The Politics of Listlessness: The Democrats since 1981

October 8, 2019

Chapter 9 of Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, The Hollow Parties

In September 1981, a hundred leading Democratic elected officials from across a beleaguered party convened for a Democratic National Strategy Council, aiming to formulate

Democrats’ response to Reaganism. Alan Cranston of California, the Senate Democratic Whip, chaired “A Conversation among Democrats.” The questions prepared for that session could be repeated, nearly verbatim, after every electoral setback for Democrats down through 2016. They portend the paths followed, and also the paths left untrod, in the decades since.

“If our party is a coalition, unlike the Republicans who tend to represent a single group, what are the common denominators, transcending regional differences and local interests, which make us a National Party?...

The Republicans cannot, and will not, represent the needs and hopes of middle and lower income Americans, as we are committed to do. Yet numbers of these Americans voted Republican in 1978 and 1980. How have we failed to make clear that the Democratic Party represents the true interests of these and other Americans among our true constituencies?...

To endure, a Party must look to the future as well as stay true to its past. What problems have we as a Party failed to face up to? Where will the next two decades take us and what are the principle (sic.) new challenges that we must address?”1

Incipient in each question is the goal of a party that would bring together its many constituencies in shared vision and common purpose—but also the recognition of the forces that would militate against that goal. The challenge to meet resurgent Republicanism with a cohesive response has been clear. Yet answers have repeatedly proven elusive, and debates often seem to run in circles. Cycle after cycle in the long decades that followed the crack-up of the New Deal order, the Democratic Party’s project as a party has stubbornly eluded its grasp.2 In this light, the

1 “A Conversation among Democrats—Chaired by Sen. Alan Cranston,” Kirk O’Donnell files, Box 23, “Strategy Council Meeting, 1981,” Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., Papers, Burns Library, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass. The questions are unsigned, so it is unclear if they originated with Cranston or the Democratic National Committee. 2 Though this view of the Democrats shares much with Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), we do not treat group interests as determinative, but instead emphasize the ways that groups do or do not render themselves into a larger party project. Cf., emphasizing ideology more than groups as the sources of party division, William G.

1 dilemmas of the Trump years, which feel so fresh and raw, largely rehash the same debates and respond to the same fundamental challenges that Democrats have faced for decades. That

Democrats so often seem ignorant of the history they are repeating precisely makes our point.

Democrats have displayed the politics of listlessness. In various factions from left to center and across institutional loci, this listlessness has emerged and endured in ways that defy glib patterns either of party revitalization not yet complete, or else of ongoing decline and fall.

Our account is complex and layered. The ideological sorting of the party system removed many of the nettlesome conflicts that defined the Democratic Party at midcentury. In the face of profound organizational and electoral headwinds, however, this newly polarized party has repeatedly failed to subordinate particular interests for common purpose, to connect policy and politics, or to build public goods that would benefit the party as a whole. The party’s pledge to inclusiveness has proved its own sort of pathology, more often a thin claim to take all comers than a thick vision of universalism.3 In seeking a party prophecy, Democrats have largely been groping in the dark.

Over the decades since 1981, Democrats became more organized and better disciplined despite themselves. This organizational improvement largely redounded to benefit not the formal party or its program, but a vast blob-like army of consultants and para-organizations with their own, often mercenary incentives. Candidate-driven, consultant-shaped politics became less consensual and more partisan over the decades—but without a commitment to party.4 The

Mayer, The Divided Democrats: Ideological Unity, Party Reform, and Presidential Elections (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). 3 Using party rhetoric, John Gerring marks this change with Adlai Stevenson in 1952. Our concerns with the political economy of the New Deal order and the exigencies of party finance date it later. John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 232-256. 4 See John H. Aldrich, “Presidential Campaigns in Party- and Candidate-Centered Eras,” in Under the Watchful Eye: Managing Presidential Campaigns in the Television Era, ed. Mathew D. McCubbins (Washington: CQ Press, 1992).

2 Democratic National Committee and the party’s congressional campaign committees professionalized and expanded their budgets. The money, however, largely went straight to television, or else to outside vendors. State and local parties fell on hard times. Democrats developed a particularly cramped version of communications amounting to facile “messaging” for the television air war. When, in the 2000s, Democrats decided to get serious about the ground war and about policy development—tasks that had once been joined together in the aspirations of postwar programmatic liberals—it was para-organizations, not formal parties, that attempted to fill the void. Party platforms, the sine qua non for the wonkier postwar reformers, became mere afterthoughts. Credit claiming and blame avoidance, particularly acute pathologies for paraparty blobs, have subverted Democrats’ collective task: to forge the partial democratic vision that is the sine qua non of the political party. The task of mobilizing positive loyalty to an enduring party prophecy remains unmet.

Two intersecting master stories have together shaped the Democrats’ political vision.

Polarization has divided the parties, while neoliberalism has constricted the space for a traditional center-left politics.5 The dominant pattern of polarization from the 1980s onward emerged from impersonal processes of ideological sorting, with Democrats serving as the passive receptacle for the new alignment. Democrats’ neoliberal turn, by contrast, emerged from the conscious agency of identifiable actors who sought to negotiate harsh new realities.

5 The two themes have received bifurcated treatment across the disciplines. Political scientists emphasize polarization in accounts of contemporary politics, while sociologists and historians excavate a neoliberal “neo- consensus.” On post-1960s historiography, see Bruce J. Schulman, “Post-1968 History: Neo-Consensus History for the Age of Polarization,” Reviews in American History 47 (2019): 479-499. Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer’s recent historical synthesis, breaking the pattern, is framed as an account of division and polarization. Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019).

3 With the breaking of the Solid South, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats have vanished from Congress and grown rare in the mass public.6 The Boll Weevils, almost all southern, who denied Democrats an effective House majority in 1981 differed from the party’s mainstream far more than the Blue Dogs of the 2000s, who in turn look like conservative dissidents next to the moderate representatives first elected in 2018. As partisan identities became more salient, the courtesies that followed from the old cross-cutting alignment vanished,7 legislative fights turned bruising,8 and American politics grew angry.9 If Republicans, in close alliance with a revanchist conservative movement unbound by the fetters of party, have moved further right than Democrats have moved left, they have been largely parallel but asymmetric processes. Both the party’s congressional rank and file and its activist cadres grew more cohesively liberal over time, while African Americans and feminists bolstered their positions in the party coalition. Though beleaguered labor faced new intraparty competitors for clout, it, too, tethered itself to the party banner. Seen historically, what emerged was a kind of liberalism of the litmus test. It emphasized fealty on the core issues that divided the two parties more that it plumbed the outer limits of new possibilities.

6 Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); Alan I. Abramowitz, The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 7 On these themes, see Sam Rosenfeld, “Joe Biden’s nostalgia for ‘civility’ is nostalgia for the politics of Jim Crow,” Washington Post Monkey Cage, June 21, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/21/joe-bidens- nostalgia-civility-is-nostalgia-politics-jim-crow/. 8 Barbara Sinclair, Party Wars: Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006); Frances Lee, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 9 Liliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

4 Yet alongside polarization came neoliberalism.10 It was a variant on a theme seen across the rich democracies.11 The postwar political economy had collapsed. Gone were steady growth,

“easy finance,”12 the fixed exchange rates agreed to at Bretton Woods, commercial

Keynesianism to balance the business cycle, and the labor power that could keep capital in check. The old commitments receded. Instead, the new paradigm meant “the demise of full employment as a central commitment of economic policy and as the centerpiece of a more encompassing antipoverty agenda” alongside “retreat from a commitment to fair labor standards, economic security, and ‘freedom from want’ as signposts of economic health.”13

Not without dissention, but in numbers hardly limited to the “Atari Democrats” of the

1980s and the “New Democrats” around Bill Clinton, Democrats preached macroeconomic orthodoxy, deregulation in the name of consumer choice, and public-private partnerships.14

Policy proposals arrived with the imprimatur of economics.15 Policymaking in the party of the wonk came to elevate technical rigor and consumer choice above practical experience and political know-how. Amid straitened circumstances, Democrats resisted big-ticket programs in

10 Neoliberalism is complex and multivalent. We lean on William Davies, who treats neoliberalism as “an attempt to replace political judgment with economic evaluation, including, but not exclusively, the evaluation of markets.” See William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty, and the Logic of Competition (London: Sage, 2015), 5-6. For helpful guides to its many dimensions, see Peter B. Evans and William H. Sewell, Jr., ‘Neoliberalism: Policy Regimes, International Regimes, and Social Effects,” in Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era, eds. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Angus Burgin, “The Neoliberal Turn,” typescript, 2019. For a debate on the term, see Daniel Rodgers, “The Uses and Abuses of Neoliberalism,” Dissent, Winter 2018, and responses from Julia Ott, Mike Konczal, N. D. B. Connolly, and Timothy Shenk, plus a rejoinder from Rodgers, at https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/debating-uses-abuses- neoliberalism-forum. 11 Stephanie Mudge, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 12 The phrase comes from W. Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 149. 13 Alice O’Connor, “An Economy That Works for Workers,” in What Works for Workers?: Public Policies and Innovative Strategies for Low-Wage Workers, eds. Stephanie Luce, Jennifer Luff, Joseph A. McCartin, and Ruth Milkman (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 41. 14 Lily Geismer, “Democrats and neoliberalism,” Vox Polyarchy, June 11, 2019, https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2019/6/11/18660240/democrats-neoliberalism. 15 Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (New York: Little, Brown, 2019).

5 favor of incrementalism, incentives delivered through the tax code, and a politics of fiscal restraint that aimed to slay the beast of the budget deficit.16

Questions about the political control of the economy retreated to the background in debates over what it meant to be a Democrat during these years. The party had constituencies to placate across what the journalist Robert Kuttner in 1985 termed “interest-group neoliberalism.”17 The most critical of them came from Wall Street, as Democrats embraced the rising power of finance. Fed Chair Paul Volcker engineered a brutal recession in 1981-1982 that did not simply break the back of inflation but set the stage for the pattern of growth that followed, one dependent on access to credit determined through market allocation and, in its distributional effects, highly unequal.18 During the ensuing decades, Democrats accommodated themselves to and attempted to shape a new order that was not, in the main, the product of their own conscious design.19 In fits and starts between the Carter years and the final repeal in 2000 of the Glass-Steagall law, the New Deal-era limits on the scale and scope of financial services were steadily dismantled while old party-prophetic arguments about finance largely went silent— before making a dramatic return in the 2010s. Though the Ataris may be history and the New

Democrats a rump looking for relevance on the party’s right flank, accommodating the party’s stakeholders still means accommodating the world that neoliberalism made.

16 Iwan Morgan, The Age of Deficits: Presidents and Unbalanced Budgets from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); Paul Pierson, “The Deficit and the Politics of Domestic Reform,” in The Social Divide: Political Parties and the Future of Activist Government (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), 126-178; Mark A. Smith, The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 151-177. 17 Robert Kuttner, “Ass Backwards,” The New Republic, April 22, 1985. 18 Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 116-20. 19 For the latter argument, see Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People (New York: Henry Holt, 2016).

6 Polarization and neoliberalism together made over Democratic moderates. Even as the party’s ideological stalwarts diversified, they largely followed a course shaped by the New Deal and Great Society. It was the party’s centrists, pragmatists, and nonconformists to liberal orthodoxy whose identities and commitments shifted the most across the decades that followed

Reagan’s election. Southern Democrats and old-line urban regulars, the leading voices against responsible-party liberalism at the New Deal order’s close, fell on increasingly hard times. In their stead, first the Atari Democrats, largely hailing from high-tech, upscale suburbs, and then the broader “New Democrat” party faction of the later 1980s and 1990s married pro-growth paeans to the Information Age with small-bore policies and opposition to labor’s more ambitious agenda. As the factional energy on the party’s right dissipated after the Clinton years, the locus of moderate Democratic power continued to shift. The country crossroads and the clubhouse, each rooted in its particular political economy of place, were supplanted by the patio in the strip mall.20 The critique of liberalism grew softer, but centrist politicians stayed resistant to anything that would hit constituents’ pocketbooks.21 The moderates within an increasingly educated and diverse party embraced cultural liberalism and their own version of globalization even as they flinched at commitments to what Tip O’Neill, in his first campaign back in 1936, had encapsulated as “work and wages.”22

20 David A. Hopkins, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992–2018,” paper presented at the 2019 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, August 29, 2019. 21 By attending to the politics of polarization, and noting the differences between national politics and the vexed questions of schools and housing, we offer a somewhat different emphasis from Lily Geismer and Matthew D. Lassiter, “Turning Affluent Suburbs Blue Isn’t Worth the Cost,” New York Times, June 10, 2018, SR7. See also Emily Badger, Quoctrung Bui and Josh Katz, “The Suburbs Are Changing. But Not in All the Ways Liberals Hope,” New York Times, November 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/upshot/suburbs-changing-midterms- democrats-hopes.html. 22 Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., with William Novak, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (New York: Random House, 1987), 376.

7 If anything united moderates of all stripe during these decades, it was concern over deficits, a perennial worry in American politics after the massive 1981 Reagan tax cuts.

Moderates came to deficit hawkery from different places, whether fear of liberal profligacy, demonstration of policy seriousness, or fealty to the demands of the bond market.23 Especially when combined with the tricky politics of revenue, however, all three sentiments ended up in the same place. As deficit hawks precluded New Deal-Keynesians from their old routes to political success via priming the pump and directing spending to favored claimants, Democrats suffered the liabilities of particularistic, group-oriented politics while foreclosing its benefits.24 Instead, it was budget-busting Republicans who cashed in on moderate Democrats’ fiscal rectitude.

In the new century, both in and out of power, the Democratic institutionalists of the party’s mainstream maneuvered awkwardly between the grease-the-wheels accommodationist and good-government reformist strands in its heritage. The debate over the war in Iraq reopened fissures far older than the Reagan years about the relationship between liberalism and empire.

And eventually mainstream Democrats had also to contend with a left-dissident revival that blew on the embers of a long-smoldering radicalism.

The Democrats rediscovered an aggressive partisanship as a byproduct of Republican militancy and the partisan sort, but it was largely a partisanship without party. The institution- building first provoked by George W. Bush’s presidency grew the blob while eschewing the kinds of party strengthening and party renewal once bruited as Democrats’ salvation. Barack

Obama’s presidency embodied both the renewed organizational energy and the indifference to formal party-building that marks contemporary Democratic politics, uneasily fusing personalist

23 Viveka Novak, “After the Boll Weevils,” National Journal, June 26, 1993, 1630-34. 24 Robert Kuttner, “Reaganism, Liberalism, and the Democrats,” in The Reagan Legacy, eds. Sidney Blumenthal and Thomas Byrne Edsall (New York: Random House, 1988).

8 charisma with the technocratic pursuit of policy victory. As they try to bring together the various strands of resistance that have sprung up since 2016, from the movement-fueled left to ordinary voters yearning for normalcy, Democrats labor under this complex inheritance.

“In 1981 the New Deal doesn’t carry a lot of water.”

The 1980 election results—Ronald Reagan’s 10-point popular-vote margin over Jimmy

Carter, Democrats’ 31-seat loss in the House, and, most shocking of all, Republicans’ twelve- seat gain and outright capture of the Senate—if anything undersold the severity of the

Democrats’ troubles. Across the decades of the New Deal order, the party’s conservative contingent in Congress had been more numerous and institutionally empowered than it was in

1981. But Reagan’s election marked the first time a conservative Republican had arrived at the

White House carrying the banner of a serious, movement-backed project for transformative use of state power. That bolstered the discipline and “fraternity house zeal” of congressional

Republicans “willing to compromise the institutional independence of Congress” to advance

Reagan’s agenda, while cutting off Democratic leaders’ access to moderate GOP aisle-crossers.25

The venerable conservative coalition had a robust new agenda to pass, and conservative

Democrats in a shrunken majority caucus could flex new clout. Following the election, Texan

Charles Stenholm revived Judge Howard Smith’s old term for southern dissidents—“boll weevils”—in spearheading the organization of the Conservative Democratic Forum (CDF), all but two of whose 47 members hailed from the South.26 They extracted key committee assignments from House Speaker Tip O’Neill upon implicit threat of jeopardizing his speakership.

