A look back at 1992: Al From, Life of the Party. Amazing...should I say arrogant?

[madfloridian]

We need to retrace our party's steps sometimes to remind where we are being taken in policy. This is an amazing article, if nothing else just for the assumptions they make about the party being clay for them to mold into something else.

The background: This is from the 1992 Democratic Convention in Madison Square Garden. It appears to be a tribute to Al From. I believe this is about four years after they starting controlling the party's policy.

Al From, the Life of the Party

The Head of the Democratic Leadership Council, Finding Victory in Moderation

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.

..."The ascension of Clinton - the Arkansas governor who chaired the DLC, as it's known, until he launched his run for the White House - represents a stunning victory for From and company, who've been waging ideological war since 1985, a response to former vice president Walter Mondale's loss of 49 states to Ronald Reagan. They've tried to drag the Democratic Party from traditional liberal doctrines that, they argue, have resulted in five crushing defeats in the past six presidential elections.

The article points out that "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. "

Let me know when you figure that out.

More about what they were about, and more puffed up pride from Al From.

As opposed to lording over.

"This hasn't been an effort to take over the party," From demurs about the DLC, whose staff of 20, including five who work for its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, occupies one floor of a bank on Capitol Hill. "We don't care about the party apparatus. What we care about is what this party says, and what its candidates stand for."

The group's $2.5 million annual budget comes largely from corporate lobbyists and the financial community, who appreciate the DLC's pragmatic approach of "Democratic capitalism," while its 3,000-strong membership includes about 750 elected officials nationwide, with 32 U.S. senators and 142 current and former House members, and chapters in 28 states in every region of the country.

"We are more akin to the conservative movement in the Republican Party after the 1964 Goldwater defeat," From says. "They put a lot of effort into developing ideas and changing the nature of the political debate."

Their main opponents were Jesse Jackson and Howard Metzenbaum .

But even today, with the party seemingly primed to take back the White House on the strength of DLC ideas and a DLC ticket, the accolades are far from universal. Among the group's chief antagonists have been two-time presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, who in years past has mocked it as the "Democratic Leisure Class," and Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, a proud and ornery liberal who founded the Coalition for Democratic Values in 1990 as an ideological counterweight to the DLC.

I would say their main success was Bill Clinton, though we lost Congress in the process of trying to be just like the other side. They claim credit for Clinton's win, but it was Clinton's charm as a politician that won....not the DLC. Not Al From.

I found these uniting words from Al From rather odd...since he since has framed the activists and anti-war of the party as "fringe."

"What we tried to do," From says, "was to say that this party has to understand that if we're going to win, we have to unite our core constituency - those who are aspiring to get into the middle class, and those who are struggling to stay there."

I don't think we who call ourselves activists were his "core constituency."

[madfloridian]

1. "an intellectual leveraged buyout" of the party.

""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."