It annoys Lynn Cutler that so many fellow Democrats these days cheerily tell her, “See you in Cleveland!” Cutler, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, isn’t going to Cleveland. True, there will be a national convention of Democrats there next month. Some 200 Democratic elected officials are planning to attend. But it won’t be the party’s party.
The Democratic Leadership Council, a six-year-old, self-styled “mainstrean” group, is sponsoring the Cleveland conference as part of its effort to reshape the party’s profile. They tout themselves as a “new generation of Democrats” offering a “new choice to Americans.” In Cleveland, delegates from 25 states will endorse “mainstream planks” including ones opposing quotas in civil-rights laws, favoring a cap on federal spending and–most controversially–supporting the use of force abroad. Several presidential wanna-bes will speak, and the group will soon have chapters in 15 states. DLC leaders say they don’t want to form a third party or formally nominate their own candidate. But, says Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, chairman of the DLC, “we want our ideas to be what people think about when they think of the Democratic Party.”
In the DLC view, the “national party”–the wing that nominates presidential candidates–is hopelessly in thrall to faded Great Society liberalism and to a post-Vietnam reluctance to use force in foreign affairs. Surveys have only deepened the DLC’s panic. Just 29 percent of Americans now see themselves as Democrats, according to a recent Times Mirror Co. poll; the party hasn’t been that unpopular since before the New Deal. “A lot of people don’t think Democrats can be trusted with their national security or their tax money,” says Clinton. “We need to change that view if we want to win a presidential election.”
The toughly worded “use of force” resolution is the DLC’s most dramatic challenge yet to the rest of the party. Although the resolution does not mention the gulf war, it is clearly an implicit criticism of the congressional Democrats who overwhelmingly voted to oppose the war. “These DLC people think the only way to get ahead is to kick other Democrats in the shins,” says Paul Goldman, a DNC member and adviser to Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder. “They think politics is a zero-sum game.” Republicans are enjoying the spectacle. “It’s fun to watch them go at each other,” says Mary Matalin, Republican Party chief of staff.
The DNC-DLC rivalry does have its comic moments. Cutler, asked by DNC Chairman Ronald Brown to smoothen relations with disgruntled state party officials, found DLC president Al From prospecting at one of her meetings. Cutler herself–as the date of a DLC donor–attended a group retreat last fall in Williamsburg, Va. She listened in angry silence while speakers lambasted the party as a bastion of inside-the-Beltway, interest-group toadies. Then, on the ride back to Washington, she delivered a lecture on party unity. “It reminds me of what Henry Kissinger said about faculty politics,” says a Democratic insider. “The infighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low.”
Until recently, the DLC was easy enough to dismiss. Heavily funded by corporate lawyers and Washington lobbyists, conspicuously aloof from Big Labor and minority interest groups, it has been derided publicly by Jesse Jackson as “Democrats for the Leisure Class” and privately by others as “the Southern White-Boy Caucus.” But the DLC membership has broadened, and its positions seem more salable–or safe. The only senators who supported the war authorization were DLC members (though one DLC founder, Sen. Sam Nunn, opposed it). Party leaders in Congress and the DNC hierarchy remain committed to a new civil-rights bill, but the DLC wants to narrow the bill’s focus and downplay it, for fear of alienating white middle-class voters. Surveys show that many Americans indeed view the measure as a “quota bill”–a case of special pleading by minority groups.
Through a think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute, the DLC has shrewdly moved beyond denunciations of “traditional liberalism.” It’s become a font of new ideas on how to govern in an antigovernment, antibureaucratic era of limits. The council has promoted parental choice in selecting schools and child care, a national service requirement for student loans and a new tax code favoring traditional families. DLC governors, Clinton prominent among them, have successfully pushed these “choice” and “citizen responsibility” ideas in their states, and attacked bureaucracies with “goal setting” management.
Tougher confrontations lie ahead with Democrats who believe that they, too, represent the “mainstream”–at least of the Democratic rank and file. DLC members claim to be free traders; the national party, siding with Big Labor, denounced a proposed free-trade agreement with Mexico. The DLC isn’t pushing national health insurance, an idea that DNC members lustily cheered at their own recent meeting. The DLC supports a tough stance on spending. One of its founders and fiscal watchdogs, Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia, was kicked off the Senate Budget Committee for arguing that other Democrats had hidden extra spending in last year’s budget. Liberal Democrats have started their own miniparty, the Coalition for Democratic Values. “I’m in favor of free speech,” says labor insider Rachelle Horowitz, political director of the American Federation of Teachers. “[But] some of us just wish the DLC would shut up.”
It won’t. And there are early indications that Democratic presidential candidates are listening–either because they want to or they have to. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo is battling labor, education and welfare groups over sweeping budget cuts he has proposed. Former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, a professed liberal on social issues, called himself a “pro-business” Democrat as he set out last month on the campaign trail. Governor Wilder, who began formally exploring a candidacy last week, is one of the nation’s tightest-fisted chief executives. He recently cut $2 billion from the state budget without raising taxes. None of the three politicians is in the DLC. “I used the term “New Mainstream’ before they ever did,” Wilder said last week. “You don’t need a special group to talk about issues.”
Maybe not. But Wilder is planning to travel next month–to Cleveland.
