an adherent to the “New Democrat” philosophy crafted by From, so are most of the people in his cabinet, and the bulk of the Senate Democrats and House Democratic leaders. From 2007–2011, the New Democrats were the swing bloc in the U.S. House of Representatives, authoring legislation on bailouts and financial regulation of derivatives. And given how Democrats still revere Clinton, so are most Democratic voters, at this point. The DLC no longer exists, but has been folded into the Clinton’s mega-foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, a convening point for the world’s global elite that wants to, or purports to want to, do good. In other words, it’s Al From’s Democratic Party, we just live here. So From has done us all a favor by writing his memoirs. Unlike most political biopics, which are often of the ‘kiss and tell’ variety and designed to sell books and settle scores, this book seems written by a man who cares more about ideas than personalities. He doesn’t pull punches, because he’s not a particularly high-profile figure. I spent some time with From, and while he still has strong feelings towards the Democratic Party, he seems to have no particular interest in the current President. In other words, the story he tells is believable. So if you want to know why America is governed the way it is, this story matters. The book is loosely divided into three parts, which mirror the shift in the Democratic party itself as baby boomers gradually reorganized it into what it is today. The first was From’s formative political years, from the late 1960s civil rights era to the 1970s inflationary failure of liberal governance. It then moves into the Democrats in the 1980s, when the political eddies of baby boom youth leadership solidified into a clear set of policy elites bent on wielding power. And finally, Bill Clinton took office in 1992, and completed From’s revolution.




~snip~


But Mondale was never sold, and the way From tells it, he was too wedded to the ‘special interests’ in the party to challenge Reagan among voters tired of brittle bureaucratic redistributionist pro-government Democrats. Gary Hart, though more of a DLC type politician, lost the primary to Mondale. And thus the Democrats suffered another crushing defeat, and another signal they needed to ditch the New Deal. After the 1984 election, the group of politicians and operatives convinced From that he had to organize an independent policy and political arm dedicated to resurrecting the Democratic Party. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was born. Ironically, for a Democrat who believed in reducing the power of government, From had always worked as a public servant. But once he filed the incorporation papers for the DLC (with Bob Bauer, later White House Counsel for Obama), he was on his own. Still, as an idealist, From says he “made sure that only our true believers set the agenda, not financial contributors or even the politicians who joined for political cover.” The DLC was controversial from the start, both because it was competitive with existing party institutions and because the existing party establishment did not agree with this new agenda. The DLC was called the “southern white boys’ caucus”, and Jesse Jackson and populist Senator Howard Metzenbaum, both called it the “Democrats for the Leisure Class.” From mediated this anger by appointing a man with a conciliatory personality, Dick Gephart, as the DLC’s first chairman. While controversial, the DLC was also spectacularly successful at placing itself in the center of the party. Groups of DLC politicians dubbed “the cavalry” traveled around the country to talk to reporters, activists, and operatives about what they were doing and what the Democrats needed to do to be successful. Their message was, well, “change and hope.” Arizona Governor and later Clinton cabinet member Bruce Babbitt explained it as such. “We’re revolutionaries. We believe the Democratic Party in the last several decades has been complacent. . . . We’re out to refresh, revitalize, regenerate, carry on the revolutionary tradition.” It was immediately successful among media elites — the Washington Post’s David Broder headlined his column: “A Welcome Attack of Sanity Has Hit Washington.” Over the course of the late 1980s, the DLC continued its attack on the orthodoxy of the populism that had residual power in the party. The DLC’s Chairman, Virginia Senator Chuck Robb, said it clearly in an influential speech during this period. “The New Deal consensus which dominated American politics for 50 years has run its course.” Economic growth, not redistribution or getting in the way of corporate power, was now on the menu. The DLC attacked all facets of policymaking, setting up a think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute (because From was tired of being called conservative) and hosting forums on poverty, welfare and crime with liberals like New York Governor Mario Cuomo. PPI and the DLC pushed globalization, the shareholder revolution, and reforms in entitlements like Social Security and Medicare (initially pressing to link their growth to productivity growth). The DLC group is sometimes portrayed as a pro-Wall Street set of lobbyists. And From did recruit hedge fund legends like Michael Steinhardt to fund his movement. But to argue these people were corrupt or motivated by a pay to play form of politics is wrong. From is clearly a reformer and an ideologue, and his colleagues believed they were serving the public interest. “Make no mistake about it,” wrote From in a memo about his organization’s strategy, “what we hope to accomplish with the DLC is a bloodless revolution in our party. It is not unlike what the conservatives accomplished in the Republican Party during the 1960s and 1970s.”