25 David Rogers, “A lesson in civics: Reagan’s march through Congress,” Boston Globe, August 14, 1981. 26 CDF was informally termed the Redneck Caucus. Novak, “After the Boll Weevils.”

9 O’Neill, the North Cambridge warhorse, channeled the accommodationist tendency of

New Deal party practice into the energetic management of a party in flux.27 His approach combined new formal tools for influence and organization—control over committee assignments and floor management, regularized leadership meetings and caucus outreach28—with a recognition of the party’s continuing diversity. “In another country there would be five separate parties,” he described his caucus to a reporter.29 “O’Neill is not a strong-armer.” remarked a fellow House leader. “His knack is being able to put people in a position where they don’t want to disappoint him.”30 But in the opening shots of the Reagan Revolution, plenty would.

Before the summer of 1981 had ended, House Democrats managed the nearly anomalous historical feat of allowing themselves to be “rolled” in three successive votes on bills constituting the core of the new administration’s sweeping fiscal agenda, first on the budget resolution, then on the administration’s reconciliation bill, and then on Reagan’s massive tax cuts.31 Though tactical miscalculations by the panicked and fragmented Democrats contributed to each of those rolls, in a more basic sense party leaders sealed their fate from the outset. At a March leadership meeting, they agreed to commit publicly to allowing Reagan’s spending and tax proposals to receive consideration on the House floor before the August recess. “As Speaker, I could have refused to play ball with the Reagan administration by holding up the president’s legislation in

27 See Jack Beatty, “The Life of the Party,” The New Republic, January 24, 1983, 16-20. 28 Barbara Sinclair, Majority Leadership in the U.S. House (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 53, 66-67. 29 Robert Healey, “It’s time for round 2 and things are looking up, Boston Globe, May 15, 1981. 30 Sinclair, Majority Leadership, 89. 31 As the leading scholars of majority parties’ cartelistic control of the House agenda across American history have put it, the first of these three votes in 1981 constituted “the single most important vote in our dataset,” given how “rare” is it to see a majority party not merely ceding negative agenda power to a coalition of majority-party dissidents and the minority, but rather allowing significant legislation to actually pass in the face of opposition from a majority of the majority. Gary W. Cox and Matthew D. McCubbins, Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117. More generally, see also Gary W. Cox and Matthew D. McCubbins, Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

10 the Rules committee,” O’Neill’s memoirs explained. “But in my view, this wasn’t a politically wise thing to do.”32 The Boll Weevil-GOP coalition, for one, made the long-term sustainability of such obstruction doubtful.33 But a deeper sense of shock and ideological disarray was at work.

In a letter to constituents widely circulated in Washington, Les Aspin of Wisconsin invoked history to charge O’Neill with operating “in a fog.” “His politics have always been straight New

Deal,” Aspin wrote. “In 1981 the New Deal doesn’t carry a lot of water.”34

Democrats’ strategic alternative to obstruction—seeking to shape the substance of the legislation they allowed through—came repeatedly to shambles. Their efforts to craft a consensus budget resolution that gave the administration 75 percent of its desired cuts were stymied by Budget Committee member Phil Gramm, who spied on caucus deliberations for the

White House while working with OMB director David Stockman to draft a substitute he then offered, and passed, on the House floor.35 The dynamic repeated itself over tax legislation two months later.

The conservative rout proved potent but fleeting, as congressional Democrats managed to shore themselves up organizationally and strategically to bring movement conservatism’s legislative juggernaut to a halt after the budget and tax votes. The New Deal’s patrimony provided the basis for O’Neill’s first successful offensive push against the administration, as he pounced on proposed cuts to Social Security benefits for early retirees in the summer of 1981. In

32 O’Neill, Man of the House, 412. 33 Steven Smith, “The Budget Battles of 1981: The Role of the Majority Party Leadership,” in American Politics and Public Policy, ed. A.P. Sindler (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1982), 52. 34 Les Aspin letter to constituents, undated, Box 25, Folder “Kirk O’Donnell Files: 1981 Budget—Memos, Statements, Analysis, March 5-July 11,” O’Neill Papers. 35 William Greider, “The Education of David Stockman, The Atlantic, December 1, 1981. See also Ross K. Baker, “Party and Institutional Sanctions in the U.S. House: The Case of Congressman Gramm,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 10.3 (Aug. 1985): 315-337.

11 the face of objections from the more transactional Dan Rostenkowski at Ways and Means,36

O’Neill waged political war against the administration over Social Security. He made the partisan authorship of the program explicit in a letter to the president in July: “A Democratic

Administration created the social security system and as Democratic members of Congress we are committed to protecting the system and preserving the security and dignity of those who depend on it.”37 The administration ultimately abandoned its proposed cuts and agreed to a bipartisan commission to address the program’s fiscal imbalances. A year later, in the face of much more massive projected shortfalls in general revenue, Democrats pushed Reagan into a $98 billion rollback of the previous year’s tax bill.

Reagan never recovered legislatively. The 1982 midterm elections, held amidst soaring unemployment wrought by the Volcker Shock, expanded Democrats’ House majority by 26 seats and decisively broke Reagan’s legislative coalition in the chamber. With the Boll Weevils’ leverage destroyed, leaders used committee assignments to reward loyalists and punish CDF dissidents.38 (Booted off the Budget Committee, Gramm promptly switched parties.) Those midterm gains would also provide O’Neill and other leaders with a retrospective story about having pursued a deliberate rope-a-dope strategy of legislative losses to hang full responsibility for the 1982 recession on Republicans.39 Such rose-tinged accounts belied the panic and bungling that produced Democrats’ initial humiliations. As Majority Leader Jim Wright would recall ruefully on these first clashes with Reagan, “That sonofabitch rolled us.”40

36 Richard E. Cohen, Rostenkowski: The Pursue of Power and the End of the Old Politics (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999), 132-134. 37 Tip O’Neill to Ronald Reagan, July 20, 1981, Box 20, Folder “Press Assistant Files—Social Security, 1981- 1985,” O’Neill Papers. 38 Steven V. Roberts, “The Democrats Get Even,” New York Times, January 8, 1983. 39 This story was previewed in Margot Hornblower, “‘Horatio’ at the Bridge: O’Neill Fought Back, Feels Like a Winner,” Washington Post, October 10, 1982. 40 John A. Farrell, Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2001), 547.

12

Varieties of Liberalism: Feminists, Black Pragmatists, Stalwarts

Democrats’ challenges in the 1980s emerged not merely from Reagan Republicans and

Boll Weevils, but from the cross-cutting and competing goals of various liberal and moderate forces within the party. “An American political party resembles a massive geographic formation composed of different strata,” wrote Samuel Huntington in 1985, “each representing a constituency or group added to the party in one particular era and then subordinated to new strata produced in subsequent political eras.”41 Huntington identified three in the modern Democratic

Party—the fading New Deal stratum (including the Boll Weevils—a vestige rendered nettlesome by new circumstances), a dominant “New Politics” stratum tied to the politics of 1968, and an emergent “New Affluent” stratum. The fact of such layering was a given, but the contingent arrangement of the layers could either facilitate or impede electoral majority-making.

In this environment, a variety of center-left party actors, old and new, similarly jostled in vain to set the party’s course and transcend fragmentation. A particular, professional-class form of organized feminism found its seat at the party table. The first generations of African American office-holders elected after the civil rights revolution married liberal policy commitments to a politics of group bargaining that drew on the accommodationist strand of party prophecy. And liberal stalwarts toiled in the face of grassroots atrophy and organizational drift.

Having broken through with startling speed in the previous decade, feminists secured a commanding presence in Democratic party affairs that deepened across the 1980s even as political fortunes fluctuated. The second wave’s breakthrough was profoundly a party story.42

41 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Visions of the Democratic Party,” Public Interest 79 (Spring 1985), 64. 42 This is the key argument of Denise L. Baer, “Political Parties: The Missing Variable in Women and Politics Research,” Political Research Quarterly 46.3 (Sep. 1993): 547-576. See also Jo Freeman, “Whom You Know Versus Whom You Represent: Feminist Influence in the Democratic and Republican Parties,” in The Women’s

13 The key development was less a shift in mass political behavior than the effects of a decisive turn in both parties’ activist cadres. In the 1970s, McGovern-Fraser opened the Democratic Party institutionally to movement actors, second-wave feminism transformed the meaning of women’s rights in American politics, and Carter-era activism on both sides of the Equal Rights

Amendment (ERA) and abortion rights polarized elite party positioning and coalitional ties.43

Feminist Republicanism found itself homeless; the 1980 GOP convention ratified a platform reversing the party’s four-decade-long support of the ERA and endorsed a constitutional ban on abortion.44 At the Democratic convention—where fully 20 percent of all delegates were members of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Women’s Political

Caucus (NWPC), or both45—feminists secured floor passage of a minority plank calling on the party to “withhold financial support and technical campaign assistance from candidates who do not support the ERA.”46 In turn, exit polls in the 1980 election revealed a sharp jump in the difference between men and women’s candidate choices compared to four years earlier. NOW officials coined the term “gender gap” to describe the phenomenon, launching a popular and scholarly cottage industry.47

The post-reform world of primaries, participatory caucuses, and midterm issue conferences gave engaged group activists new leverage. Feminists used the 1978 party

Movements of the United States and Western Europe: Consciousness, Political Opportunity, and Public Policy, eds. Mary F. Katzenstein and Carol McClurg Mueller (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1987), 215-244. 43 Christina Wolbrecht, The Politics of Women’s Rights: Parties, Positions, and Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Marjorie Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 44 Sam Rosenfeld. “How Feminists Became Democrats,” Politico, February 3, 2018, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/03/how-feminists-became-democrats-216926. 45 Wolbrecht, Politics of Women’s Rights, 45. 46 “Democratic Party Platform of 1980,” August 11, 1980, accessed online at Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29607. 47 Bella Abzug with Mim Kelber, Gender Gap: Bella Abzug’s Guide to Political Power for Women (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1984); Eleanor Smeal, Why and How Women Will Elect the Next President (New York: Harper & Row, 1984); Carol M. Mueller, ed., The Politics of the Gender Gap: The Social Construction of Political Influence (Newbury Park, Calif.: SAGE Publications, 1988).

14 conference in Memphis to secure a pledge from the DNC to guarantee full gender balance at the

1980 convention.48 Four years later in Philadelphia, Queens congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro took the lead in securing the inclusion of language concerning women’s rights in statements on the economy and Social Security.49

When Walter Mondale chose Ferraro as his running mate, the three-term House member’s relative obscurity underlined the extent of women’s underrepresentation—Democrats counted one female governor and zero senators in 1984. Female office-seekers encountered the biggest hurdle to running in the early stages of fundraising, which trapped them in a Catch-22 of nonviability. A new venture, targeted at getting donations from women for Democratic women, aimed to fix the problem. The result, spearheaded by NWPC veteran and IBM heiress Ellen

Malcolm, was EMILY’s List (Early Money Is Like Yeast, because “it makes the dough rise”).50

The group raised $350,000 for two Senate candidates in the 1986 cycle, Harriett Woods in

Missouri and Barbara Mikulski in Maryland; soon, it became one of the largest PACs in the country.51 At decade’s end, Democrats began to outpace Republicans in the percentage of women office-holders in state legislatures and Congress. In 1992, the “Year of the Woman,” 25 percent of all nonincumbent Democratic House candidates were women compared with 9 percent for Republicans, while four new Democratic women were elected to the Senate.52 The road to a female presidential nomination would take longer, though Representative Patricia Schroeder of

48 Alan Ehrenhalt, “The Democratic Left Faces a Dilemma,” Congressional Quarterly, December 16, 1978. 49 Frank Lynn, “Women’s Issues Given Strong Support by Democrats in Philadelphia,” New York Times, June 28, 1982. 50 Harriett Woods, Stepping Up to Power: The Political Journey of American Women (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 99; Ellen Malcolm with Craig Unger, When Women Win: EMILY’s List and the Rise of Women in American Politics (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2016), 38-41; Amanda Spake, “Women Can Be Power Brokers, Too,” Washington Post, June 5, 1988. 51 Wolbrecht, Politics of Women’s Rights, 62. 52 Kira Sanbonmatsu, Democrats, Republicans, and the Politics of Women’s Place (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 45-48.

15 Colorado launched a brief campaign in 1987. She waved off suggestions that Mondale and

Ferraro’s landslide loss revealed the vulnerability of a female candidacy: “Nobody says Sam

Nunn can’t run because Carter was from Georgia.”53

Notwithstanding both the “special interest” label ascribed to them by moderate

Democrats and the accusations of racial and class blinders advanced by radical critics, the mainline multi-issue feminist organizations were, as a matter of formal program, down-the-line liberals on not only cultural but also economic issues,54 helping to enrich and sustain an ideological core inside a beleaguered and fragmented party. The radical critics identified something real, nonetheless. For reasons both specific to the women’s movement55 and common to the dynamics of organizational maintenance in American politics writ large, the feminist choir in Democratic politics sang with an upper-class accent. When civic organizations use expressive benefits to induce voluntary contributions, they depend on appeals and approaches that produce.

For feminist groups, whatever the litany of formal issue positions they propounded, abortion appeals produced; campaigns aimed at working-class women did not.56 Some members of NOW expressed outright hostility to the notion of providing legal support to welfare recipients. “We stopped doing direct mail on that issue.”57 And so universal child care, paid family leave, and

53 Robin Toner, “Democrats and Women: Party Shifts Approach,” New York Times, July 11, 1987. 54 For evidence from Congress, see Anne Costain and Heather Fraizer, “Congress and the Transformation of the Women’s Movement,” in Women Transforming Congress, ed. Cindy Simon Rosenthal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), esp. 79-84. 55 A classic critical analysis of class dynamics in feminist activism can be found in Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 56 Abortion was in fact an exceptional issue among all major controversies related to women’s rights, in both the extent of its polarization by party and its reach into the mass electorate. See Sanbonmatsu, Democrats, Republicans, and the Politics of Women’s Place, 98-111, 173-215. 57 Felicia Kornbluh, “Feminists and the welfare debate: Too little? Too late?” Dollars & Sense, November 1, 1996.

16 combating the feminization of poverty remained at the back of the feminist agenda. Women entered the workforce on the terms set by a gendered labor market.58

EMILY’s List proved enormously influential in setting priorities and drawing lines within feminist Democratic politics. Its litmus test for candidate support was abortion rights; other issues were flexible, and its donor network hardly prioritized aggressively redistributive policies. An innovator in bundling campaign contributions, the group maximized its effectiveness within the strictures set by the electoral system’s skyrocketing campaign costs. The limits of Democratic feminism’s class politics both befit and contributed to an era in which the party’s economic prophecy, forged for a now-outdated notion of a family led by a male breadwinner, fell into particular confusion and drift.59

---BLACK PRAGMATISM SECTION---

Liberal stalwarts, meanwhile, propounded themes and coalitional affinities out of both the New Deal and New Politics “strata.” They urged Democratic partisans to stay the course even if it meant sailing against the wind.60 In what was probably a case of mistaken identity, the

Democratic Leadership Council, which hoped to brand itself as “progressive,” in 1986 invited the New Deal historian William Leuchtenburg to speak on “The Progressive Tradition of the

58 See Ann Shola Orloff, “Transforming Gendered Labor Policies in Sweden and the United States, 1960s-2000s,” in Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity, eds. Alice Kessler-Harris and Mauricio Vaudagna (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 249-272. 59 For a state-level analysis of feminism’s class limitations in this era, see Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 235-249. On breadwinner liberalism, see Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill & Wang, 2012), esp. 17-46. 60 Ted Kennedy, concession speech, Democratic National Convention, August 12, 1980, text accessed at https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/tedkennedy1980dnc.htm.

