A reminder of the political culture Clinton comes from. The liberal-bashing, Big Business lovin DLC

[Armstead]

I realize it's futile, but it would be helpful if those who support Clinton, who say the Democratic Party still represents liberalism,. and that the Clinton are progressive at least know what they are really supporting.

THIS is what you are supporting -- brought to you by Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Corporate Wall St. Matrix that brought them to the table, and continues to feed them --and which basically now owns the Democratic Party.

It is a culture created by the DLC, or the New Democrat Coalition and now the The Third Way. http://www.thirdway.org/

They don't like liberals or actual progressives or what liberalism represents (except as sources of votes on select social issues).

For historical perspective below are excerpts from an article in 2001....Some details have change but it is still true, and has grown to become worse than ever. .

http://prospect.org/article/how-dlc-does-it

How the DLC Does It -2001

Representative Gregory Meeks, an African-American lawyer and assistant district attorney elected to Congress in 1998 ...was undecided last year on the divisive issue of trade rights for China. Lobbyists for big business were battling the AFL-CIO and environmental groups on Capitol Hill for every vote, and Meeks, who'd previously voted against granting fast-track negotiating authority to President Clinton, was a prize.....

The DLC's effort to win Meeks's vote was part of a vigorous campaign by New Democrats to assure legislators that business groups would replace campaign contributions from labor lost by a pro-business China vote. In The New Democrat, the DLC's monthly magazine, Washington's most powerful business lobbyist, Thomas J. Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote that even though some members of Congress risked losing the AFL-CIO's support, "business will stick by Democrats on the China trade vote."

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."

..........

Freeing Democrats from being, well, Democrats has been the Democratic Leadership Council's mission since its founding 16 years ago ...Producing and directing the DLC is Al From, its founder and CEO, who's been the leader, visionary, and energizing force behind the New Democrat movement since Day One. .....

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.

Today's is not your father's Democratic Party. Though the dwindling chorus of party progressives provides counterpoint, today's Democrats are proud to claim the mantle of budgetary moderation. They oppose President Bush's $2-trillion tax-cut plan not by arguing mainly for more spending on health, education, and welfare, but because it risks the new sacred cause of paying off the national debt. They are the party of increased military spending, the death penalty, the war on drugs, and partnership with religious faith. They are the party of Ending Welfare As We Know It, the party of The Era of Big Government Is Over.

The three men who've dominated the last three presidential tickets, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joseph Lieberman, the DLC's most recent chairman, are all quintessential New Democrats.


Of course, it is easier to be contentious when you are well financed. And the DLC message of pro-market moderation is just what organized business wants to hear......One by one, Fortune 500 corporate backers saw the DLC as a good investment. By 1990 major firms like AT&T and Philip Morris were important donors.

Indeed, according to Reinventing Democrats, Kenneth S. Baer's history of the DLC, Al From used the organization's fundraising prowess as blandishment to attract an ambitious young Arkansas governor to replace Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia as DLC chairman. ....the DLC offered Clinton not only a national platform for his presidential aspirations but "entree into the Washington and New York fundraising communities." Early in the 1992 primaries, writes Baer, "financially, Clinton's key Wall Street support was almost exclusively DLC-based," especially at firms like New York's Goldman, Sachs.

The DLC's investment in Clinton paid off, of course, after the 1992 election. Not only did the DLC bask in its status as idea factory and influence broker for the White House, but it also reaped immediate financial rewards. One month after the election, Clinton headlined a fundraising dinner for the DLC that drew 2,200 to Washington's Union Station, where tables went for $15,000 apiece. Corporate officials and lobbyists were lined up to meet the new White House occupant, including 139 trade associations, law firms, and companies who kicked in more than $2 million, for a total of $3.3 million raised in a single evening.

And for $25,000, 28 giant companies found their way onto the DLC's executive council, including Aetna, AT&T, American Airlines, AIG, BellSouth, Chevron, DuPont, Enron, IBM, Merck and Company, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Texaco, and Verizon Communications. Few, if any, of these corporations would be seen as leaning Democratic, of course, but here and there are some real surprises. One member of the DLC's executive council is none other than Koch Industries....two Koch executives, Richard Fink and Robert P. Hall III, are listed as members of the board of trustees and the event committee, respectively--meaning that they gave significantly more than $25,000.

At its founding, the DLC's chief emphasis was on reconnecting the Democratic Party to white working- and middle-class class voters, who, the DLCers feared, had been increasingly attracted by the Republican Party's social conservatism, especially among northern ethnics and southern Protestants. To the DLC of the 1980s, that meant a message that was less tilted toward minorities and welfare, less radical on social issues like abortion and gays, more pro-defense, and more conservative on economic issues--in other words, less liberal generally. The DLC thundered against the "liberal fundamentalism" of the party's base--unionists, blacks, feminists, Greens, and cause groups generally.

The DLC maintains that with the telecommunications and computer revolution, the "rising learning class" of individualist new-economy workers will resist populism, reject Big Government, spurn unions, and abandon the social contracts of the New Deal and the Great Society. These upper-middle-class, new-economy voters, while still conservative on economic and fiscal issues, are more liberal on social policy. Adapting itself accordingly, the DLC is now a fervent backer of gay and abortion rights....

MUCH MORE

[Tarc]

1. Sanders supporters pulling out all the stops 2 days before the next votes are in...

[Armstead]

2. You read that article mightily quickly

[emulatorloo]

3. Some form or version of this article is posted daily

That makes it easy to skim new DLC OP's quickly.

Also, maybe he read it in 2001 when it first came out

[senz]

6. Why do you have a Bernie photo as your avatar?

[emulatorloo]

7. Because I support Bernie for President

I always support the most left candidate in the primary.

[Armstead]

9. Deserves to be posted regularly

It has a lot of those factie things in it.

[emulatorloo]

11. Your original material is better

[beedle]

14. Does when it came out make a difference?

The measure is, is it accurate or not, correct?

[TM99]

4. I don't think they get paid to read

only to respond.

[senz]

5. Well, I wish they got paid to read.

It might improve them. Or at least make them interesting.

I get so tired of grade school taunts from those for whom it is impossible to feel even a modicum of respect.

[TM99]

8. You and me both!

I really need a shaking head emoticon.

[Armstead]

13. This is my go-to avatar for such things

Sigh, whateverrrr

[jwirr]

10. "to relieve the party from the 1960 era activists"

Those damned hippies were right. Look what a mess we are in now.

[Armstead]

12. Emperors new clothes