Now those were not his exact words, but that is in effect what he said recently in an interview with the Washington Post. He said they tried to take away things that made people not want to vote Democratic. In effect what that means to me is that they wanted to take away the heart and soul of the party...and keep us from standing for Democratic values.
One of the important things we had to do in 1992 was remove the obstacles that kept people from voting Democratic in the first place," he said.That included addressing issues of welfare, fiscal discipline and crime. "As long as people thought we were going to take money form (from) people who worked and give it to people who didn't work, they didn't want to listen to anything else," he added. "The Republicans have to make people understand that they're not just a right-wing, southern party."
Interview with Al From So Al and the DLC instead of explaining that our government did have a role in helping those who are not working, they got rid of the issue by caving in and not standing up.
It's a long interview but that bit jumped out at me.
Simon Rosenberg, who helped found the DLC in the 80s, verified what Al From said. They set up the DLC to get enough money from corporate sources...and they no longer had to include the traditional Democratic interest groups such as minorities and unions.
Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, "We're trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way," he adds, "they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win."A Business-Led Party
Freeing Democrats from being, well, Democrats has been the Democratic Leadership Council's mission since its founding 16 years ago by Al Gore, Chuck Robb, and a handful of other conservative, mostly southern Dems as a rump faction of disaffected elected officials and party activists.
...
"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. With few resources, and taking heavy flak from the big guns of the Democratic left,
the DLC proclaimed its intention, Mighty Mouse–style, to rescue the Democratic Party from the influence of 1960s-era activists and the AFL-CIO, to ease its identification with hot-button social issues, and, perhaps most centrally, to reinvent the party as one pledged to fiscal restraint, less government, and a probusiness, pro–free market outlook.It's hard to argue that they haven't succeeded.
American Prospect article And right now may I mention that there are two other issues that make it "hard to be a Democrat". One of those issues is women's rights, another issue is gay rights and the issues of DOMA and DADT.
This administration has been effectively tap-dancing around both of those issues lately. It is just too hard to fight the religious right on these things.
Oh wait, I forgot the inconvenience of having anti-war activists define the party. From Huff Post last year...more words from Al From.
Recently, Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, used a front page New York Times story to warn Senator Obama and other Democratic leaders that, "the antiwar people cannot define the Democratic Party."
Al From is wrong, again.For years, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) has been warning the Democratic Party about the dangers of being associated with progressive values, ideas and policies. Time and again, their advice has proven disastrous. After Al Gore's defeat in 2000, From and pollster Mark Penn argued Gore lost the election in part because he abandoned the DLC message. But it was Gore's progressive message - making prosperity work for all - that helped him erase the seventeen-point deficit he held heading into the Democratic convention. In 2004, the DLC attacked Howard Dean as an elitist liberal and warned our party to "seize the vital center." Yet John Kerry's attempt to do just that failed to deliver the governing majority From and the DLC promised it would.
Now they are at it again - this time attacking "the antiwar people" while promoting the vice presidential credentials of their former Chairman Senator Bayh.
And who are these "antiwar people"? According to recent polling, it's probably you. Nine out of ten Democrats want the next president to end the war in Iraq, and an astonishing 66% of the American public opposes the war. Al From and his colleagues at the DLC may not like it, but the party that sides with the "antiwar people" sides with the majority of Americans. Not a bad place to be on election day. Al From is Wrong Again. We don't have enough votes to get immigration reform passed, either....even though we have a very good majority plus the White House. Rahm, a main spokesman for the DLC, says
we don't have the votes for meaningful reform in immigration.Just hours before President Obama hosted lawmakers for a discussion on immigration at the White House, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel conceded that Obama and his allies on Capitol Hill do not have the votes to pass a comprehensive reform bill.
"If the votes were there, you wouldn't need to have the meeting. You could go to a roll call," Emanuel told reporters during an hour-long breakfast.
And guess what. We "don't have the votes" for real health care reform according to many Democratic senators. At least one person is speaking out, though he is not in national leadership.
The star of the show Thursday was Dean, the former Vermont governor, who took the stage to raucous cheers. Dean fired a shot across the bow to Democratic lawmakers not committed to including the public option as part of healthcare reform.
“We are here; we’re not going away. We voted for change a few months ago. We expect change. And if we don’t get it, there’s going to be more change,” said Dean.
Success on healthcare reform is a must for Democrats, Dean told The Hill. “I think it’s going to be a catastrophic problem for the Democratic Party if they can’t get this bill out.” Speaking out on health care.The unfortunate part of this whole thing is that when your party is under the spell of a think tank whose main goal was to neutralize their positions...they would just as soon cater to the other party.
I would say Al From and his cohorts have effectively won the day if we don't have the votes to get real reform on any issue.
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