Party Cannibals

In December the leaders of the Democratic Leadership Council, Al From and Bruce Reed, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about what the Democrats had to do to attract heartland voters ("We need to be the party of Harry Truman and John Kennedy, not Michael Moore"; help "parents protect their children from a coarsening culture"; "expand opportunity for all who are willing to work for it"). Angry letter writers to the Journal just saw two more crypto-Bolsheviks who "cannot resist the impulse to engage in a bit of class warfare," in thrall like all the rest to "special-interest constituenc[ies] such as extreme environmentalists."

On the one hand, it's a sign of the ripening strangeness of the right-wing imagination. On the other, the letters reveal a grain of truth. The DLC is made up of centrists, not conservatives, just as it claims, and that's why the Journal's readers hate it. Let's be generous in one regard: It's fought the Administration on more than a few issues in the past year, from climate change to Social Security reform, honestly and in the open.

Would that it were so honest and in the open when it came to fighting Democrats. The main problem with the DLC is not that its ideology mirrors the Republicans'. It is that its tactics do. At the DLC's annual convention this year, From ("his voice intense with emotion," according to the New York Times) said, "The DLC has saved the Democratic Party once, and we're bound to do it again." As the battle heats up between party centrists and progressives for the February 12 election for Democratic Party chair, a glance at the DLC's history shows that From's definition of "saving" looks a whole lot like that of the field commanders who thought they'd rescue Vietnamese villages by sanctioning their destruction.

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