17 Democratic Party.” As the centrist audience squirmed in its seats, Leuchtenburg paid homage to the old gods, and summoned up their presence:

“If Democrats are soon to enjoy the kind of election night celebrated in 1936, 1948, and 1964, it will be, I believe, because the next Democratic presidential candidate has that kind of spirit, because he takes pride in the magnificent legacy that is ours, and because he affirms that government is not part of the problem, it is part of the answer.”61

Even beyond the telltale “he,” the tone of Leuchtenburg’s remarks, like others in the genre across the 1980s and ’90s, pointed back, not forward. They diagnosed a party in the doldrums—but, as for the challenge of knitting together a diverse coalition constituted on very different grounds from

Franklin Roosevelt’s, they had less advice. In particular, the party could no longer be led, as it had been for almost two centuries, entirely by white men.

Grassroots activists did what they could to sustain themselves through lean years and against adverse currents. The coalition of activists and groups that had spearheaded left-liberal opposition to Carter and powered Ted Kennedy’s 1980 nomination challenge dissipated in the

Reagan era. The Progressive Alliance, founded by UAW president Doug Fraser and largely underwritten by the union, shuttered in 1981 in the wake of Chrysler’s bankruptcy and an industry-wide wave of plant closings.62 Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing

61 Reported in Robert Kuttner, The Life of the Party: Democratic Prospects in 1988 and Beyond (New York: Viking, 1987), 203-204. For variants on the theme, see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Requiem for Neoliberalism,” The New Republic, June 6, 1983, 28-30; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “For Democrats, Me-Too Reaganism Will Spell Disaster,” New York Times, July 6, 1986, E13; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “It’s My ‘Vital Center,’” Slate, January 10, 1997, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1997/01/it-s-my-vital-center.html; George McGovern, “A Word from the Original McGovernik,” Washington Post, December 25, 1994, C2; Richard Goodwin, “Has Anybody Seen the Democratic Party?” New York Times Magazine, August 25, 1996, 33; and, more analytically, Alan Brinkley, “Liberalism’s Third Crisis,” American Prospect, Spring 1995. After Schlesinger attacked the DLC’s “me-too-ism,” Al From, in a letter to the editor, emphasized the continuities between postwar anti-Communist Democrats and the DLC. Alvin From, “Worthy Heirs to the Democratic Legacy,” New York Times, July 20, 1986, E22. For the exact same point made a generation later from the left, see Thomas Meaney, “The Hagiography Factory,” London Review of Books, February 8, 2018, 13-15. 62 Andrew Battista, The Revival of Labor Liberalism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 96-97; Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, “Liberal Alliance Falls Apart at Strange Time,” Washington Star, March 23, 1981, 3.

18 Committee (DSOC) merged with the New American Movement to form Democratic Socialists for America (DSA) in 1982, but the new outfit largely pulled back from intra-Democratic activism.

Mass protests and direct-action campaigns in the Reagan years often featured broad but thin support for symbolically charged causes, and lacked any explicit partisan commitment. The nuclear freeze movement, which in 1982 produced the largest political demonstration in

American history up to that point—one million protestors assembled in New York’s Central

Park—epitomized those dynamics. Even as its potency constrained Reagan officials’ sense of their strategic options (compelling them to push for the Strategic Defense Initiative), its organizational and ideological life proved ephemeral.63 One important exception to this dynamic was Citizen Action, a federated network of state-level public interest and community action groups founded by the New Left organizer Heather Booth. Two weeks after Reagan’s victory,

Booth announced at a Citizen Action conference that “we need to seriously review part of the previous advice given by myself and others: that the organizations represented here, and others like us around the country, should not be particularly electoral.”64 Over the next several elections cycles, Citizen Action became central to Democratic get-out-the-vote operations, part of a broader flourishing of professionalized canvassing operations among liberal activist groups.65

63 Julian E. Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security from World War II to the War on Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 316-323; Michael Stewart Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 121-149. 64 Heather Booth speech, November 20, 1980, Box 150, Folder “CA Leadership Conference - 11/20/80,” Midwest Academy Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago, Ill. 65 Harry C. Boyte, Heather Booth, and Steve Max, Citizen Action and the New American Populism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 71; Dana Fisher, Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns is Strangling Progressive Politics in America (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006), 11-15.

19 Nevertheless, groups like Citizen Action were no more capable than the intellectuals of building up the party’s cohesion and influencing its substantive agenda.66

Varieties of Moderation: Southerners, Ataris, New Democrats

Two tributaries, one southern and the other predominantly northern and western, fed into the faction of moderate “New Democrats” that came to prominence by decade’s end. Most of the politicians who would found the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) hailed from the Greater

South, and saw modernizing the party in a battle against doctrinaire liberals as the way to preserve Democrats’ footing in the region.67 Largely eschewing the open dissension practiced by the Boll Weevils, white southern moderates sought to sustain the makeshift alliances in post-Jim

Crow Democratic politics among ancestral party loyalists, elites in the rising Sun Belt anxious for a developmental state to grease the wheels,68 and, as decidedly junior partners, African-

Americans. This meant a political appeal that resisted the cultural liberalism of Huntington’s

New Politics stratum, championed the legacies of Jefferson and Jackson,69 and touted “middle- class values” to win back disaffected constituencies.70 As late as 1986, David Broder could still report from “rural Democratic courthouses where ‘Daddy is sheriff and Bubba is his deputy.’”71

66 Citizen Action was disbanded in 1997 following revelations of its participation in the “Teamstergate” scandal involving illegal fundraising for Ron Carey’s reelection as union president. Steven Greenhouse, “Link to Teamsters Forces a Liberal Group to Close its National Office,” New York Times, October 30, 1997. 67 It was the classic conservative paradox that the Sicilian aristocrat Tancredi identified in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 40. 68 Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt : Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 69 The Jefferson-Jackson Institute was one of the names on the short-list for the Democratic Leadership Council’s think tank, ultimately called the Progressive Policy Institute. See Kenneth Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 305. 70 Al From, “Democrats in the Center,” Louisville Courier-Journal, November 3, 1996. 71 David S. Broder, “Republicans Gain Strength in Region’s Political Cauldron,” Washington Post, May 18, 1986, A1.

20 But in fits and starts, then accelerating from 1994 onward, the tides of demographic party sorting would overwhelm southern Democratic coalitions and party power.72

The second moderate tributary emerged from Huntington’s New Affluent stratum.

Hailing from high-tech, upscale suburbs of the North and West and championing a new growth politics that foreswore the pork barrel, these Democrats wielded out-with-the-old generational rhetoric to attack long-sacrosanct New Deal shibboleths. At once evoking and drawing a contrast with neoconservatism, their journalistic guru Charlie Peters propounded the moniker

“neoliberals” for them,73 while Tip O’Neill’s quippy aide Chris Matthews coined an alternative label at a DC brunch in 1982 that spread fast: “Atari Democrats.”74 Matthews’s term tweaked the obsession with technology and post-industrial economic development that colored the proposals and intraparty critiques of office-holders like Gary Hart and Tim Wirth of Colorado, Mike

Dukakis and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, and Bill Bradley of New Jersey. A shocking number of them had entered office in the post-Watergate wave elections of 1974, which brought

Democrats into swing districts and states as well as GOP strongholds across the country. The neoliberal Democrats of the Reagan years were the ones who had managed to sustain reelection when the wave receded.

Though geographically diverse, their politics reflected a broadly similar suburban and educated voter base, part of the slow shuffling of white partisan alignments underway across the

72 Compare Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); and James M. Glaser, The Hand of the Past in Contemporary Southern Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 73 See Charles Peters, “A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto,” Washington Post, September 5, 1982. Though the substantive overlap is clear, Peters’s parochial and time-bound meaning of the term should be distinguished from the broader transnational concept. 74 Randall Rothenberg, The Neoliberals: Creating the New American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 79. See also John B. Judis, “Neoliberals: High-Tech Politics for the ’80s?,” The Progressive, October 1982; and Patrick Andelic, Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative America, 1974-1994 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019), 150-180.

21 country. “Wirth or Les Aspin [of Wisconsin] could come from a hundred different districts around the country,” Chris Matthews remarked to a reporter. “The new-breed guys went away to college. They became unrooted.”75 On cultural and “postmaterialist” issues like ecology and consumer protection, neoliberals generally took outspoken liberal positions. Hart’s political genesis as manager of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign was no aberration—a strong dose of the New Left and the New Politics suffused the neoliberals’ approach. “I had a base among environmentalists and anti-war activists, because I was up front on those issues, as I was on gay rights and women's rights,” Tsongas explained. “I had those groups in place, and then I moved on to the business community.”76

That “business community” was key: it was political economy, not culture, that the neoliberals stressed. Their overriding focus was on stimulating economic growth, as both a goal in itself and the means by which to sidestep political conflict over redistribution. Coming of age politically amidst stagflation-driven distributional conflict and pervasive talk of economic and fiscal limits, they reveled in a rhetoric of sober realism and hard choices rather than “class warfare.”77 They floated Reagan-lite plans for means-testing entitlements. Failure to adapt to new economic realities with “tough, fresh policies,” Tsongas insisted in 1980, threatened to

“reduce liberalism to an interesting dissertation topic for historians.”78 Globalization and the supplanting of manufacturing by services—“an economic transformation as significant as the

Industrial Revolution of the 19th century,” Hart declared in 198279—had together rendered the

75 Hedrick Smith, The Power Game: How Washington Works (New York: Random House, 1988), 135. 76 William Schneider, “JFK’s Children: The Class of ’74,” The Atlantic, March 1989, 46. See also E.J. Dionne, “Greening of the Democrats: An Eighties Mix of Idealism and Shrewd Politics,” New York Times, June 14, 1989. 77 Les AuCoin, quoted in Schneider, “JFK’s Children,” 42. 78 Paul E. Tsongas, “Update Liberalism, Or It’s a 60’s Relic,” New York Times, June 30, 1980. 79 Gary Hart, “An Economic Strategy for the 1980s,” February 6, 1982, Box 75, Folder 17, Gary Hart Papers, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo. Hart presented this at the annual Issues Conference of the House Democratic Caucus.

22 New Deal-Keynesian synthesis obsolete. In its stead, neoliberals sought to foster innovation and nurture growth sectors like high-tech via an array of national industrial policies drawing inspiration from public-private partnerships at the subnational level.80

The Ataris saw in contemporary Democratic practice the perverse tendency to prop up declining industries while ignoring emerging ones. The debate over the federal bailout of

Chrysler in 1979 proved a crucible for them; Hart opposed it, while Tsongas and others made their support conditional on labor concessions. The bailout crystallized neoliberals’ political critique of the Democratic Party—less that it supported government interference in the market

(neoliberals, after all, championed their own industrial policies)81 than that it kowtowed to entrenched interests.82 To critics on their left, it all confirmed the continuing relevance of Hart’s infamous 1974 line about the Watergate babies: “We’re not a bunch of little Hubert

Humphreys.”83 It was no coincidence that the very auto-industry bankruptcy that helped neoliberals to fortify their factional critique simultaneously prompted the shuttering of labor- liberalism’s leading effort at coalitional revival in the Progressive Alliance.

The attack on the politics of special interests, drawing on still-potent reformist and anti- party strands of thought among liberal voters and activists, reached a crescendo in Hart’s insurgent campaign against the labor-backed Mondale for the presidential nomination in 1984.

80 Brent Cebul, “Supply-Side Liberalism: Fiscal Crisis, Post-Industrial Policy, and the Rise of the New Democrats,” Modern American History 2.2 (July 2019): 139-164. Michael Dukakis’s economic stewardship of Massachusetts as governor, particularly the public-private partnerships he forged with technology firms along the Route 128 corridor, epitomized the national trend of state-level postindustrial policy. See Geismer, Don’t Blame Us, 251-279. 81 On the rise of industrial policy as a topic of Democratic debate, see Otis L. Graham, Jr., Losing Time: The Industrial Policy Debate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 59-74. Robert Reich, then a guru for liberal and neoliberal Democrats alike, concluded his book-length analysis of the Chrysler bailout with a narrowly negative verdict on its overall merits. Robert Reich and John D. Donahue, New Deals: The Chrysler Revival and the American System (New York: Random House, 1985), 268-297. 82 Many traditional liberals were themselves enamored with industrial policy. As the UAW’s Doug Fraser put it, “Industrial policy is very, very, very important because this goddamn free market system doesn’t work any longer.” Quoted in Sidney Blumenthal, “Drafting a Democratic Industrial Plan,” New York Times, August 28, 1983. 83 Quoted in Schneider, “JFK’s Children,” 35.

23 “We are tired of the politics of special arrangements and old arrangements and old deals,” Hart told a New Hampshire crowd.”84 In place of interest-group brokerage would come the technocratic competence and idealism that so many of the neoliberals associated with a shared formative hero, John F. Kennedy.85

Robust parties were not, for neoliberals—as parties had been for a line of reformist thought going back to Schattschneider—the answer to the failings they identified in overweening interest-group politics. For all the sweep of their critique, the neoliberals lacked either the overarching ideological vision or the organizational sense to advance a party project. “They have post-New Deal policy options,” Norman Ornstein summed up in 1981, “but no post-New Deal philosophy.”86 The generational branding and free-floating support for postindustrial policy experiments failed to cohere into a program. Even the sympathetic journalist Michael Kinsley conceded a “rather vacuous blow-dried side to the neolib business.”87

The neoliberals advanced a political approach that unrooted in durable organization, and the consequences for Democratic developments were twofold. Notwithstanding their philosophical opposition to interest-group politics, the practical upshot of neoliberals’ economic agenda was to encourage the deeper incorporation of business, including the burgeoning knowledge industries that initially viewed themselves above grubby politics, into the inner circle of the party-as-interest-broker. And yet, precisely because the neoliberals’ critique resonated, with Hart and his allies effectively claiming the mantle of idealism for many reform-minded

84 Elizabeth Drew, Campaign Journal: The Political Events of 1983-1984 (New York: MacMillan, 1985), 321. 85 On Kennedy’s own ambivalent place in the New Deal lineage, see William E. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Barack Obama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 63-120. 86 Norman J. Ornstein, “Paul Tsongas: A Liberal for All Seasons,” Washington Post, September 13, 1981. See also Fred Barnes, “The Neoliberals,” Baltimore Sun, December 13, 1981, K1. 87 Walter Goodman, “As Neoliberals Search for Closest Fit, Hart Is Often Mentioned,” New York Times, May 15, 1984, A24.

24 voters and activists in the 1980s, their own attenuated party vision helped to color the tradition of issue-driven reformism itself in increasingly anti-party hues.

