Apr 7, 2022
POLITICS
When the DLC held the biggest party in Washington
Did Bill Clinton’s think tank remake the Democratic Party?
Every DC story — especially the good ones— has a Rashômon-like retelling by everyone in the room. The significance of the Democratic Leadership Council — or DLC — is one of them. Take the party held in Union Station after Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992.
The DLC — founded by Al From and Will Marshall in 1985 as an antidote to years of Democrats suffering— reached its pinnacle as Bill Clinton emerged as the leading Democratic challenger to President George H. W. Bush. From and Marshall as well as Elaine Kamarck and Bill Gallston are are at the center of Lily Geismer’s excellent new Public Affairs book, Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.
The DLC offered a novel vision for Democrats. New Democrats would cast off the policies of the past for a future of market-based empowerment, innovation, and a reinvented government. These policies would transform the party, attracting new voters and building political power in parts of the country that had been written off for decades. Dozens of members of Congress and Democratic governors quickly affiliated with the organization. Bill Clinton soon became its chair.
After the election, From was smarting from Clinton’s win over George H. W. Bush. The DLC had authored much of the party’s platform and assembled a policy agenda that helped recapture the White House for Democrats, for New Democrats. In November, From was in Arkansas as a part of the work of the transition team — DLCers Dave Katz, Kiki Moore, Linda Moore, and Bruce Reed also were on the team — when he saw Clinton.
From explained what happened next:
“So as we walk out of the office, I looked at Clinton and said, You speak to me, it’s worth a million dollars. So he put his arm around me. The picture was on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post.”
This was was especially good timing, since the DLC had just mailed invitations to its annual fundraiser where corporate donors could get a table for $15,000. RSVP’s began arriving immediately and the party planned for Union Station quickly sold out. From later said “We sold out so much that we had planned to have one room for cocktails and the other two rooms for dinner, and we had to put tables in all three rooms.”
Nothing says victory like a sold out party, a new President in the White House, and $3.3 million raised in one night.
Others, however, tell this story differently.
According to Elaine Kamarck — also a key figure at the DLC — ticket sales for the party were a success: “Al From was sitting pretty, I was sitting pretty, we were all feeling very good about ourselves.”
But when the day of the event arrived, the guest of honor, the President-Elect, was partying with a different group. Kamarck said: “The Clintons got to town and before they came to the DLC dinner, they went to visit Marion Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund and did a cocktail party there.”
This was more than just a slight to Kamarck, it said something about how Clinton was going to govern: “We had teed off on…[Edelman’s] policies as one of the examples of the failed Great Society mentality that was killing the Democratic Party.” If Clinton was truly a New Democrat, what did this mean? To Kamarck and the DLC
“for him to come to town and go to [the Children’s Defense Fund] first took everybody at the DLC aback. We were shocked, thinking, Who is this guy? Is he trying to play both sides against the middle?…Shock number one: Uh-oh, who is this guy?”
Loyalty is fleeing in Washington; to any specific organization, let alone to close friends. To be sure, Hillary Clinton was committed to that “Great Society mentality”, she’d even chaired the board of the Children’s Defense Fund. But, within a few years in the Washington, Hillary Clinton had fallen out with the organization and her good friend, Marian Wright Edelman, because of the overhaul of US welfare policy that DLC was central to.
But what did Bill Clinton’s busy dance card mean for the influence of the DLC? Was the Union Station party a success or a failure? Was the DLC now the party or just one more group fighting for a seat at the table?
While the DLC had policy successes with Clinton — many carefully illustrated in Geismer’s book — on the personnel side, the wins came as often as the losses. Elaine Kamarck explained: “in the [presidential] transition itself, as many old-fashioned Democrats got jobs, key jobs. It was very disappointing.”
That disappointment shouldn’t come as a surprise. The DLC had mastered public policy, but it didn’t seem to understand the party as well. Take another story Al From told about what happened after the election.
