Reply #4: DLC Ties to PNAC (neocons)

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Al From is founder and chief executive officer of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a dynamic idea action center of the "Third Way" governing philosophy that is reshaping progressive politics in the United States and around the globe. He is also chairman of the Third Way Foundation and publisher of the DLC's flagship bi-monthly magazine, Blueprint: Ideas for a New Century.

As a founder of the DLC -- birthplace of the New Democrat movement and the Third Way in America -- and its companion think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), From leads a national movement that since the mid-1980s has provided both the action agenda and the ideas for New Democrats to successfully challenge the conventional political wisdom in America and, in the process, redefine the center of the Democratic Party.

-snip

http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=86&subid=191&contentid=1131



Will Marshall, the head of PPI signed PNAC letters.
(Called "Bill Clinton's idea mill," the Progressive Policy Institute was responsible for many of the Clinton administration's initiatives...)
Starting right after 9/11.
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Along with such neocon stalwarts as Robert Kagan, Bruce Jackson, Joshua Muravchik, James Woolsey, and Eliot Cohen, a half-dozen Democrats were among the 23 individuals who signed PNAC's first letter on post-war Iraq. Among the Democrats were Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution and a member of Clinton's National Security Council staff; Martin Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to Israel; Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and Democratic Leadership Council; Dennis Ross, Clinton's top adviser on the Israel-Palestinian negotiations; and James Steinberg, Clinton's deputy national security adviser and head of foreign policy studies at Brookings.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0522-10.htm

More about Will Marshall
Note the PNAC link to the left.
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1295

Populism is a political doctrine or philosophy that purports to defend the interests of the common people against an entrenched, self-serving or corrupt elite. In their 2007 volume Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan), Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell define populism as "an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice".

Recent scholarship has discussed populism as a rhetorical style; as such, the term "populist" may be applied to proponents of widely varying political philosophies. Leaders of populist movements in recent decades have claimed to be on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, while some populists claim to be neither "left wing," "centrist" nor "right wing."<1><2><3><4><5><6><7><8>

Leaders of populist movements have variously tried to stand up to corporate power, remove "corrupt" elites, fight for the "poor people of the country", and "put people first." Populism incorporates anti-regime politics, and sometimes espouses, especially among the right wing varieties, nationalism, jingoism, racism or religious fundamentalism.<1> Often they employ dichotomous rhetoric, and claim to represent the majority of the people. Many populists appeal to a specific region of a country or to a specific social class, such as the working class, middle class, or farmers or simply "the poor".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism

DLCer WILL MARSHALL BLAMED GORE'S "LOSS" ON POPULISM

A key factor in that defeat was Gore's peculiar decision to discard the New Democrat formula that had worked so well in 1992 and 1996. Instead of proposing a second wave of modernizing ideas intended to build on the New Democrat successes of the past eight years, Gore recast himself as an old fashioned populist fighting big corporations on behalf of working class families and his party's traditional interest groups.

-snip
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=128&subsecID=187&contentID=3361

YET NOW HE STATES:

"We're all populists now," says the DLC's Will Marshall, but the organization still scorns the populist economics that was central to Democratic election victories across the county last year.

http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/wrong_right?tx=3