In 1985, Southern moderates joined with northern Ataris to form the Democratic

Leadership Council. For the next two decades, the DLC would serve as the nerve center for a party-faction of self-described New Democrats calling on the party of the people to move

“beyond the sterile left-right debate.”88 The DLC’s initial leaders were mostly from the South: in the Senate, Lawton Chiles of Florida and Sam Nunn of Georgia and, less centrally, the border- state Joe Biden of Delaware; Governor Chuck Robb of Virginia; Representative Jim Jones of

Oklahoma.89 But the Southerners shared with the Ataris the same essential critique: that the party had become a passive broker for the organized demands of labor, identity groups, and big- government constituencies. Al From, ex-aide to Representative Gillis Long of Louisiana, carried out his staff leadership of the DLC with factional zeal. While serving as Long’s top staffer at the

Committee on Party Effectiveness, From had worked effectively with both southerners and

Ataris.90

88 Quote from “The New Progressive Declaration: A Political Philosophy for the Information Age,” Progressive Policy Institute, July 10, 1996, http://web.archive.org/web/20020116151449/http://www.ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=839. With the DLC’s closure, the group’s archives are no longer online, but may be found by using caches of ndol.org from the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org. For scholarship on the New Democrats, see Jon F. Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats,” Political Science Quarterly 110 (1995): 207-232; Baer, Reinventing Democrats; Daniel DiSalvo, “The Death and Life of the New Democrats,” The Forum 6:2 (Summer 2008), Article 4: 1-18; Curtis Atkins, “Forging a New Democratic Party: The Politics of the Third Way from Clinton to Obama,” PhD dissertation, York University, 2015; Mudge, Leftism Reinvented, 260-303. A recent discussion brought the band back together; see Paul Kane, “‘As I see the Democratic Party today, it is really more around identity politics than around ideas’: The DLC's founders vanquished left-wing Democrats—for a while,” Washington Post, January 7, 2018, A25. 89 Though he soon moved toward a more protectionist stance on trade and left the DLC’s central orbit, Representative Dick Gephardt of Missouri served as the group’s first chair Paul Taylor, “Democrats’ New Centrists Preen for ’88,” Washington Post, November 10, 1985, A1; Phil Gailey, “Frankly, Democrats Want the South,” New York Times, January 16, 1986, B8. 90 Al From with Alice McKeon, The New Democrats and the Return to Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 41-43.

25 “Our party had become the party of caucuses,” bemoaned Chiles. “A caucus for every group but Middle America.”91 The DLC sought both to be that caucus and, transcending the caucuses, to fill the void left in the wake of the New Deal public philosophy.92 The New

Democrats’ consistent and defining trait was their factional criticism of other actors inside the party. They had two principal antagonists, both of whom, in their view, had failed to face hard political facts. First came organized labor, both as actor in the political economy and as linchpin of the old liberal coalition. The DLC, largely led by politicians from right-to-work states, sought labor-management cooperation in private- and public-sector workplaces alike rather than what it deemed a conflictual model from another age.93 The second antagonist, more intense but also more amorphous, was the New Politics. New Dems saw coarsened permissiveness and the liberal tendency to explain away antisocial behavior as political legacies of the 1960s that repelled the mainstream. As the DLC put it in its 1990 New Orleans Declaration, “We believe in preventing crime and punishing criminals, not in explaining away their behavior. We believe the purpose of social welfare is to bring the poor into the nation’s economic mainstream, not to maintain them in dependence.”94 One figure in particular epitomized the worst in those tendencies: Jesse

Jackson, whom the DLC pointedly refused to invite to its conventions leading up to the 1992 presidential race.95

91 Janet Hook, “Officials Seek Moderation in Party’s Image,” CQ Weekly Report, March 9, 1985, 457. When Chiles led an all-white, all-male DLC delegation around Florida, state representative Helen Gordon Davis welcomed “all you fine looking gentlemen here.” Robert Barnes, “Democrats bring to Florida plan to put party in mainstream,” St. Petersburg Times, May 18, 1985, 1-B. 92 Metaphor taken from Richard E. Cohen, “Democratic Leadership Council Sees Party Void and Is Ready to Fill It,” National Journal, February 1, 1986, 267-270. 93 For the factional debate, see Jeff Faux, “The Myth of the New Democrats,” American Prospect, Fall 1993; and Will Marshall, “Friend or Faux,” American Prospect, Winter 1994. 94 “The New Orleans Declaration: Statement Endorsed at the Fourth Annual DLC Conference,” Democratic Leadership Council, March 1990, http://web.archive.org/web/20030526020448/http://www.ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=878. 95 Robert A. Jordan, “DLC Gets Jesse Jackson’s Dander Up,” Boston Globe, May 5, 1991. Jackson, for his part, returned fire, excoriating “Democrats for the Leisure Class… who didn’t march in the sixties and won’t stand up in the eighties.” In an obvious dig at Joe Biden, he went after politicians “combing their hair to the left like Kennedy

26 For the New Dems every bit as much as for radicals who flocked to Jackson, however— in contrast to liberals who urged the party to trim the sails and stay the course—Reaganism marked a kind of natural governing order, one demanding a full reckoning.96 After Michael

Dukakis’s defeat, the DLC established a new think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, which published in September 1989 the New Democrats’ most important document: “The Politics of

Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency,” by William Galston and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck. The authors were both political scientists, Galston a Chicago-trained theorist97 and Kamarck a student of the anti-reform Nelson Polsby at Berkeley. They had met on Mondale’s campaign, but hardly embraced a repeat of his politics. Three successive presidential defeats made the crisis plain, they argued. “The real problem is not insufficient liberalism on the part of the Democratic nominees; it is rather the fact that during the last two decades, most Democratic nominees have come to be seen as unacceptably liberal.” Democrats could not mobilize their way out—especially not on the basis of support from African-Americans. Having attacked the central claims of liberals in general and Jackson supporters in particular, Galston and Kamarck warned that, “[e]ventually, the massive political realignment at the top of the ticket will affect races at the bottom of the ticket.”98 Typifying the power and limits of the New Democratic project, Galston and Kamarck’s intraparty critique and electoral diagnosis betrayed a comparatively hazy substantive vision.

Theirs was a call to factional arms more than a statement of party prophecy.

and moving their policies to the right like Reagan.” Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars?: The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency 1988 (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 44-45. 96 William Galston, “The Future of the Democratic Party,” Brookings Review, Winter 1985, 16-24. 97 See, inter alia, William A. Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and William A. Galston, “Leo Strauss’s Qualified Embrace of Liberal Democracy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Steven B. Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 193-214. 98 William Galston and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency,” Progressive Policy Institute, 1989, 3, 14. https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/Politics_of_Evasion.pdf.

27 Growing polarization helped ensure that New Democrats’ party legacy would be mixed.

On the one hand, and in common with modernizers in left parties across the rich democracies, they favored expanding the scope of market, rather than governmental, authority, and rarely spoke out in defense of politics as the way to allocate resources. They rooted their priorities more in an undifferentiated people than in the partial, us-vs-them claims of party, and, in the American context, consistently urged Democratic candidates to go after independents.99 But they never disavowed partisan commitment itself. Whether or not they were Republicans Lite in substance,

New Democrats always called themselves Democrats and framed their core project as rescuing the Democratic Party from itself. When Al From trumpeted the New Democrats’ achievements, he gave a backhanded homage to his political party. Were it not for the New Democrats, he claimed, the party might “have gone the way of the Whigs.”100

Party-Building as a Double-Edged Sword

As factional actors in the 1980s battled fitfully over the party’s vision, Democrats attempted across several fronts to meet their organizational challenges. By decade’s end the party would be better-armored, -funded, and -organized at the top, but ever more sapped of prophetic purpose. Party leadership in Congress strengthened and centralized, a development enabled by the slow but steady sorting out of conservative dissidents from the caucuses’ rank and file. The national party organs, playing frantic catch-up with the GOP, beefed up their staffing and resources in Washington, drastically overhauled their communications and financing operations, and grew into well-heeled provisioners of campaign services to candidates. Just as important

99 Al From and Will Marshall, “The Road to Realignment: Democrats and Perot Voters,” Democratic Leadership Council, July 1993, https://web.archive.org/web/20010729020122/http://www.ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=2446. 100 Atkins, “Forging a New Democratic Party,” 116. See also From, The New Democrats, 249-250.

28 were the efforts that didn’t stick, as initiatives pursued in Congress and the national committee to develop new formal mechanisms for policy development and to invest in organizational party- building largely stalled.

“Needless to say,” O’Neill aide Kirk O’Donnell wrote in a strategy memo to the DNC in early 1981, “the Democrats are in trouble.”101 On this, all party factions agreed. Where they disagreed, at times allying with strange bedfellows, was over whether to emphasize organizational, procedural, or ideological solutions. O’Donnell ascribed the party’s losses to a yawning organizational deficit that had grown over the years, as the state and local components of the party’s “decentralized amalgamation” atrophied while the Republicans rebuilt. His solutions were chiefly organizational: professionalize the DNC and bolster its finances; end the committee’s preoccupation with the presidential election; and “promote and aid in the rebuilding of state and local party units.” Though O’Donnell was channeling a northern liberal outlook—he also called for an increased union presence in the party—the whole gamut of party actors, awed by the Republicans’ national juggernaut, agreed with him about the need to professionalize the committee as a service party for office-seekers.

A similar consensus emerged around another of his agenda items: to “promote greater participation of Members of Congress, Governors, Mayors and State Legislatures” in party affairs. The debacle of the Carter presidency helped account for the breadth and diversity of support for this unambiguous reversal of a key McGovern-Fraser tenet. Carter, a man without a country in factional terms, had left Democrats of every stripe—Southern moderates, rising neoliberals, pragmatic accommodationists, programmatic labor-liberals, even reformers in the

McGovern-Fraser tradition—newly receptive to an argument about the unintended consequences

101 Enclosed in Kirk O’Donnell memo to Al Barkan, Dick Moe, and Paul Kirk, undated, Box 22, Fodler KOD: DNC Information, 1980-1981, O’Neill Papers.

29 of nomination reforms. Taking office-holders out of the nominating process, so the argument went, served to destroy the connective tissue between the presidency, Congress, and subnational actors that party institutions historically provided, with disastrous consequences for governance.

For moderate and conservative party actors, empowering elected officials in party decision- making and agenda-setting served an additional, substantive purpose. The ideological center of gravity among officeholders fell to the right of the kinds of activists that McGovern-Fraser reforms had advantaged in party affairs. Bringing them back in thus represented a bid for power by the party’s accommodationists and non-liberal ideologists alike.

The surprisingly uncontested dismantling of the party’s midterm issues conventions represented one such reassertion of officials’ intraparty clout relative to that of liberal activists.

The party had held conventions of elected delegates in 1974 and 1978 to foster intraparty exchange and formulate policy positions; the party’s official charter endorsed the institution. The delegate selection process ensured issue activists’ dominance of the midterm conventions, rendering them, in the approving words of James MacGregor Burns, “a transmission belt between movement politics and party politics.”102 In the post-1980 reckoning, more than just the party’s pragmatist usual suspects proved willing to halt that transmission belt. The DNC under its new chairman Charles Manatt initiated the process by shrinking the size of the 1982 gathering to half that of 1978 and scrapping the district-level delegate selection procedures.103 Manatt’s

102 Thomas E. Cronin, “On the American Presidency: A Conversation with James MacGregor Burns,” Political Science Quarterly 16 (Summer 1986): 536. The 1978 conference in Memphis proved instrumental in coalescing an activist network in support of Ted Kennedy’s eventual nomination challenge against Carter. See Tim Stanley, Kennedy vs. Carter: The 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 63-91; Sam Rosenfeld, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 237-252. 103 For the rationale and details of the change, see Ann Lewis memo to Eugene Eidenberg, Ron Brown, Bill Sweeney, Mike Steed, Bob Neuman, April 11, 1981, and undated “Recommendations from Mid-Term Task Force to Chairman Manatt,” both in Box 1043, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Papers, National Archives, Washington, D.C.. (This collection is unprocessed; folders are unlabeled.)

30 successor, Paul Kirk, would complete the process four years later by canceling the 1986 conference altogether. “I just think it’s wrong to spend a lot of money on … what becomes an exercise in damage control,” he reasoned.104 Democrats never again held such a gathering.

The same impulse—and the broad coalition that shared it—could be seen in the work of the Commission on Presidential Nomination, commonly known as the Hunt Commission after its chairman, North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt. The latest in the party’s long line of presidential nominating reform commissions created 550 new unpledged ex officio convention delegates, eventually known as superdelegates. Given the controversy generated by superdelegates upon their first contact with a real nomination contest in 1984, it is all the more remarkable how little dissent was voiced in establishing them. The commission engaged both the moderates’ skepticism of existing activists in nomination politics as well as the liberals’ frustration with pervasive irresponsibility on the part of party actors in Congress:

The commission regards this as an important way to increase the convention’s representativeness of mainstream Democratic constituencies. It would help restore peer review to the process, subjecting candidates to scrutiny by those who know them best. It would put a premium on coalition-building within the party prior to nomination, the forming of alliances that would help us govern effectively. It would strengthen party ties among officials, giving them a greater sense of identification with the nominee and the platform.105

The pendulum swing back toward elected officials’ participation in party affairs was likewise evident in proposals for new programmatic vehicles dominated by office holders. One came from party pragmatist par excellence Bob Strauss, the ex-DNC chair and chairman of

Carter’s reelection campaign. A widely circulated memo drafted by Strauss’s former aide Paul

Jensen in late 1980 called for a new and continuing party entity consisting of twenty-five

104 David Broder, “Kirk to Seek Cancellation of Midterm Convention,” Washington Post, May 10, 1985. 105 “Report of the Commission on Presidential Nomination,” adopted Feb 5, 1982, p. 16, Box 1073, Folder “Hunt Commission,” DNC Papers.

31 members drawn from both Congress and the national committee and intended “to achieve a greater degree of political and policy cohesion in the Democratic Party.”106 Jensen’s suggested name is, in hindsight, notable: the Democratic Leadership Council.107 Jensen intended the council to give congressional officials “a more active role in the Democratic Party”—but also emphasized the council’s potential to project “an image that the Party is seriously committed to rebuilding its electoral base, and is working from its mainstream to accomplish this task.”108

“Mainstream” would become a watchword for centrist efforts to regain support from white middle-class defectors to Reagan. Factional mistrust and presidential politics doomed Strauss and Jensen’s venture, which foundered for lack of a universally palatable leader.109

A similar venture pursued simultaneously in Congress proved more successful in the short term, though it ultimately would meet a similar fate. Gillis Long, elected chairman of the

House Democratic Caucus in 1981, oversaw a marked revitalization of the caucus as a collective body engaged in developing and promulgating partywide positions on major issues in classic responsible-party fashion.110 Long was not a factional brawler, and professed a desire to “unify and not purify” the caucus when he took the chairmanship.111 Following a caucus-sponsored issues conference, Long assembled the 35-member Committee on Party Effectiveness (CPE) to develop substantive position planks on major domestic and foreign policy issues. The fruits of

106 Paul Jensen, Memorandum on the Democratic Leadership Council, p. 1, Box 23, Folder “KOD: Democratic National Committee—Correspondence, Mailings and Memos, 1981,” O’Neill Papers. 107 Eventually, to shed the top-down connotations of “Leadership,” they renamed the proposed group as the Democratic Coordinating Council. Fred Barnes, “Dispute on Strauss Snags Plan for Democratic Leaders,” Baltimore Sun, January 26, 1981. 108 Jensen, Memorandum on the Democratic Leadership Council, 1-2, O’Neill Papers. 109 Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, “Democrats See Panel Providing a United Voice,” Washington Star, January 16, 1981. 110 Paul S. Herrnson and Kelly D. Patterson, “Toward a More Programmatic Democratic Party? Agenda-Setting and Coalition-Building in the House of Representatives,” Polity 27.4 (Summer 1995): 607-628. 111 Gillis Long, “Report of the Caucus Chairman,” November 19, 1981, Box 22 Folder “Kirk O’Donnell Files: Democratic Caucus, 1980-1982, 1984,” O’Neill Papers. See also Brandt, “Ideological Origins of the New Democrat Movement,” 277.

