I am linking from the copy of this article at the DLC website. This article contains so much stuff about where he wanted to take the party. Lloyd Grove wrote it, and it is rather irreverent, but it tells a lot of truth.
You should be able to read it now from a perspective of how they have done. They have done a good job of achieving their goals, but they have hurt the party in doing so. To see now that we do not hold the White House, the House, or the Senate shows that something was wrong with this policy.
From 1992 Al From Life of the Party
I will just put some pertinent snips.
http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=859&kaid=85&subid=65"Although he was born in Indiana and spent his formative years in the heartland, Alvin From tends to speak these days with a decidedly Southern accent. "Ah picked up mah twang in 1960," he says, tracing it to a summer at Northwestern University, where he roomed with Kentuckian David Hawpe, now editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. "Ah'm married to a woman from Birmingham, Alabama," he adds, referring to his wife, Ginger, "but she doesn't have a Southern accent."
But some would suggest a different explanation for From's -- pronounced "frahm's" -- strange and mysterious mode of speech, which occasionally recalls former Georgia Sen. Herman Talmadge, jaw chock-full of tobacco juice. It's all those Dixie centrists he's been consorting with during his seven years at the helm of the Democratic Leadership Council."
But for Al From, this election is not about ideology in the usual, outmoded sense.
From wants to escape the liberal-conservative tug of war, which the Democrats inevitably lose, and replace it with a brave new world of "information-age politics," "reciprocal obligation," "innovative non-bureaucratic approaches to governing," and a blizzard of equally ineffable buzz-phrases with which to bewilder GOP strategists."Are you ready for these two quotes by Rob Shapiro and Will Marshall? Just asking.
"What we've done in the Democratic Party," explains institute Vice President Rob Shapiro, a Clinton economic adviser, "is an intellectual leveraged buyout." The DLC, presumably, is acting as arbitrageur, selling off unprofitable mind-sets to produce a lean and efficient philosophy for the "New Democrat," as DLCers call their slick bimonthly magazine.
"I'm stunned by the suddenness with which the party seems to have embraced what only yesterday seemed heretical and offensive to many," says institute President Will Marshall, whom From jokingly refers to as "the party ideologist," the Democrats' answer to the Soviets' Mikhail Suslov. "Having been used to being in a sort of a defensive crouch, I'm not sure now how to take all the accolades we've been receiving," Marshall continues, but hastens to add, "I don't know if I like the Suslov analogy. Suslov is a dead purveyor of a dead ideology." There is more. But these quotes pretty well explain how it happened, and how they left the people behind on purpose.
And one last portion of a paragraph:
"At From's instigation in 1989, after yet another debacle, Galston and Kamarck wrote a paper titled
"The Politics of Evasion," drawing on census data, exit polls "and everything we could get our hands on," Galston says, to argue that the Democrats would never win a presidential election, no matter how high the turnout among blacks and other reliable supporters, unless they radically changed their message to lure back the white middle class."
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