In the first week of the transition, From had a meeting with Bill and Hillary Clinton. He recounted advising Bill Clinton: “I know you want to make this the most diverse administration ever, and that’s a worthy goal…there are probably going to be 150 jobs that will drive this administration and determine whether or not your programs are going to be pursued and enacted. For those jobs, I think you ought to go with a test of loyalty to your programs and not worry about diversity.”
Later that day, From explained: “Clinton turns to me and says, Repeat what you told me in the smaller meeting. So I did. That’s the last time anybody ever talked to me about appointments.”
Appointments matter and, even in 1992, representation mattered, too. Clinton had promised a diverse cabinet to make headlines, of course, but also to reflect the diverse party that got him elected. From didn’t understand at the time that, while the DLC was an important player in the party and integral to Clinton’s win, it was not the only group in town. The DLC took credit for 7 of the 17 members of Clinton’s cabinet, a disappointment to some at the time according to Al From. Civil rights groups, unions, women’s groups were also jockeying for influence, and the Clintons understood what Kamarck already knew. To survive in Washington and in the Democratic Party, you’ve got to know how to play both sides against the middle.
From also acknowledged another problem the DLC faced: it was brand new in 1992, operating for under than a decade at that point. From explained: “Part of the problem we had as new Democrats is we won too early…we didn’t have this big cadre of intellectuals.” Some DLCers got into the White House, Bruce Reed one of the most prominent, but “As the White House staff was put together, we had our recommendations but, to be honest with you, there were not that many people with real New Democrat DNA in their blood.”
Geismer’s book is a must read. It unearths the early roots of the DLC, its role in shaping the policy views of a generation of Watergate Babies, and a host of specific policies that likely wouldn’t have been adopted without its expertise. As Geismer also shows, the DLC also successfully marketed the idea of markets in DC, popularizing markets as a policy solution to nearly every public problem. She rightly argues that these policies were successful, only in the sense that they were adopted, not in any way of addressing the inequities they purported to address.
But it’s easy to overstate the impact of this organization, both its short-term impact on the Clinton administration and its long-term impact on the party and its policy agenda. On policy, the change that can be attributed to the DLC is a mixed bag. Take education, for one. Geismer rightly attributes the rising popularity of charter school policies on the national education agenda to the DLC and Bill Clinton. Yet, the budget for the Department of Education also doubled between Clinton’s entrance and exit from the White House. This expanded funding had little to do with charter schools. In fact, fewer than 1 in 100 students were enrolled in charter schools when Clinton left office. Today that remains fewer than 1 in 10.
On remaking the party, the record is spottier.
Recall, the DLC was squarely focused on party politics, not just public policy. The DLC manifesto, “The Politics of Evasion”, was chiefly interested in how to influence the Democratic Party and its electoral strategy. It can be debated how the Democratic Party has changed since the early 1990s, but it isn’t clear that the change is the one advocated for by the DLC. The DLC chairs that followed Clinton — John Breaux, Dave McCurdy, and Joe Lieberman — hardly had his political success. There was only one Bill Clinton. The next Democratic president, Barack Obama, may have embraced some of the policies of the DLC and even once called himself a “New Democrat”, it was Hillary Clinton who was a DLC leader in the run up to the primaries.
And, when the DLC through another big party in Nashville in 2007, nobody showed up. None of the eight leading Democratic candidates came to speak. Only Bill Clinton showed up, greeted the 300 or so legislators in attendance, and reminisced about the roaring ‘90s.
Politics is about policy and people as well as ideas and beliefs. The DLC understood how to capture the imagination of many with its ideas, elevate local experiments to the national stage, and repackage past policy proposals with clever branding. What the DLC didn’t do was get the people part right. From those very earliest days of the Clinton administration, it didn’t have a strategy to win the personnel game — a point Geismer notes in the book. And, that failure says as much about the DLC as it does the durability of the Democratic Party.