32 the committee’s work included a widely distributed “Statement of Democratic Economic

Principles” in 1981, followed by two comprehensive agenda books in 1982 and 1984 that provided the basis for campaign messaging and legislative agenda-setting.112 Beyond socializing new members and building cohesion, the caucus initiatives were also, for all Long’s caution, an ideological project. Long was a moderate-liberal southerner. His leadership in the 1980s embodied the contingently overlapping goals of southern white Democrats like himself and the

Ataris Tim Wirth and Richard Gephardt, who together made up the CPE’s three-member Task

Force on Long-Term Economic Policy.113 Both sets of actors wanted to reevaluate the party’s economic priorities and to push back against liberal constituency groups. With Long’s untimely death at 61 in January 1985 and his aide Al From’s departure for the DLC, the intellectual push to moderate the party would move out of formal channels.

Compared to such fitful programmatic and factional ventures, the growth in congressional party discipline and centralized, activist management of legislative behavior proceeded straightforwardly, though with only a limited impact on the party’s ability to generate a positive project for itself. Long-term party sorting and near-term battles with Reagan, together with the rise of omnibus lawmaking requiring stronger management to solve collective action problems, compelled party leaders to make full use of the various procedural tools afforded them by the reforms of the 1970s.114 It was O’Neill’s short-lived successor as Speaker, Jim Wright of

Texas, who would first exercise such power, rendering the southern moderate an unlikely pioneer of the kind of partisan procedural combat that eventually came to define Congress.

112 On the substantive thrust of all three documents, see Karl Gerard Brandt, “The Ideological Origins of the New Democrat Movement,” Louisiana History 48.3 (Summer 2007): esp. 285-291. 113 Rebuilding the Road to Opportunity: A Democratic Direction for the 1980s (Washington: Democratic Caucus, U.S. House of Representatives, 1982), esp. 6-31. 114 David W. Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Post-Reform House (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Barbara Sinclair, Legislators, Leaders, and Lawmaking: The U.S. House of Representatives in the Postreform Era (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), esp. 44-60.

33 Under O’Neill, wrote the journalist John M. Barry, “the House still ran loosely. The nuts and bolts of the place rattled; O’Neill had not turned the screws.” By contrast, “Wright intended to bring the power of the speakership full circle; he would turn the screws.”115

Wright corralled his own troops and battled the Republican opposition with an equally heavy hand. One incident in September 1987, immediately dubbed “Black Thursday” by outraged Republicans, at once reflected and exacerbated the procedural hardball and gamesmanship that would come to define lawmaking in the age of polarization. Wright wanted to pass an omnibus budget reconciliation package quickly to build leverage in negotiations with

Reagan, but the rule for floor consideration went down to narrow defeat. Rather than wait the required 24 hours before a new rule could be introduced, he formally adjourned then immediately reconvened the House to produce a brand new legislative “day”; introduced and passed a modified rule to secure consideration of the bill; and then, when Democrats appeared to have lost the vote on the bill itself, kept the clock running past the traditionally allotted fifteen minutes to identify a fellow Texas Democrat and prevail upon him to switch his vote. When the clock was finally stopped amidst a cacophony of Republican boos, the yeas had it, 206 to 205.

Republicans led by minority whip Newt Gingrich, deeming Wright a uniquely malign figure operating in bad faith, worked tirelessly to isolate him and damage him. They hit pay-dirt with revelations that lobbyists had bought bulk copies of a book Wright had written in excess of legal limits on gifts to public officials. With no factional base of loyal support within his own caucus and the GOP raining down heavy artillery, Wright resigned the Speakership and his seat in 1989.

115 John M. Barry, The Ambition and the Power (New York: Penguin Group, 1989), 67-68. The account in the following paragraph is drawn from Barry’s book.

34 Messaging and the Money Chase

Democrats during the 1980s durably upped their game in the interrelated realms of messaging and money. It would prove to be a pyrrhic victory. The new professionalized service parties—with Manatt and Kirk at the DNC largely emulating the Republicans, and Tony Coelho at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) forging new ground—now acted as brokers between office-seekers and for-profit suppliers of electoral services clustered in their partisan network.116 For their part, consultants profited off the national committees’ dime, but their party-funded work did more to foster a fetish for messaging and the growth of the party blob than to bolster a sense of purpose in the party or engagement with its voters.

One avatar of the Democrats’ professionalization of communications in the Reagan era was the restless aide who convinced Tip O’Neill to lose weight, brush off his dandruff,117 and appear each morning before the cameras as the face of the Democratic opposition. A former

Carter speechwriter, Chris Matthews began working for the Speaker while on the DCCC’s payroll—Coelho sent him to help drag the all-politics-is-local throwback into the mass-media age. “Tip didn’t get it, at first,” Matthews recalled. “He and his buddies were out at dinner every night [while the] American people … were home watching television. The old-timers didn’t appreciate the TV culture because they weren’t in on it. They didn’t know this is how the country communicates in the 1980s.”118 While pushing him to stick to soundbites repeated ad nauseum,

Matthews also had O’Neill lean into his avuncular persona as “the classic political retailer,” rendering him an unexpectedly effective party spokesman.119

116 Robin Kolodny, “Electoral Partnerships: Political Consultants and Political Parties,” in Campaign Warriors: Political Consultants in Elections, eds. James A. Thurber and Candice J. Nelson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 110-133. 117 Farrell, Tip O’Neill, 569-70. 118 Farrell, Tip O’Neill, 567. 119 Reel 115, page 16, Box 132, “Matthews, Christopher,” Hedrick Smith Papers, Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington, D.C.

35 Matthews delighted in the cynical gamesmanship of messaging and media management.

“Spin is a curveball,” read a typical passage in his 1988 bestseller, Hardball. “Lowballing is more like a fast ball. If you throw the message hard enough, it’ll get past just enough of the batters for you to win.”120 Both the politician and the TV anchor, he explained, “are basically there to charm millions of people at the same time”—and he ultimately took the latter job.121 But his insistence on the importance of personalizing political conflict and tailoring messages to the strictures of TV reflected broader developments at the intersection of communications technology, candidate-centered politics, and electoral demobilization. Not just congressional leaders like O’Neill but national Democratic organizations across the board both utilized and helped to fuel the growth of political consulting in the 1980s.

To some contemporary observers, the growing ranks of consultants (many of whom catered to corporate clients to keep up cash flow amidst the seasonal industry of politics) seemed clearly destructive of strong parties.122 “As image predominates,” remarked Walter Dean

Burnham after the 1984 election, “the motivations of politicians to conduct serious issue debates, not to say ideological campaigns, disappear. The older linkages between rulers and ruled become ever hazier, ever more problematic.”123

Money and message traveled together in the post-New Deal party. All these new services were expensive. And nowhere was the sense of crisis wrought by Reagan’s election more acutely felt, or met with efforts of such portentous consequence, than in the realm of party finance. Party

120 Christopher Matthews, Hardball: How Politics is Played—Told by One Who Knows the Game (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 199. 121 Reel 117, page 68, Box 132, “Matthews, Christopher,” Smith Papers. 122 See Sidney Blumenthal, The Permanent Campaign: Inside the World of Elite Political Operatives (New York: Beacon Press, 1980); Larry Sabato, The Rise of Political Consultants: New Ways of Winning Elections (New York: Basic Books,1981). On consultants, see Adam Sheingate, Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 123 Walter Dean Burnham, “The 1984 Election and the Future of American Politics,” in Election 84: Landslide without a Mandate?, eds. Ellis Sandoz and Cecil V. Crabb, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1985), 206.

36 leaders looked at the staggering gap in Democratic and Republican Party financing with sober eyes, and got to work.124 In the 1980 cycle, the RNC had raised five times as much money as the

DNC.125 (A year later the DNC would still be paying off the debt accrued during the 1968 campaign.)126 In Congress the disparities approached the comical: the DCCC raised just over

$2.8 million and its Senate counterpart $1.6 million in 1980, compared to $20.3 million and

$22.3 million, respectively, on the GOP side.127 Apprehending the missionary appeals to business interests made by National Republican Campaign Committee chairman Guy Vander

Jagt, who called for class-conscious funding of a businessmen’s political revolution, Democrats of all stripes—pragmatic accommodationists, ideologically committed neoliberals and conservatives, programmatic liberals—grew newly open to crash-financing efforts to stave off a permanent realignment.

The quickest route was big money, and Democrats, Willie Sutton-like, went there. The

DNC under chairman Manatt, a California lawyer, institutionalized major donors’ participation in party affairs through a Democratic Labor Council and a Democratic Business Council— membership in the latter costing $10,000 in individual contributions or $15,000 from PACs.

Belying his liberal reputation as a Kennedy aide and labor ally, Manatt’s successor, Paul Kirk, offered in 1985 what a conference program dubbed a “stockholders’ report” to Business Council members, extolling the council as the “backbone of the Democratic Party’s finances, and its intellectual resources.”128

124 Timothy Clark, “The RNC Prospers, the DNC Struggles As They Face the 1980 Election,” National Journal, September 27, 1980, 1617-21. 125 Paul S. Herrnson, Party Campaigning in the 1980s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 33. 126 Peter Kelly remarks, Executive Committee meeting, May 8, 1981, Box 1043, DNC Papers. 127 Herrnson, Party Campaigning in the 1980s, 33. 128 Brooks Jackson, “Democrats Court Small Band of Business Donors Who Contribute Advice Along with Needed Cash,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 1985.

37 The major locus of transformative change in party financing was found less in the national committee’s incremental improvements than the rejuvenated congressional campaign arms, particularly the DCCC during the chairmanship of the party’s “Dr. Faustus,” Tony

Coelho.129 The central Californian, like LBJ four decades earlier, ascended to his position after a single term in Congress. Coelho had intended to become a priest before an epilepsy diagnosis scotched his plans; he now brought a messianic intensity to his political vocation, touting turbocharged fundraising as the answer to Democrats’ existential fear after the 1980 election.

Prior to Coelho’s tenure, the committee raised most of its funds at a single annual gala, then divvied up the proceeds equally among members. He centralized the allocation of the growing largesse, concentrating on vulnerable incumbents.130

Key to Coelho’s strategy was Democrats’ retention of House control, however nominal, and the party’s 1982 gains, which left many business donors feeling burned by Vander Jagt’s promises of an imminent Republican imperium, bolstered the force of his pitch: Ante up to an incumbent governing party that wasn’t going anywhere soon.131 “Business has to deal with us whether they want to or not,” he explained with characteristic bluntness. “I tell them, ‘You’re going to need to work with us.’”132 Coelho’s overtures both depended on and in turn exacerbated the party’s characteristic tendency to take all comers—to prize inclusion of interests over programmatic coherence or conviction. “I cannot buy the argument by any special interest groups,” Coehlo wrote to Jim Jones, “that Members of our party are not supportive of some of

129 Kuttner, “Ass Backwards.” 130 The party continued, however, to protect incumbents at the expense of funding promising challengers. Gary C. Jacobson, “Party Organization and Distribution of Campaign Resources: Republicans and Democrats in 1982,” Political Science Quarterly 100.4 (Winter 1985-1986): 603-305. 131 Brooks Jackson, Honest Graft: Big Money and the American Political Process (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 77. 132 Kuttner, “Ass Backward.”

38 their concerns—after all is not our umbrella rather large?”133 By the 1986 election cycle, House

Democrats had come to receive 63 percent of all PAC money, including 48 percent of corporate

PAC contributions and 52 percent of those from trade association PACs.134

PACs, whose numbers had exploded eightfold in a decade under the regulatory regime established by the Federal Election Campaign Act and the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo,135 epitomized a broader development of the era: the rise to predominance of brokers in political giving, skilled in the task of bundling large donations and connecting them to relevant office-holders. These “money mechanics,” wrote the journalist Robert Kuttner, were dominated by “rising Washington-based lawyers who can invest a few years laboring for the party, making contacts, and distributing funds—and then cash in handsomely in an enlarged law/lobby practice that serves mostly Republican-oriented business interests.” They institutionalized a kind of business accommodationism across national party politics. Ex-DNC chair turned superlobbyist

Bob Strauss pioneered the type. Manatt, who got rich exploiting the intricacies of banking law, ran the national committee while continuing to derive income from his law firm’s corporate lobbying.136 DNC finance chair Peter Kelly decamped to Black, Manafort, and Stone after the

1984 election along with Dan Rostenkowski’s aide, Jim Healy.

Though the degree to which the money chase compromised governance and party practice can be exaggerated,137 the blatancy of the new arrangements contributed to a pervasive

133 Coehlo to Jones, March 27, 1981, Box 24, “Kirk O’Donnell Files: DCCC—Correspondence, Mailings & Memos, Jan.-July 1981,” O’Neill Papers. 134 Jackson, Honest Graft, 93. 135 Gary C. Jacobson, “The Republican Advantage in Campaign Finance,” in The New Direction in American Politics, eds. John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1985), 147. 136 Phil Gailey and Warren Weaver, Jr., “Briefing,” New York Times, June 14, 1982; Jonathan Alter, “With Friends Like These…,” Washington Monthly, January 1983, 12-22. 137 Compare Philip A. Klinkner, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956-1993 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 168-171; and Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 141-145.

39 sense of decadence—and fueled the most mercenary elements of the national party blob. Coelho set the tone. With O’Neill’s permission, he organized a “Speaker’s Club,” for which membership, priced at $5,000 per individual or $15,000 per PAC, “would entitle the participants to regular meetings and social activities with the Speaker and Members of the Leadership including committee chairmen.”138 (“I look upon my Club members as friends and advisors,”

O’Neill wrote a long-distance telephone company executive. “When you come to Washington, I want you to visit me and my congressional colleagues and keep us informed of your concerns.”)139 The DCCC chair made no apologies, portraying himself, in journalist Brooks

Jackson’s words, as “a political Robin Hood, taking campaign money from the rich and using it to build a financially secure party to help the poor.”140 Few others could claim this with Coelho’s conviction. More common was disquiet over the open talk on how policymaking would affect fundraising, and the accompanying dose of legislative caution that such talk engendered. “People aren’t embarrassed about saying this anymore,” one House Democrat told Elizabeth Drew. “I’m no Common Causer, but this stuff has really been bothering me.”141

The financial and communications improvements, along with the retreat from programmatic work and factional brokerage, by decade’s end rendered national Democratic organizations into a full-fledged party-in-service, organized around the provision of campaign resources to office-seekers.142 Ron Brown’s tenure as the DNC’s first African American chairman, from 1989 to 1993, brought all the pieces together. A former Urban League official

138 Tony Coelho to Fred Richmond, March 27, 1981, Box 24, “Kirk O’Donnell Files: DCCC—Correspondence, Mailings & Memos, Jan.-July 1981,” O’Neill Papers. 139 Tip O’Neill to John R. Barnes, November 6, 1981, Box 24, “Kirk O’Donnell Files: DCCC—Correspondence, Mailings & Memos, Aug.-Dec. 1981,” O’Neill Papers. 140 Jackson, Honest Graft, 4. 141 Elizabeth Drew, “Politics and Money – I,” The New Yorker, December 6, 1982. 142 Xandra Kayden and Eddie Mahe, Jr., The Party Goes On (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Herrnson, Party Campaigning in the 1980s; David Menefee-Libey, The Triumph of Campaign-Centered Politics (New York: Chatham House Publishers, 2000).

