Privately funded and operating as an extraparty organization without official Democratic sanction, and calling themselves "New Democrats," the DLC sought nothing less than the miraculous: the transubstantiation of America's oldest political party. Though the DLC painted itself using the palette of the liberal left--as "an effort to revive the Democratic Party's progressive tradition," with New Democrats being the "trustees of the real tradition of the Democratic Party"--its mission was far more confrontational.

Abstract
A short memo outlining an idea for Congress: demanding that the President provide a plan for ending America’s combat operarations in Iraq.

Description
The President has offered up yet another in a long line of “plans for victory”, but he has never told the country exactly how or when the United States would end its involvement in the Iraq War. Rather than fighting over troop numbers, we recommend in this memo that Congress demand such a plan from the President.

Third Way supports the idea for a nonbinding congressional resolution condemning the escalation. But going further, with legislation barring the troop increase, would be a mistake, for both substantive and political reasons. First, we do not believe that Congress should use the imprecise mechanism of appropriations to dictate the management of an ongoing military conflict. There is simply no way of ensuring that funding restrictions would not compromise the safety of the troops already in the field, and it is generally a bad idea for Congress to be dictating the details of military strategy. Moreover, continuing to argue over troop numbers keeps the debate on the President’s terms: the tactics of an open-ended commitment to combat operations in Iraq.

We therefore recommend that Congress take up – either by free-standing legislation invoking the War Powers Resolution or by a rider on the supplemental appropriations bill for Iraq – legislation requiring the President to submit to Congress within three months a plan laying out precisely when and how American combat operations in Iraq will come to an end. Members should put a limit on the length of the President’s plan for an end to the war – we suggest 18 months or two years. Congress also should press the President to lay out the details, both through hearings and in his report – how the United States would begin to disengage militarily in Iraq. This includes the phases and manner of military redeployment and how American strategic interests in the region will be protected, etc.

Iraq is now second only to Vietnam in the length of US involvement in a foreign conflict. In the elections of 2006 and in subsequent surveys, Americans have spoken clearly: huge majorities now believe it is time for Congress to require a genuinely new direction in Iraq, one that leads to an end of this nation’s combat there.

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."