Bruce Reed now Biden's Chief of Staff. Last year said mission nearly completed.

madfloridian

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Fri Jan-14-11 06:00 PM
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Bruce Reed now Biden's Chief of Staff. Last year said mission nearly completed.

And it is apparently nearly done. He is CEO of the DLC. Their policies are firmly in place now, especially the ones I never thought I would see under a Democratic administration.....cutting Social Security, closing public schools to become charter schools, the move to be sure that we (the left, the liberals) are kept in their proper place.

Here is how Newsweek describes his appointment.

Bruce Reed, Biden's New Chief of Staff, Is Another Centrist Choice

My first thought when I saw this picture of the deficit commission with him in the middle....why are these men laughing? Why...because they are getting their greedy hands on Social Security after all the years we fought for it. Betrayed by our own party.

Harry Hamburg / AP Deficit commission members, including executive director Bruce Reed in center, on Capitol Hill.

When President Obama named Bill Daley his new chief of staff, there was muted grumbling on the left. Daley, a banker and commerce secretary under Bill Clinton, had publicly criticized the Democratic Party and Obama administration for governing too far from the left. But his appointment was not presented as an ideological repositioning so much as a pragmatic choice. At the time, many liberals�in the words of Robert Kuttner, the coeditor of The American Prospect and a fellow at Demos, a progressive think tank�saved their fire for bigger potential fights to come, especially potential cuts to Social Security benefits.

Now the administration is bringing in one of the architects of the proposal to cut Social Security benefits and other domestic programs: Bruce Reed, who has been named chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden. Reed recently served as executive director of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which Obama created to fashion a bipartisan compromise on long-term deficit reduction, and is also known as the Bowles-Simpson Commission, after its co-chairs. The commission report was criticized on the left for agreeing to what liberals considered arbitrary and unnecessary limits on domestic discretionary spending. "Reed is someone who has been very open for a long time in his desire to see Social Security and Medicare rolled back," says Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

When we won back the House, the Senate, and the White House....the DLC declared victory. It was not their victory, it was ours. They took credit falsely.

Here are the words of Bruce Reed from 2009 when he took credit not due him.

Bruce Reed: �The political mission of the DLC has been largely accomplished"

�The political mission of the DLC has been largely accomplished,� said Reed, who�s had the group�s No. 2 post since 2001. �Twenty-five years ago, the forgotten middle class had serious doubts about Democrats, and now Democrats are winning the middle class, suburban voters, moderates by handsome margins. Our next challenge is to deliver on that promise and earn those votes for years to come.�

Well, Bruce, the forgotten middle class now have even more doubts...but not a single Democratic leader is listening. You are barreling ahead with plans that are the dream of the GOP.

More on what Reed said, he put his trust in Obama to fulfill their goals...he has not disappointed them.

Reed said he�s pinning some of his hopes for the group�s future on Obama�s promise to break through the constraints of partisan politics. The notion that Obama might be receptive to the DLC�s ideas gained strength recently after the president told members of the House�s New Democrat Coalition that he considered himself one of them. �He said, �Listen, I feel comfortable with you guys because I consider myself a New Democrat,�� said Ron Kind of Wisconsin, one of the lawmakers at the meeting.

The article was originally in CQ Politics, but the link died. Here is more on that from the archives of the DLC.

Bruce Reed had a lot to say about grassroots in 2002. He wanted less grass.

Less grass more roots

Where have all the good protests gone? Aging centrists everywhere would love to blame over-pierced and under-challenged young people -- the first generation in human history to talk like snowboarders and think like Ralph Nader. Today's youth think "this generation has a lot to say" is an advertisement for cell phones -- which, as a matter of fact, it is.

Yet much as I believe that there's nothing wrong with the younger generation that a few years of national service wouldn't fix, they're not the only ones who bear responsibility for the collapse of modern dissent. If all that young Americans can find to get mad about is some vast globalist conspiracy, authority isn't giving them enough to question.

Interesting article by Reed...all of it needs reading.

Bruce Reed in 2003 co-wrote a memo with Al From, the previous DLC CEO. They said very clearly that Howard Dean would not be president.

More than 50 centrist Democrats, including Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner, met here yesterday to plot strategy for the "New Democrat" movement. To help get the ball rolling they read a memo by Al From and Bruce Reed, the chairman and president of the Democratic Leadership Council. The memo dismissed Dean as an elitist liberal from the "McGovern-Mondale wing" of the party -- "the wing that lost 49 states in two elections, and transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one."

...As founder of the DLC, From has been pushing the Democratic Party to the right for nearly 20 years. He was in tall cotton, philosophically speaking, when an early leader of the DLC, Bill Clinton, was elected president in 1992. As Clinton's domestic policy guru, Reed pushed New Democrat ideas -- such as welfare reform -- that were often unpopular with party liberals.

"We are increasingly confident that President Bush can be beaten next year, but Dean is not the man to do it," Reed and From wrote. "Most Democrats aren't elitists who think they know better than everyone else."

So one more quote from the first article that was originally at CQ Politics. This one paragraph from the CQ Politics article defines their philosophy. Instead of encouraging the party to keep these 49 districts to which they refer by telling people what we stand for and believe in, they seem to have a philosophy that to preserve those seats we must be as much like the other party as possible.

Here is the paragraph and why they claim credit. History has proven them right that we would lose the seats. But in my mind the reason we lost is because if you have a Republican running and a Democrat trying to be just like them....the real Republican will usually win. I forget who said that, but it is true.

On a broader level, though, the group will face the same tension affecting the entire party: the sense among liberals that �their ship has come in,� as (Ron) Kind puts it � and that, as a result, the need for moderation and compromise in Democratic politics has passed. But Democrats only have that majority because they�re holding on to seats that could easily return to Republican hands. In the House, for example, 49 districts that elected Democrats were carried by Republican John McCain at the top of the presidential ticket in 2008.

No, we never thought our ship had come in. But we expected not to be treated as though we do not exist.

Bruce Reed was right last year. The DLC is getting their charter schools, they are getting the drastic changes in Social Security. They are able to claim mission accomplished.