40 turned wheeler-dealer lobbyist at Patton Boggs and Blow in the 1980s (he counted among his clients the regime of Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier), Brown joined Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign before launching a long-shot race to succeed Kirk at the DNC. The racist opposition he encountered from southern party leaders—Louisiana Senator John Breaux’s assurance that

“you’re the wrong man at the wrong time for the job” was one of the more restrained offerings— testified to the party’s still-deep divisions.143

Once in command, however, Brown took the Democratic institutionalist’s ethic of inclusivity to a new level, carrying forward Kirk’s mission of reducing intraparty conflict by dodging programmatic questions and delegate selection reforms and showering state parties and candidates with resources.144 Lavish “finance council weekends” buttered up the party’s donors while Brown offered them more formalized roles in providing organizational and policy input.145

Under Brown and his political director Paul Tully, the party broke new ground in unregulated soft-money fundraising through the device of the “coordinated campaign,” with state parties serving as the main conduit for DNC money reaching candidates. And in a harbinger of electoral targeting that doubled as demobilization, Brown and Tully spearheaded a data-driven research project to model paths to Democratic electoral victory that explicitly identified states to write off as unwinnable.146 In its own terms—and by the decisive verdict of election victory in 1992—

Brown’s tenure at the DNC was a clear success. Yet Democrats had revived themselves organizationally for electoral competition without renewing the party for the pursuit of prophecy.

143 Tracey L. Brown, The Life and Times of Ron Brown: A Memoir by His Daughter (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1998), 181-183. 144 Menefee-Libey, Triumph of Campaign-Centered Politics, 108-110; Anthony Corrado, “The Politics of Cohesion: The Role of the National Party Committees in the 1992 Election,” in The State of the Parties, eds. John C. Green and Daniel Shea (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), esp. 66-71. 145 Bob Farmer remarks, Executive Committee meeting, May 1, 1989, Box 187, DNC Papers. 146 Thomas B. Edsall, “Democrats Create ‘Geography’ for 1992,” Washington Post, June 15, 1991, A4.

41 Jesse Jackson

The 1984 and 1988 campaigns of Jesse Jackson stand out sharply against this background of ascendant transactionalism. Jackson ran in the radical tradition, offering a sweeping vision of collective liberation that extended far beyond the confines of the Democratic Party whose nomination he twice sought. Jackson grounded his campaign neither in the plans and programs of the policy-reformist nor in the dealmaking at the heart of the transactional pol. Instead, he called Democrats away from their obsession with the political center toward a moral center, and the country away from selfishness and racism toward redemption147 “The blood at the bottom of the American pool,” he warned in 1981, “keeps coming to the surface.”148 Once, when Jackson was called a politician, he snapped back, “I’m not a politician. I’m a public servant, just trying to serve God. Maybe sometimes politics is a method, but that’s not what I’m driven by.”149

Jackson, a trained Baptist preacher, began his career as a lieutenant to Martin Luther

King, Jr., and was with him in Memphis on the night of his murder. In 1971, Jackson set up shop in Chicago under the aegis of Operation PUSH. In the years before his presidential run, he bobbed and weaved politically, even speaking in 1978 to the Republican National Committee at chairman Bill Brock’s invitation, where he urged blacks “to broaden our political options.”150

The road to Jackson’s candidacy went through Chicago. In 1983, Congressman Harold

Washington won the city’s Democratic mayoral primary with 6 percent of the white vote and 84

147 On these themes, see Allen D. Hertzke, Echoes of Discontent: Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, and the Resurgence of Populism (Washington: CQ Press, 1993), 58-80 and 260-265. This interpretation is largely compatible with the leading critical treatment, Adolph L. Reed, Jr., The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro- American Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 148 Jesse L. Jackson, Straight from the Heart, eds. Roger D. Hatch and Frank E. Watkins (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1987), 49. This speech, “Liberation and Justice: A Call for Redefinition, Refocus, and Rededication,” is an excellent distillation of Jackson’s worldview. 149 Marshall Frady, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (New York: Random House, 1986), 501. 150 Jackson, Straight from the Heart, 35.

42 percent of the black vote.151 The machine had divided between the hapless incumbent, Jane

Byrne, and Richard M. Daley, son of the late mayor. After a bitter campaign in which national

Democrats stayed loyal to Washington but white ward bosses deserted en masse for the

Republican, whose slogan was “Before it’s too late,” Washington prevailed narrowly.152 Though he was never close to Jackson, Operation PUSH mounted a large voter registration drive before his election.

In the wake of Washington’s election, leading black political figures discussed running a presidential candidate in 1984 to mobilize voters and push their agenda at the convention.

Operation PUSH opened a voter registration drive in the South, and on November 3, 1983,

Jackson announced his candidacy, promising to build a Rainbow Coalition. As longtime aide

Frank Watkins wrote in a memo, Jackson would run “not as a ‘realistic’ candidate with a chance to win” but “do to the left what George Wallace and Ronald Reagan did to the right, that is build a potential constituency that must be taken into account.”153

The liberal black political establishment largely spurned Jackson in his first run, preferring instead to work with Mondale, a longstanding ally (he largely wrote the Fair Housing

Act of 1968), and show their reliability as loyal Democrats.154 The same story held on the white left. Even the Democratic Socialists of America, close to the AFL-CIO leadership and residually

151 Paul Kleppner, Chicago Divided: The Making of a Black Mayor (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985), 166. 152 Kleppner, Chicago Divided; William J. Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931- 1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 143-224. From the Trib’s lead political reporter, see David Axelrod, “Washington wins,” Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1983, 1; David Axelrod, “Washington’s new focus,” Chicago Tribune, February 27, 1983, A1; David Axelrod, “For Democratic dissidents, the color that matters is green,” Chicago Tribune, March 13, 1983, A10; Thom Shanker and David Axelrod, “Mayoral candidates gain more support,” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1983, A9; David Axelrod, “Washington elected,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1983, 1; David Axelrod, “‘The party’s over—again—for Chicago’s political machine,” Chicago Tribune, April 17, 1983, M1. 153 Frady, Jesse, 304. 154 These paragraphs rely on Manning Marable, Black American Politics: From the Washington Marches to Jesse Jackson (London: Verso, 1985), 254-282.

43 tied to the kibbutzniks’ Israel, declined to back Jackson.155 Instead, the Jackson camp built up from the grassroots. The bulk of its support came from the black church; the president of the

National Baptist Convention estimated that more than 90 percent, or 26,000, of its ministers had endorsed Jackson by February 1984.156 Jackson’s old allies with roots in black capitalism dominated the campaign’s leadership. Below them, black radicals, black nationalists, peace activists, gays and lesbians, and even a few family farmers and union locals all joined up.157

In 1984, Jackson won about three quarters of the black vote and only about 5 percent of the white vote. By 1988, he garnered over 90 percent of the black vote and twelve percent of the white vote.158 Though much of the black establishment had come around by 1988, their support remained tepid. A few white politicians, notably Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, endorsed strategically, and a sliver of liberal activists signed on with the campaign.

In an important paradox, Jackson the radical crusader was also the last candidate in a very long lineage to run with a goal of hammering out an advantageous deal at the national convention. He sought not just personal recognition—forcing the Mondale and Dukakis campaigns to jump through hoops for his endorsement and demanding primetime speaking slots in both 1984 and 1988—but collective recognition from the Democratic Party, taking special aim at party rules.159 It was, said Dukakis strategist John Sasso, an “unending litmus test.”160

155 Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (London: Verso, 2002), 277. 156 Gerald Boyd, “Black Churches a Mainspring of Jackson’s Efforts,” New York Times, February 14, 1984, A24. See also Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., “Theology Under the Rainbow,” The Witness, May 1984, 6-9; Hertzke, Echoes of Discontent, 120-132. 157 See, e.g., Peter Shapiro, “How Jesse Jackson has opened the door for workers,” Unity, May 25, 1984, 15; “A Victory Already Won,” Southern Fight-Back, July 1984, 1-5; Barbara Ehrenreich, “Why I Back Jackson,” The New Republic, March 21, 1988, 16-19. 158 E.J. Dionne, Jr., “Jackson’s Share of Votes by Whites Triples in ‘88,” New York Times, June 13, 1988, B7. 159 For arguments that Jackson’s focus on rules distracted from his substantive critique, see Christopher Edley, Jr., “Jesse Jackson vs. the Party Rules,” Washington Post, December 28, 1983, A19; and Robert C. Smith and Joseph P. McCormick II, “The Challenge of a Black Presidential Candidacy (1984): An Assessment,” New Directions, April 1985, 24-31. 160 Frady, Jesse, 404.

44 Jackson won eighteen percent of the total primary vote in 1984 but garnered only nine percent of the delegates, having often failed to meet district-level delegate thresholds or to qualify for “winner take more” bonuses established by the Hunt Commission.161 With his convention majority tenuous, Walter Mondale acceded to many of Jackson’s platform demands, allowed votes on several others—but did not budge on delegate allocation.162 Four years later,

Dukakis, unlike Mondale, had a hefty majority going into the convention. The presumptive nominee wanted a drama-free convention more than he cared about rules, which gave Jackson an opening. To press his advantage, he enlisted Harold M. Ickes, son of Progressive-turned-New

Dealer Harold L. Ickes and veteran of convention insurgencies from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Ted Kennedy in 1980. After intense private negotiations, Ickes garnered a deal for strict proportional representation above a 15-percent district threshold and a ban on direct election of delegates (the “loophole primary”), a pre-reform relic that had hurt Jackson.163 The proportional- representation rules have remained ever since.164

The new rules marked the culmination of the long effort, begun with the elimination of the two-thirds rule in 1936 and carried forward by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in

161 Smith and McCormick, “The Challenge of a Black Presidential Candidacy,” 28. Jackson also wanted to get the national party on record against the two-round primary elections predominantly used in Southern states, with a top- two runoff following the primary. See Jesse Jackson, “Moving to the Common Ground,” Washington Post, March 25, 1984, C7; Jesse Jackson, “Runoffs and Voting Rights,” Washington Post, April 16, 1984, A13. 162 In a sign of the distance between Jackson and the black political establishment, when Andrew Young spoke from the rostrum to defend Mondale’s position on a platform plank, Jackson delegates booed him. When Coretta Scott King defended Young at a meeting of black convention delegates, she was booed as well. Juan Williams, “Jackson Urges His Supporters to Unite Behind Ticket,” Washington Post, July 19, 1984, A9; “Andrew Young Booed,” Sacramento Observer, July 19, 1984, 4; Robert G. Newby, “The ‘Naive’ and the ‘Unwashed’: The Challenge of the Jackson Campaign at the Democratic Party National Convention, in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 Presidential Campaign, eds. Lucius J. Barker and Ronald W. Walters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 160-175. 163 Paul Taylor, “Democratic Panel Votes New Rules,” Washington Post, June 26, 1988, A1; Larry Eichel, “Jackson Gets Rule Change on Delegates,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 26, 1988, A1. For a tribute to Ickes from a sometime rival, see Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, “Jackson’s Tough, Intense Tactician,” Newsday, May 16, 1988, 55. For longer context, see Elaine Kamarck, Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 87-124. 164 Although the deal Ickes struck had eliminated members of the DNC as superdelegates, the DNC restored its own votes the following year. Thomas B. Edsall, “Democratic Rules Dispute Simmers,” Washington Post, April 29, 1989, A13; Thomas B. Edsall, “Democrats Avoid Fight On Rules,” Washington Post, June 18, 1989, A11.

45 1964, to transform the Democrats from the party of Jim Crow to one open to all comers. Twenty years later, having taken advantage of the rules that Ickes (by then a supporter of Hillary Clinton, whom he had met on the McGovern campaign) had crafted, Barack Obama would capture the nomination and the presidency.

Ultimately, the Jackson campaigns cut in two directions. On the one hand, after he pried open the national party citadels, African-Americans became loyal institutionalists, eager to harness the power they had struggled so hard to win. Two Jackson aides, Ron Brown and Donna

Brazile, later chaired the DNC. On the other hand, Jackson’s disdain for mainstream Democrats’ transactional politics would, with the 2016 candidacy of his 1988 supporter Bernie Sanders,165 harden into a call for rejection rather than transformation of the central organs of party.

Left-liberals in the Trump years have begun to look back to Jackson’s campaigns for a model of multiracial populism.166 Yet they risk understating just how extraordinary, and how difficult in the American context, was his strategy. As Robert Borosage, Jackson’s issues director in 1988, reminisced:

“you were bringing people together who had never been together before. And against all the established powers and money of the Democratic party, and the encrusted leadership of each of these communities, which was with whoever’s the anointed one. There wasn’t any inheritance. So you had to build it almost literally union hall by union hall… He was the only civil rights leader trying to make the link between African-Americans and the white working people in the country, whereas most of the civil rights connection had been between the affluent liberal white community and the impoverished in the black community…. But what Jackson did in ’88 was reveal people to one another. So they could see themselves in their true strength together, with their shared interests, a much greater strength than they had ever imagined. If they had just known that ahead of time, they could have actually nominated the son of a bitch.”167

165 “In Vermont, Jackson and Dukakis Virtually Tie in Delegate Contests,” New York Times, April 21, 1988, D26. 166 Jamelle Bouie, “Keep Hope Alive,” Slate, November 27, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/11/jesse_jackson_s_presidential_campaigns_offe r_a_road_map_for_democrats_in.html; Ryan Grim, We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement (Washington, D.C.: Strong Arm Press, 2019). 167 Frady, Jesse, 383.

46

The DLC and Bill Clinton

A very different logic informed Bill Clinton’s path to the nomination four years later. As

Galston and Kamarck emphasized in “The Politics of Evasion,” the presidential-level realignment threatened to shake up partisan affiliations down-ballot, and “southern politicians know this better than anyone.” Their analysis converged on a core prescription: the party should nominate and elect a moderate to the presidency. That candidate would aim straight at disillusioned white voters, turned off by “racial reductionism” and “the white liberal elites who increasingly dominate national party and presidential politics.”168 Their charge would form the basis for Clinton’s candidacy.

Clinton served as the DLC’s president from March 1990 until he announced his presidential run in October 1991. He milked the opportunity, barnstorming the country to meet with local elected officials and donors, and overseeing the DLC’s 1991 Cleveland convention that excluded Jesse Jackson. (Clinton snubbed Jackson again when, with no warning, at a June

1992 Rainbow Coalition meeting, he attacked the rapper Sister Souljah, a fellow attendee, for anti-white lyrics.)169 Clinton’s address to the DLC’s Cleveland gathering drew on the core New

Democratic themes of opportunity, responsibility, and community to which he would return time and again through the next decade:

[O]ur burden is to give the people a new choice, rooted in old values, a new choice that is simple, that offers opportunity, demands responsibility, gives citizens more

168 Galston and Kamarck, “The Politics of Evasion,” 14, 17. 169 Thomas B. Edsall, “Clinton Stuns Rainbow Coalition,” Washington Post, June 14, 1992, A1; Chuck Philips, “‘I Do Not Advocate… Murdering,’” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1992, F1; Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992 (New York: Warner Books, 1993), 289-305. Original comments in David Mills, “Sister Souljah’s Call to Arms,” Washington Post, May 13, 1992, B1.

47 say, provides them responsive government, all because we recognize that we are a community, we are all in this together, and we are going up or down together.170

The New Democrats’ turn to presidentialism was fitting. Theirs was a thin concept of party, defined around the cold facts of electoral logic more than the prerogatives of organization.171 Individual issue entrepreneurs, not party platforms, would advance their priorities. “We don’t care about the party apparatus,” Al From said in 1992. “What we care about is what this party says, and what its candidates stand for.” For his ally Rob Shapiro, a Clinton economic adviser, “What we’ve done in the Democratic Party is an intellectual leveraged buyout.”172 Though New Democrats had their Tocquevillean streak, they never included parties among the little platoons they wished to empower or treated them as civic institutions rather than factional battlegrounds.173 They urged Democrats to persuade voters already in the electorate, foreclosing the party’s historic role of exciting non-voters behind and bringing them to the polls.174 The DLC failed to build its own durable infrastructure in the states, being “more of a grass tops than a grassroots effort,” by From’s own admission.175 And so, with their man in the

White House, the New Democrats reinforced rather than counteracted the party-sapping tendencies of the modern presidency.