~snip~


When Clinton took office, he did seek change, but did not at first succeed. “For his first two years,” wrote From, “he would be defined by the congressional Democrats he came to Washington to change.” That is, with one exception — the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. As From wrote in a memo to Clinton in his first term, “Of all the opportunities you have this fall, NAFTA presents the greatest. Passing NAFTA can make your presidency. NAFTA presents both an economic and political opportunity….I can’t tell you how much better it would make your life and how much it would strengthen your presidency for you to beat [David] Bonior and organized labor on NAFTA. That would reestablish presidential leadership in the Democratic Party, something that hasn’t happened since 1966.” From had an institutionalist perspective on NAFTA. He believed in free trade, but he also believed in Presidential primacy over the legislature. “Politically, a victory on NAFTA would assert your leadership over your own party by making it clear that you, not the Democratic leadership in Congress or the interest groups, set the Democratic Party’s agenda on matters of real national importance.” You can hear echoes of Obama, and the broad Democratic party, in its collective disdain towards Congress. That is one consequence of From’s revolution, a shift of legitimacy away from the legislature. From worked with Bob Rubin, Bill Daley, and Rahm Emanuel to run a campaign to pass NAFTA. Since rolling labor and crushing the left was his favorite activity, From jumped into this feet first. He registered as a lobbyist, talked to members on the Hill, and traveled nationwide to do public and media events on behalf of the agreement. It worked, and in his view, set the stage for the rest of Clinton’s term. The Democrats lost Congress in 1994, a result of insufficient hewing to the DLC’s policy ideas by Bill Clinton and members in Congress. The American public punished Democrats for pushing gays in the military, a health care bill, lack of welfare reform, insufficient attention to crime, and a lack of spending cuts. But despite the loss, Clinton at a DLC gala argued that “more of the DLC agenda was enacted into law and will make a difference in the lives of the American people than almost any political movement in any similar time period in the history of the United States.” From agreed — “DLC ideas — national service, community policing, and the expanded earned income tax credit — had become law. He had pushed reinventing government against opposition inside his administration and Congress, and he had rolled over the congressional Democrats on NAFTA.” It was not a main focus of the book, but Clinton also used DLC ideas earlier pushed by Chuck Robb to change the view of the Democratic Party towards corporate power. The role of government was to help corporations — “we will support your efforts to increase your profits — they’re good” said Clinton, while asserting he would hold them accountable for being good corporate citizens. It was a vision of political economy at odds with a more traditional populist orientation. Towards the end of Clinton’s Presidency, as more and more DLC ideas were enacted into law, the organization went global. Third war leaders from around the world, from Britain’s Tony Blair to “Germany’s Schroeder, Chile’s Lagos, and South Africa’s Mbeki” worked to create a “progressive manifesto defining their common progressive approach to governance.” The New Democrat philosophy was everywhere, the true legacy of the New Democrat movement. After Clinton’s time in office, Al From gradually receded from political influence. The 2000s were a time of Republican dominance, and new DLC type groups like Third Way took over his organizational duties. I got the sense that From considers his work done. From is now a consultant for business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and he hews to aggressive policy ideas. He believes, for example, that “we need to follow the New Orleans model in every major city and make every school a charter school or charter-like school. Rather than have schools run by overstaffed, costly, and sclerotic school administrations, every school should be put on a five-year charter or performance contract.” But these ideas are not new, they are what has animated his entire life. As he put it, “The harsh reality of the New Deal era — the nine elections between Roosevelt’s in 1932 and Johnson’s in 1964 — was that it was the anomaly, not the norm.” Economist Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” makes a similar claim about these years. From saw himself as an engineer of a Democratic electoral coalition that could live outside these exceptional circumstances.






cont'



http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/11/matt-stoller-democratic-party-acts-way.html

[Segami]

1. "...If you want to know why the Democratic Party behaves the way it does,..

"....recognize that behind its habits, customs, beliefs, and culture are organizers with strong beliefs, a rich history, and ideas. We’re just starting to learn the history of that period when the party really changed. What’s fascinating is how the anti-Vietnam and Civil Rights movements, commonly seen as exertions of left-wing political power, turned into the modern Democratic Party elite of bankers, venture capitalists, and technology entrepreneurs talking about the need for revolutionary and disruptive change. And they got their revolution..."

[hootinholler]

2. Thanks for this!

I'll have to read it tomorrow, but here's a K&R for today.

[Segami]

3. Its a bit

of a longer read, but well worth it.

Thanks for the record!

[sabrina 1]

4. Shhhh, the DLC is a figment of your imagination, and if you think they evolved into the Third Way

you are a CONSPIRACY THEORIST, or as I was told right here on DU 'raving like a paranoid schitzophrenia'.

That is one great article for anyone who doubts the existence of the infiltrating Wall St entities that now run the Dem Party.

