Dems Are No-Shows At DLC
As moderate Democrats assembled over a long weekend at the Democratic Leadership Council's "National Conversation" in Nashville, eight familiar faces were missing--those of all of the party's presidential contenders.
The closest thing to a candidate was a spouse. Former President Bill Clinton appeared before the group of more than 300 moderate lawmakers and other supporters Monday, but his wife was nowhere to be found even though she spoke at last year's event and is chair of the group's American Dream Initiative.
The candidates' snubbing of the centrist Democratic nonprofit group seemed bound to yield speculation that the 2008 front-runners and the Democratic Party in general are moving decidedly to the left and that the DLC's influence might be waning. While not attending the National Conversation, many of the candidates--including Hillary Clinton--are slated to appear this coming weekend in Chicago at the YearlyKos conference, hosted by a slew of liberal bloggers.
A handful of candidates also attended the progressive "Take Back America" conference in June, where candidates Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich, and others roused the progressive and antiwar crowd with equally progressive and antiwar messages. Clinton, who had been booed at the same event the year before for her Iraq war vote, was more warmly received, reflecting a perception that she's moving to the left in addressing the war.
While it's hard to deny that candidates are rousing the liberal base, Marc Dunkelman, who runs the blog on the DLC-sponsored Ideas Primary website, writes that this is history merely repeating itself and doesn't spell death for the DLC. Pandering to more liberal or conservative primary voters and then moving to the center is the way presidential politics are played, he says. After a nominee is selected in the primaries, he (or she) then moves to the center. Dunkelman reminds readers that Al Gore and John Kerry were no-shows at DLC National Conversations in 1999 and 2003, respectively, but both worked hard to gain the DLC's support after winning the party's nomination.
"True to form, some in the media, and some in the blogosphere, have chosen to interpret [the presidential candidates' not being at the conference] as a bellwether for the state of centrist politics, the direction of the Democratic Party, and even the national political tenor in the year before a presidential election," he writes.
Dunkelman and DLC President Bruce Reed said the snub was business as usual.
Reed said the role of the DLC in this campaign will be to provide ideas for the candidates to consider running on.
"That's why we're here; our whole purpose is to remind Democrats that ideas matter and the Democrats ought to be in the solutions business, not just pointing out the other side's failures," Reed said.
He admitted, though, that there are differences in opinion between the candidates and the DLC on some issues, including trade.
"There are areas that we have our differences with some of the candidates, but in general we've had a very grown-up debate on the Democratic side and a serious effort to deal with the real challenges that the next president's going to inherit," Reed said.
While Reed hopes the candidates will embrace some of the moderate group's ideas, the New Republic's Noam Scheiber examined the current political climate in Saturday's New York Times and said there is no need. When Bill Clinton was running in 1992, the country was far more skeptical of liberalism.
"But George W. Bush taught Democrats of all stripes that their differences with one another were minor compared with the differences between them and Republicans," Scheiber wrote. Liberal may no longer be quite such a dirty word.
Regardless of whether the candidates need the DLC and moderate Democrats this time around, one thing is certain. Looking at recent election history, the lst two Democratic losers embraced the organization late in the game, while the last Democratic president--Bill Clinton--headed the DLC for two years before winning the White House.
By Nikki Schwab