170 Bill Clinton, “Keynote Address of Gov. Bill Clinton to the DLC's Cleveland Convention,” May 6, 1991, http://web.archive.org/web/20010513055339/http://www.ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=3166. See also the “New American Choice Resolution” adopted at the convention, https://web.archive.org/web/20040313082824/http://www.ndol.org/documents/cleveland_proclamation.pdf; Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 163-92; and From. The New Democrats, 131-59. 171 The DLC shared with the hawkish regulars of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority a critique of the New Politics, but wasted little time getting dewy-eyed for machine politics. Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 208-17. For the CDM perspective, see Joshua Muravchik, “Why the Democrats Lost Again,” Commentary, February 1989, 13-22. 172 Lloyd Grove, “Al From, the Life of the Party,” Washington Post, July 24, 1992, D1. 173 Among the DLC’s various manifestoes, The New Democrat Credo well captures this communitarian impulse. “The New Democrat Credo,” Democratic Leadership Council, May 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/20010528150505/http://ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=533. 174 See generally Richard M. Valelly, “The Vanishing Voters,” in The American Prospect Reader in American Politics, ed. Walter Dean Burnham (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House Publishers, 1994), 137-150. 175 From, The New Democrats, 139. See also Rob Gurwitt, “Go Past the Beltway and Turn Right,” Governing, April 1991.

48 During the Clinton years, the DNC operated as an adjunct to the White House and its immediate priorities. Its unlimited “soft money” went largely to television, under the fig leaf of

“issue advocacy”—not bricks-and-mortar party-building.176 State parties faced rough times, and little support from above.177 At the 1992 and 1996 conventions, Clinton loyalists kept a tight lid on proceedings, unbothered, especially in the reelect, by insufficient enthusiasm if it avoided trouble from the left.178 And on the long-vexed questions of party rules, the Clinton years saw no changes to the basic structure of nomination. A president desirous to remake his party left no institutional fingerprints on it.179 Polarization rather than presidentialism proved a force for party strengthening during the 1990s. In the blur of prosperity and Clintonian charm, Democratic cohesion, such as it was, emerged as a byproduct of Republicans’ sustained assaults.

Neoliberalism and Polarization in the Clinton Years

In the New Democratic interpretation, the party needed a stream of new ideas both to counter the Old Democrats’ prescriptions and to answer the charge of pure me-too-ism.180 In practice, however, the New Democrats’ major policy victories, most notably the North American

176 Anthony Corrado, “Party Soft Money,” in Campaign Finance Reform: A Sourcebook, ed. Anthony Corrado (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1996), 169. 177 Daniel Galvin, Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 225-46, tells the story well. For helpful particulars, see, e.g., James A. Barnes, “States of Repair,” National Journal, September 16, 1995, 2268; Richard L. Berke, “Clintons Seek to Repair Rifts for Democrats,” New York Times, July 19, 1998; Peter H. Stone, “The Politics of Survival,” National Journal, October 25, 1998, 2516-17. 178 Stephen A. Borrelli, “Finding the Third Way: Bill Clinton, the DLC, and the Democratic Platform of 1992,” Journal of Policy History 13 (2001): 429-62; Ruth Marcus, “Democrats Avoiding Dissent Over Platform,” Washington Post, July 7, 1996, A7; Thomas Goetz, “Passing on the Right,” Village Voice, September 10, 1996, 28- 30. 179 See Sidney M. Milkis, “Bill Clinton and the Politics of Divided Democracy,” in Seeking the Center: Politics and Policymaking at the New Century, eds. Martin A. Levin, Marc K. Landy, and Martin Shapiro (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2001), 350-380; Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 447-63; and, with a trenchant liberal critique, James MacGregor Burns and Georgia J. Sorenson with Robin Gerber and Scott W. Webster, Dead Center: Clinton-Gore Leadership and the Perils of Moderation (New York: Scribner, 1999), 343. 180 Jason Stahl, Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 134-173.

49 Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1993 and the Personal Responsibility and Work

Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, would come about not by persuading internal adversaries but by making common cause with Republicans. Indeed, the paradox for

New Democrats was that their greatest policy triumphs took place after their ranks had been depleted. The GOP rout of 1994—gaining 54 House seats, six Senate seats, and control of both chambers—hit old-line conservative and moderate Democrats who had survived thanks to split- ticket voting. Welfare reform was only the most prominent example under divided government of Clinton making a deal as a way to counter Republicans’ issue ownership, unencumbered by liberals’ caterwauling or by a Democratic congressional leadership anxious to avoid intraparty conflict.181 If such triangulation dominated the short term, however, the old moderates’ departure pushed the party leftwards in the long run.

More than any other episode in the Democrats’ decades adrift, welfare reform exposed a clash of dueling worldviews.182 For New Democrats, the existing Aid to Families with

Dependent Children was not just a political millstone but a programmatic disaster. Its work disincentives and public opprobrium undercut dynamic opportunities to fight poverty. Time limits on receiving benefits, a keystone of the 1996 bill, made good sense. As Will Marshall and

Elaine Kamarck summarized, “While government’s responsibility is to expand opportunities for the poor to enter the mainstream of American life, the poor have a reciprocal responsibility to

181 That story also describes the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996; the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996; the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996; and the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996. 182 Gwendolyn Mink, Welfare’s End (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 33-68; R. Kent Weaver, Ending Welfare As We Know It (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2000); Ann Shola Orloff, “Ending the Entitlements of Poor Single Mothers: Changing Social Policies, Women’s Employment, and Caregiving in the Contemporary United States,” in Women and Welfare: Theory and Practice in the United States and Europe, eds. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Ulrike Liebert (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 133-159; Hugh Heclo, “The Politics of Welfare Reform,” in The New World of Welfare, eds. Rebecca Blank and Ron Haskins (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001).

50 work hard, exercise individual responsibility, and avoid behavior that has high social costs.”183 In their drive to “make work pay,” New Democrats wanted more spending than conservatives did to bolster employment in the low-wage labor market. But they shared with the right the same fundamental critique that the welfare mess was rooted in liberalism’s excesses.184

Liberals and radicals told a very different history. The welfare bill replaced a matching grant with a block grant, reversing a basic commitment to provide assistance for all eligible beneficiaries made when Title IV of the Social Security Act of 1935 established Aid to

Dependent Children and giving free rein to state governments that lacked meaningful oversight and threatened a “race to the bottom.”185 More profoundly, critics saw connections across race, class, and gender in the assault on a welfare program associated with the black underclass.186

And while many feminists steered clear, for those who engaged, the bill’s combination of stinginess and moralizing— the legislative text’s first finding was that “Marriage is the foundation of a successful society”187—proved only the latest manifestation of the racialized and gendered ways that men in power treated poor women.188

Though the politics of welfare reform had deep roots, the president’s path to signing the bill was a contingent one. Clinton repeatedly promised during the 1992 campaign to “end

183 Will Marshall and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, “Replacing Welfare with Work,” in Mandate for Change, eds. Will Marshall and Martin Schram (New York: Berkley Books, 1993), 234. 184 Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 156-203. 185 Michael K. Brown, “Ghettoes, Fiscal Federalism, and Welfare Reform,” in Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform, eds. Sanford F. Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 186 Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 187 Bill text at “H.R.3734 - Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996,” https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/house-bill/3734/text. 188 Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink, Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). They draw on the papers of Mink’s mother, Rep. Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first Asian-American woman in Congress and the first person other than a white man to chair Americans for Democratic Action. For earlier context, see Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

51 welfare as we know it.” That promise, wrote Peter Edelman, an old friend who resigned from the administration in protest after Clinton signed the bill, had “let a powerful genie out of the bottle.”189 Whether or not Clinton could have overcome divisions in the Democratic caucus had he pushed welfare reform in 1993, with the GOP’s congressional takeover the way to end welfare as we know it was to move rightwards.

The Republican-controlled Congress sent Clinton two bills that harshly cut Food Stamps and Medicaid along with AFDC. In spring 1996, a compromise began to emerge. At the White

House, Rahm Emanuel, a hard-nosed operative who had worked for Tony Coelho, and Bruce

Reed, a DLC veteran, put out the word that Clinton would accept a bill without the Medicaid cuts, though it slashed Food Stamps for immigrants and childless adults. Dick Morris, the president’s political strategist, showed Clinton a polling model from Mark Penn, the DLC’s preferred pollster, that claimed vetoing welfare reform would turn a fifteen-point win in

November into a three-point loss.190 Though most of the cabinet (including, interestingly, the influential Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, who had a soft spot for the poor) urged a veto,

Clinton signaled he would sign the legislation, which ultimately split Congressional Democrats down the middle, with 21 Senators and 101 Representatives voting no on final passage. Had

Clinton come down on the other side, a third veto would likely have been sustained.191

189 Peter Edelman, “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1997, 44. See also David T. Ellwood, “Welfare Reform as I Knew It: When Bad Things Happen to Good Policies,” American Prospect, May- June 1996, 22-29; and reply from Frances Fox Piven, “Was Welfare Reform Worthwhile?” American Prospect, July-August 1996, 27-28. 190 Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties (New York: Random House, 1997), 300. On Penn’s tricks to produce such results, see William Saletan, “Centrists vs. Progressives,” Slate, April 22, 1997, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1997/08/centrists-vs-progressives.html. 191 Joe Klein, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 153; Robert Pear, “Millions Affected; After the President Acts, More in Party Back Measure in House,” New York Times, August 1, 1996, A1.

52 At the mass base, the locus of moderate Democratic politics continued to shift across the

1990s. White Southern ranks had depleted after 1994, and New Democrats looked increasingly to upscale suburbs regardless of geography. In a 1997 poll, Mark Penn, who fused small-ball, no- mobilization tactics to win persuadable slices of voters with ruthless factionalism to stop the left, divided moderates into two camps.192 For downscale “Suburban Values Voters,” the trick was cutting into Republicans’ advantages on issues like welfare and crime. The real growth area, however, came from the upscale “New Economy Dems.”193 “The kind of people who, just a few years ago, were victims of the middle-class squeeze,” remarked William Schneider the following year, “could now be found at Starbucks, and investing in the stock market.194 The DLC embraced these voters in heralding the party’s move out of the “Industrial Age,” its preferred term for the

New Deal era,195 into the “Information Age.”196

It was an accommodationist politics gone suburban, one that picked up on some of the

Ataris’ softer postmaterial concerns without their gloom-and-doom about economic decline or their priggish opposition to pandering. New Dems wanted to keep up friendly relations with business, specifically finance and pro-trade sectors. If the ties between the mostly southern

192 This evolution is reflected in Congress. In 1995, beleaguered conservative Democrats in the House, mostly representing rural districts and aiming for some distance from the national party, formed the Blue Dog caucus (they were yellow-dog Democrats choked so hard they turned blue). Two years later, a partially overlapping group of moderate members, generally pro-free-trade, formed the New Democratic caucus. Though the two caucuses have survived into the Trump years, the New Dems’ placement upmarket has proved the more durable. See Juliet Eilperin, “House’s New Democrats at Center of Influence,” Washington Post, May 29, 2000, A1; and Paul Kane, “As Blue Dog coalition changes, it aims to become a force in House legislation, Washington Post, December 19, 2018, A1. 193 Peter Grier, “Democrats’ Values Moving to Suburbs,” Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 1997, 1 194 William Schneider, “To the ‘New Rich,’ Bill’s OK,” National Journal, November 14, 1998, 2746. 195 The DLC’s “Hyde Park Declaration,” adopted at a meeting on FDR’s estate in 2000, praised “Roosevelt's thirst for innovation” rather than the substance of his policies, and mentioned the New Deal only in the context of the New Deal generation’s passing. Democratic Leadership Council, “The Hyde Park Declaration: A Statement of Principles and a Policy Agenda for the 21st Century,” August 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20071028010903/http://www.ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=1926. See also Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR, 263-295. 196 See, e.g., Al From, “The New Democratic Platform,” The New Democrat, September/October 1996, 12-14. For a critical take, see Robert Dreyfuss, “How the DLC Does It,” American Prospect, April 23, 2001, 20-25.

53 politicians who had started the DLC and the voters they courted had been clear, those between the financiers who increasingly called the shots in the later 1990s and the Information Age voters they coveted were far less intimate, and often mediated by campaign contributions. The plutocrats and “Patio Man”197 both benefited from free markets and free trade, and shared a distaste for labor unions and tax increases. They gravitated to public-private partnerships and

“win-win solutions.” Still, the financialization and deregulation that powered the fractal inequality of the New Gilded Age offered less to the “Rising Learning Class”198 than to the super-rich. Those divisions remained in the background during the long boom of the 1990s. After the Great Recession, as college-educated white Democrats moved sharply leftwards, the hedge funders and the knowledge workers would espouse very different visions for the Democratic

Party.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton put an end to the New Democrats’ moment in the sun and laid bare the accumulated impact of party polarization. It was the long-scorned liberals who came earliest and loudest to Clinton’s defense, as they watched the right-wing attack machine in action. “Now that you've been screwed by your friends,” one liberal senator reportedly told

Clinton in a phone conversation during the Lewinsky imbroglio, “you may want to talk to some of those you took for granted.’”199

The New Democrats’ last great goal for the Clinton years remained unfulfilled.

They wanted to add individual private accounts to Social Security, linking risk and

197 Reference is to David Brooks, “Patio Man and the Sprawl People,” Weekly Standard, August 12, 2002. 198 William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, “5 Realities That Will Shape 21st Century Politics,” Blueprint, Fall 1998, 8. From a very different theoretical vantage point on the same broad demographic, see Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America, March-April 1977, 7-31, 199 Jackie Calmes, “Fast Friends: Clinton's Best Allies Now Are the Liberals He Spurned in the Past,” Wall Street Journal, October 9, 1998, A1.

54 reward through the market and thus transforming the program for the Information Age.200

For liberals, private accounts meant piercing the New Deal’s innermost citadel—and after impeachment, they finally had some leverage over Clinton. Amid heightened partisanship, Republicans felt less interested in making small concessions to get a deal.

The coalition that had passed welfare reform could not make another go. When privatization again rose to the top of the agenda in 2005, a new House Democratic leader would, as in 1982, rally to the program’s defense.201

Finance and the Democrats

The critical juncture that bequeathed a new, financialized political economy arguably came and went back in the late 1970s, leaving macroeconomic management in the hands of an unelected and insulated Federal Reserve. Democrats of all factions had largely retreated from the fight against that economic order ever since. Only during the boom of the 1990s, however, did a type of finance politics that supercharched top-end inequality become a serious force inside the party. The result only deepened Democrats’ crisis of vision.

Wall Street’s new status in the party was enabled in part by a friendly faction. The relationship between the mostly Southern New Democrats and finance began with a cold call from Barrie Wigmore to Sam Nunn’s office. Wigmore, a Saskatchewan-born partner at Goldman

Sachs with eclectic interests, had retired young, and wanted to make an impact on policy.

Wigmore and Nunn soon hit it off, and Nunn recruited Wigmore into the nascent DLC, where he

200 Robert J. Shapiro, “A New Deal on Social Security,” in Building the Bridge: 10 Big Ideas to Transform America, ed. Will Marshall (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 39-56. 201 Steven M. Teles and Martha Derthick, “Social Security from 1980 to the Present: From Third Rail to Presidential Commitment—and Back?” in Conservatism and American Political Development, eds. Brian J. Glenn and Steven M. Teles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 261-290.