I am glad to see them more and more exposed as it wasn't possible to stop them from pushing Right Wing policies while people had no idea of who they were and what their agenda was. All I remember, until I found out about them, was being constantly puzzled and frustrated by our Party.

[Segami]

8. Such attacks are the 'soup de jour'

for those attempting to deflect away from the facts.


Hope the hat is not making to much noise....

[hfojvt]

5. very interesting

and sad

they actually think (really?) that they are making life better for the masses.

[sabrina 1]

9. They think the masses are stupid and don't know what is good for them. They seriously do think

the masses need superior intellects like them, in their own minds, to rule over them, to dole out only what THEY think we need.

The arrogance is stunning, considering the total failure of most of their policies, not to mention how wrong they are. It is like a cult, in the sense that they are so obsessed in their beliefs, so intolerant of any disagreement with them that they lash out at what they view as inferior minds.

The whole thing is disgusting, despicable, and truly harmful to millions of people. Too bad these cultists always manage to find followers and defenders.

[Segami]

12. +1

[hifiguy]

6. KICK and REC!!

[Chathamization]

7. If you want to know why, look at how many people bothered to show up and support Teachout in NYC.N/T

[FSogol]

10. That article is incorrect in a lot of ways, but the line about Chuck Robb is the goofiest.

There is no denying that Robb was a Centrist and pretty conservative in many areas, but when did he ever promote the idea of the role of government was to help corporations? Robb voted with the Democrats 92% of the time. His main areas of disagreement with liberals was he was a huge supporter of the military (common among all VA politicians due the Pentagon and many Navy bases, as well as Ft Belvoir being in the State.) He was pro environment and socially liberal. He differed from many of the Democrats by being for the balanced budget amendment and he supported the line item veto.

You can see his votes here: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/r000295

[Segami]

11. "...Democrats faced a shellacking in 2010...

"....They were just defeated, again, up and down the ticket. It happened again in 2014. And while you might think that occupying the White House is some sort of palliative (and it is), recognize that the Republicans today occupy two thirds of state legislative seats. This is a country governed at a local and legislative level by deep conservatives. But if you expect changes in philosophy and behavior due to these losses, you’re going to have to do what Al From did. Which is, organize. And don’t just organize to put Democrats in power, organize around ideas the way that Al From did. From’s ideas were incredibly consequential, and they are today theis for how the West is run...."

[madfloridian]

13. Al From was not so important. It was the corporate money and power he generated.

Power and money against the little guy will win every time.

This part:

In 2000, Bill Clinton spoke of the massive influence of this single private citizen. The President, while certainly willing to grant rhetorical flourishes to those who do not deserve them, was in this case not exaggerating. The two men — From and Clinton — really have carved out the political, financial, and rhetorical space in which most elected Democrats flourish. And that’s where they are still flourishing

They may be "flourishing, but we the people are not.

[madfloridian]

14. Also found this at Daily Kos about From.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/09/1343530/-The-Man-Who-Made-the-Democratic-Party-What-It-Is-Today?detail=email

[Segami]

16. Thanks madfloridian.....this sums it up in a nutshell..

"...To all the people wondering why Dems didn't run on raising the minimum wage in 2014, an obviously wildly popular idea, or why economic populism is something Dem strategists and politicians run from like a vampire runs from sunlight, there is your answer. Because the party has over a couple of generations now been bred to reject and fight those ideas like an immune system rejects and fights invading germs.

NAFTA. Privatization. The Imperial Presidency. The destruction of organized labor. Spending cuts. Handing power to corporations. Charter schools. Think of a bad idea promoted by the Democratic Party over the past generation or so, and you'll find Al From and his DLC behind it.

It's led the party to the sorry state it's at now -- with the Republicans in control of two of the three branches of government and in possession of two-thirds of state legislatures.

He's spent his life organizing to get the party to this point. It's going to take a lot of people a lot of time organizing to undo all the harm he's done...."

One needs to only ask the question as to why democratic candidates didn't run on raising the minimum wage in this election.....an issue mostly associated with democratic progressive policies which turned out to be the one of the evening's biggest winning issues that was approved by a significant majority? I'm sure they had the raw polling numbers on 'raising the minimum wage' issue and their data showed it to be a winner.......so why then did they run away from running on that issue? Maybe this bit from the article might begin to shed some light on this question...

from the article,

"....why can’t Democrats run elections around populist themes and policies? This is still the wrong question, because it assumes the wrong causality. Parties don’t poll for good ideas, run races on them, and then govern. They have ideas, poll to find out how to sell those ideas, and run races and recruit candidates based on the polling. It’s ideas first, then the sales pitch. If the sales pitch is bad, it’s often the best of what can be made of an unpopular stew of ideas..."

....

[bemildred]

15. Democrats are the Good Cops, Republicans are the Bad Cops.

But they are all cops. That's all you really need to understand.