Artur Davis: A DLC for Republicans?

I’ve written before that Republicans looking to recast themselves as middle class-friendly and more reform oriented should look for guidance at Bill Clinton’s renovation project for Democrats in the early nineties. So, I am admiring of Bill Kristol’s project to model the Democratic Leadership Council’s role as a vehicle to modernize the post Bush/Romney Republican Party.

Admiring, but still mindful of two limitations that are often glossed over regarding the DLC’s trajectory: both the rough patch the centrist organization endured in its formative years before Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and the decidedly uneven record the group compiled during the Clinton presidency and beyond.

To a degree that is not widely remembered, the DLC’s first phase, which ran from 1985 to Clinton’s ascension to its leadership in 1990, was mired in internecine combat with more conventional Democratic forces, from Jesse Jackson to Mario Cuomo. The DLC was dubbed variously as a stalking horse for KStreet lobbyists (“the Democratic Leisure Class” in Jackson’s parlance), or Southerners trying to reassert their primacy over blacks and feminists, or unprincipled panderers trying to win over Reagan Democrats by channeling their resentment toward the liberal base. During that stretch, the DLC label was damaging enough that aspiring presidential possibilities like a young Al Gore avoided an overt association, and in the case of Missouri’s Richard Gephardt, worked overtime to purge his record of any links to the DLC as he emerged as a serious contender in the 1988 primary derby.

In other words, the DLC’s initial contribution to the Democratic debate was to polarize the party’s internal political landscape and to provide something of a convenient foil for the Democratic liberal wing.  Rather than weakening under a centrist assault, that left wing dominated the 1988 primaries to the point that Jackson ran a competitive second, while a putative moderate like Gore never developed momentum outside his home base of southern whites. Nor was the issue environment that year one friendly to centrists: the spectrum ran, unhelpfully for moderates, from Gephardt’s protectionist pledge to slap tariffs on Korean and Japanese car manufacturers to a near universal consensus among the candidates that Ronald Reagan’s policy of aiding South American counter-revolutionaries be permanently scrapped.

It is also not likely that Kristol and his cohorts mean to emulate the DLC’s footprints in the administration it unmistakably helped elect. It is worth recalling that the only major DLC initiatives that were written into law were welfare reform, a tangible, signature achievement to be sure, and a valuable but relatively modest agenda of grants for community policy. A much larger portion of the group’s portfolio never made it beyond the policy binders: not middle class targeted tax relief; not vouchers for purchasing health insurance; not national service for college scholarships; not the substitution of class for race as the criteria for affirmative action. The Democratic Party’s embrace of a global free trade campaign did not really broaden beyond NAFTA, which George HW Bush primarily negotiated. S-Chip, a genuine advance for low income children, was less a Clinton or DLC priority than a fallback from the wreckage of the abandoned 1994 effort on national health care.

To be sure, the DLC deserves reams of credit for crafting a brand of political argument that was attractive to suburbanites and blue collars, including a robust emphasis on personal responsibility over entitlement and a newfound Democratic tough-mindedness on crime. But to the extent that conservative reformers are ambitious to construct a specific policy apparatus , the DLC seems like a low baseline of achievement that actually did not succeed in reorienting the ideological instincts of its party in a sustained way. To cite just a few examples, the Democratic Party’s Clinton era hawkishness on deficits and fondness for Social Security reform did not survive Clinton’s own vice president’s messaging in 2000, much less subsequent Democratic campaigns.

Finally, the DLC’s ascension was tied in an indispensable way to the gifts of one preternatural campaigner in Bill Clinton. Democratic centrism notably failed to produce a cohort of like-minded prospects at the federal or gubernatorial level. The DLC never fostered the machinery to wage primary battles on behalf of moderate candidates who were engaged in street fights with more traditional liberals. To the contrary, the model was less to nurture centrist candidacies than to sit on the sidelines and nurture relationships with the ever diminishing class of moderates who managed to win on their own (often by sliding to the left to paper over their centrist ways).

The DLC is entitled to an important set of credits for the salvaging of the Democratic Party in the nineties.  But it is more the legacy of a candidate driven phenomenon than a sharp realignment of a political party, more a promising path explored but gradually abandoned than an enduring governing vision. If Bill Kristol and his fellow travelers  have the goal of being immediately influential, or building a robust record of legislative accomplishment, or expanding their party’s bench, the DLC model needs improving not copying.

(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from OfficialArturDavis.com)