55 rubbed shoulders with Bob Strauss. He brought his circle into the group, and in short order they met Bill Clinton. “No question about it—the key support initially came from the PPI people, and through Barrie particularly” said Wilbur Ross, a private-equity mogul who would go on to serve as Commerce Secretary for Donald Trump, after Clinton’s election.202 Wigmore joined the founding board of PPI; it was chaired by Michael Steinhardt, a New York hedge-fund pioneer, who was the DLC’s largest donor through the mid-1990s.203

The most important figure from Wall Street in the Clinton era had a less factional pedigree.204 Robert Rubin, the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs by the time he moved to

Washington, began his first serious venture into Democratic politics when Bob Strauss convinced him to chair the DCCC’s 1982 banquet.205 Rubin encouraged Walter Mondale’s strategy to announce a tax increase in order to attack the deficit.206 In the Clinton administration, where he chaired the National Economic Council and then served as Treasury Secretary, Rubin epitomized the market-friendly orthodoxy. Supporting business confidence came first. That meant reducing the deficit so as not to crowd out private borrowing and avoiding any saber- rattling against rising inequality, lest the private sector pull back. Though such instincts militated against spending on traditional Democratic priorities, Rubin’s brand of deficit hawkery meshed with the New Democrats’ more overtly political goals. For swing voters, Rubin argued, “class conflict is not an effective approach.”207

202 Paul Starobin, “An Affair to Remember?,” National Journal, January 16, 1993, 121; see also “Bill Clinton’s Policy Network,” National Journal, May 9, 1992; “The Money Men,” New York, July 13, 1992, 48 203 Michael Steinhardt, No Bull: My Life In and Out of Markets (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001), 209-18. 204 For a good profile, see John B. Judis, “Old Master,” The New Republic, December 13, 1993, 21-28. 205 Robert E. Rubin and Jacob Weisberg, In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington (New York: Random House, 2003), 93. 206 Susan Dentzer, “Walter Mondale Learns a Lesson,” Newsweek, October 22, 1984, 77. 207 Rubin and Weisberg, In an Uncertain World, 353. See also Laura Tyson, “A Squandered Legacy,” Prospect, April 20, 2004.

56 New policies make new politics, and so it was with the new rich, many of whom accepted somewhat higher taxes than they would pay under the GOP in exchange for what they deemed a sensible, market-friendly pragmatism. Though most billionaires in the New Gilded Age remained quietly Republican, the fundraising circuit well showed that their ranks also included

Dems aplenty. The latter had decidedly more liberal preferences on abortion, gay rights, and the environment than on the role of government to help the needy and to stimulate employment.208

The ground was laid in the 1980s, and the field tilled in the 1990s. Rubinomics served as the base, and the president’s hobnobbing the superstructure. According to the author of Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons, “The people of the Hamptons want desperately for Clinton to be safe. He is the spirit of the bull market.”209

By the 2000s, New Democrats and finance had fully joined. By the time the DLC shuttered in 2009, a new organization called Third Way had supplanted it as a centrist factional player. In aiming to counter the liberals—or, as the new outfit termed them, “neopopulists”210—

Third Way made protecting finance a central cause. The majority of its board and the bulk of its dollars came from financial services, including hedge funds and private equity.211 The fights over the New Politics and its putative cultural radicalism had receded. For Third Way, whose

208 Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe, Billionaires and Stealth Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019; Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (2013): 51-73. 209 Frank DiGiacomo, “President on Lam Drops Into Mediacracy’s Back Yard; His Goal? $2 Million; Their Goal: Eat Him Alive!” New York Observer, August 3, 1998, https://observer.com/1998/08/president-on-lam-drops-into- mediacracys-back-yard-his-goal-2-million-their-goal-eat-him-alive/. 210 Anne Kim, Adam Solomon, Bernard L. Schwartz, Jim Kessler, and Stephen Rose, “The New Rules Economy: A Policy Framework for the 21st Century,” Third Way, February 2007, http://content.thirdway.org/publications/57/Third_Way_Report_-_The_New_Rules_Economy_- _A_Policy_Framework_for_the_21st_Century.pdf. See also Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler, “Economic Populism Is a Dead End for Democrats,” Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2013. 211 Lee Fang, “GOP Donors and K Street Fuel Third Way’s Advice for the Democratic Party,” The Nation, December 3, 2013, https://www.thenation.com/article/gop-donors-and-k-street-fuel-third-ways-advice-democratic- party/#; Lee Fang, “Third Way: ‘Majority of Our Financial Support’ From Wall Street, Business Executives,” The Nation, December 11, 2013, https://www.thenation.com/article/third-way-majority-our-financial-support-wall- street-business-executives/; Atkins, “Forging a New Democratic Party,” 257-76.

57 supporters in elective office were less white and male than the DLC’s, the exchange between campaign funds and finance-friendly policy was a straightforward one.

The nerve centers of that exchange were the congressional Banking Committees, favorite destinations for Democratic members worried about reelection and eager to stockpile war chests to deter challengers. Many of them represented the kinds of upscale suburbs that had swung the party’s way over the decades.212 The Banking Committee moderates tie together four important threads in the Democratic story after the New Deal order’s demise: of a bourgeois suburban party uninterested in a politics of us-and-them, a theme since the Watergate Babies; of the unending money chase, back to Tony Coelho, and its implications for Washington work; of the

New Democrats as factional players anxious to stop liberals from engaging in class warfare; and of the rise of finance in the Party of the People.

Of Liberals and Greens

For liberals, the 1990s were an unhappy time. Even as the debates rolled on in op-ed pages and small magazines, they did so increasingly divorced from meaningful, party-focused activism. With a Democratic president presiding over peace and prosperity, albeit with a hefty dose of triangulation, the previous decade’s sharpest intraparty tensions had abated. The result was a left-liberal sleepwalk. Efforts to reconstitute a Democratic vision that would update the old prophecy for a new era, and so supplant the Third Way, made little headway.213 The 1990s saw few rising liberal political stars or important efforts bubbling up from states and cities, and even

212 For the manifestations in passing Dodd-Frank, see Robert G. Kaiser, Act of Congress: How America's Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t (New York: Vintage, 2013). 213 For books attempting to do just that, see E.J. Dionne, Jr., They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); and The New Majority: Toward a Progressive Popular Politics, eds. Stanley B. Greenberg and Theda Skocpol (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

58 fewer galvanizing moments of the kind that the nuclear freeze, Citizen Action gatherings, and the

Rainbow Coalition had provided a decade earlier. In a column for The Nation taking liberals to task after Clinton signed the welfare bill, Katha Pollitt rued that “the political forces they call on are just not interested anymore.”214 Writing for Dissent the following year, Harold Meyerson confirmed the verdict: liberalism, he wrote, had collapsed into “brain-dead, parochial, squabbling camps.”215

The old civic muscles had atrophied as advocacy moved to courts and agencies, away from popular politics. New citizens’ groups, some of them the descendants of the early, single- issue “Nader’s Raiders” outfits, provided ample opportunities for checkbook activists to support their favorite cause. These professionally run operations emphasized the kinds of postmaterialist issues so dear to the educated white professionals increasingly central to liberalism’s fortunes.

To keep the dollars flowing, both from foundations and from individuals looking for a tax break, they had to conform to the rules under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code, which impose strict limits on lobbying and ban partisan activity outright.216 Where amateurs once spent their evenings at party meetings, then joined forces with the AFL-CIO at the state convention, they now wrote checks. Forging cross-issue, cross-community, and cross-class partnerships meant an uphill fight.217

Further left, the critique was sharper, and its sense of rupture deeper, but it, too, offered little in the way of available alternatives. In 1995, at the nadir of left-liberal fortunes, the DSA called for “the founding of a new progressive movement… a next Left. That is because the

214 Katha Pollitt, “The Strange Death of Liberal America,” The Nation, August 26, 1996, 9. 215 Harold Meyerson, “Can Liberalism Survive Clinton?” Dissent, Fall 1997, 28. 216 Jeffrey Berry, The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1999). See also Jeffrey Berry, “Nonprofit Organizations as Interest Groups: The Politics of Passivity,” in Interest Group Politics, 7th ed., eds. Allan J. Cigler, Burdett A. Loomis (Washington: CQ Press, 2007). 217 Margaret Weir and Marshall Ganz, “Reconnecting People and Politics,” in The New Majority.

59 political momentum of mass liberalism is depleted. If we once positioned ourselves as the left wing of the possible, there is now no ‘possible’ to be the left wing of.”218 (In the 2010s, led by a cadre still in diapers, red or otherwise, when the 1995 statement was drafted, the DSA would reemerge as the tribune of that next Left.) The zone for effective action through conventional party-political channels seemed to have shrunk, and the action, such as it was, moved across the porous boundary between politics and culture.

The so-called “culture wars” raged far from the party-political trenches. Ongoing efforts by conservative warriors like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney to reassert nationalist verities in civics education and higher-ed curricula coincided with the full flowering of movement- aligned scholarship and activism on the multicultural left. The results were a roiling battle over history curricula in public schools, campus speech regulations, and the intellectual and moral legitimacy of “identity politics” itself.219 While philosophers and intellectual historians probed the conceptual and normative underpinnings of the multicultural turn,220 center-left critics closer to political ground-level took polemical aim at the tendency.221 A hazy nostalgia for an allegedly deracialized New Deal order that had come undone by left overreach and white backlash

218 “Where We Stand: Building the Next Left,” Democratic Socialists of America, https://www.dsausa.org/strategy/where_we_stand/. Ellipses in original document. 219 For a useful overview, see Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: Univesity of Chicago, 2015), 102-133, 200-284. A committee tasked with recommending new curricular standards for social studies education in New York State became one important flashpoint of controversy in this battle when it released its report in 1991. Two of the committee’s members with storied backgrounds in liberal politics, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Nathan Glazer, would be inspired by their respective experiences to offer book-length critical treatises on multiculturalism. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Knoxville, Tenn.: Whittle Books, 1991); Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 220 Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”: An Essay with Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995); K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 221 Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995); Michael Tomasky, Left For Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: The Free Press, 1996); Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism (New York: Viking, 1997).

60 suffused much of the center-left engagement with the new identity politics, just as it did with ongoing policy debates over welfare and criminal justice.222 “Since early in this century,” journalist Jim Sleeper insisted, “liberals have been the great framers of race-transcending public narratives that struck the right balance between parochialism and universalism and between individual autonomy and communal obligation.”223 But, with the tenor of much of the radical analyses fatalistic to the point of dismissiveness about electoral politics, the intra-progressive battles over identity and culture in the 1990s remained largely focused on campuses, boardrooms, and record stores and multiplexes, rather than the Democratic Party.224

The cultural turn in left-wing activism impacted even the engagement with political- economic phenomena, like globalization, that had long been the provenance of traditional socialist critique. Activists in the 1990s looking beyond the boundaries of the nation-state to oppose a transnational Third Way embraced a kind of anti-politics, decrying corporate branding and yearning, in a line back to the New Left and then Thoreau, for authentic experience unmediated by powers from above.225 The same impulses opened a new era in contentious politics, as mass protests, running the gamut from the AFL-CIO to anarchists, disrupted the

World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in November, 1999.226 If the rough coalitionism on display at those protests raised hopes for the prospects of an ongoing political project, a pervasive aversion to formal organization and electoral politics proved a continual hindrance to its realization.

222 For a trenchant early counter-critique, see Felicia A. Kornbluh, “Political Arithmetic and Racial Division in the Democratic Party,” Social Policy 22.3 (Spring 1996): 49-63. 223 Sleeper, Liberal Racism, 8. 224 For an influential (and best-selling) expression of such fatalism, see Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 225 Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999). 226 Margaret Levi and Gillian H. Murphy, “Coalitions of Contention: The Case of the WTO Protests in Seattle,” Political Studies 54 (2006): 651-670; Lesley J. Wood, Direct Action, Deliberation and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

61 Decades after his heyday in consumer activism, Ralph Nader reappeared as the candidate of the Green Party, channeling impulses to treat the two major parties as essential twins. Nader’s announcement speech laid out the case, melding classic anti-party and radical tropes: “Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates… The money of vested interests nullifies genuine voter choice.”227 After a campaign where Nader won substantial following from liberal celebrities—Pete Seeger, Linda Ronstadt,

Eddie Vedder, Phil Donahue—he won 2.7 percent of the popular vote.228 In Florida, however, his 97,444 votes dwarfed the final 537-vote margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

The election that brought Bush to power also channeled the anti-system energy in new directions. The argument that the two parties were just different heads of a single corporate hydra would fare poorly in the new century. “Jesse Jackson seems to me to have a much better understanding of how to move the Democratic Party to the left than does Ralph Nader,” Barney

Frank told a constituent in February 2001; the American left in the coming decades would largely concur.229 It was not the end of the Democrats’ listlessness or their inability to bring their disparate elements together; those elements would continue to define the party down through the

Trump years. Coming two years after the impeachment saga’s denouement, however, the 2000 election marked a critical juncture. In its wake, Democrats discovered and even embraced polarization’s potency and durability.

227 Ralph Nader, “Statement of Ralph Nader Announcing His Candidacy for the Green Party’s Nomination for President,” in The Ralph Nader Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000), 8. Compare, from erstwhile Jesse Jackson supporters, Robert L. Borosage, “Vote for Gore,” The Nation, August 21, 2000, 32; and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Vote for Nader,” The Nation, August 21, 2000, 33. 228 List taken from Ralph Nader, Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 142. 229 Barney Frank to Irvin C. Schick, February 14, 2001, Legislative Files, Box 451, Folder “Elections—Presidential, 2001-2002,” Barney Frank Papers, Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections, UMass Dartmouth, Dartmouth, Mass.

62 Partisanship without Party-Building in the New Century

It was not Gore’s campaign but Bush’s that had worried about the prospect of winning the popular vote but losing in the Electoral College in 2000. They made contingency plans to wage a scorched-earth mobilization campaign if it happened, aimed at bringing popular pressure to bear on the actual electors.230 And when the actual showdown unfolded in the month following election day, with Bush rather than Gore the popular-vote loser fighting for electoral college victory, Republicans confirmed the penchant for procedural ruthlessness that the Long

New Right had bequeathed to them. This contrasted starkly with the wan efforts waged during those weeks by the Gore campaign—with the candidate hobbled, wrote Jeffrey Toobin, by “an internal censor so strong that it wiped out not only the killer instinct but also the fighting spirit.”231 That contrast said as much about the Democrats’ lack of a core prophetic drive, and their conflicting impulses between the pragmatist’s hardball and the reformist’s commitment to good-government proceduralism, as it did about the right. Just as significant, however, was the reaction of many Democratic partisans watching the drama unfold, at once frustrated by Gore’s weakness and radicalized by the militancy of the Republicans’ attack.

The rediscovery of partisanship—as a fact of contemporary politics, a tool to utilize, and even a normative good232—served as the key theme for Democratic actors during George W.

Bush’s presidency. If impeachment and the Florida battle had provided early warnings, it was grassroots outrage at party leaders’ hidebound midterm election strategy in 2002 that proved pivotal. The first federal elections after the September 11th attacks were carried out amidst a congressional debate over authorizing an invasion of Iraq and produced a historically unusual

230 Michael Kramer, “Bush Set to Fight an Electoral College Loss,” New York Daily News, November 1, 2000. 231 Jeffrey Toobin, Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election (New York: Random House, 2001), 276. 232 Michael Tomasky, “Dems’ Fightin’ Words,” The American Prospect, August 8, 2002.

63 victory for the president’s party, which picked up two Senate and eight House seats. The prevailing response from ascendant Democratic activists was captured in a morning-after column by writer Nick Penniman, waving “goodbye to those in the accommodation wing of the party”:

“The ‘vital center’ strategy has landed the party in the mushy middle, pitifully trolling around for illusive suburbanites, astonished that its subtle rhetorical dance wasn’t enchanting busy voters. The middle should never be the destination of a political party. The middle is a byproduct of the tug of war of ideas. Politics has been trending conservative because the right has been tugging harder than the left.”233

This ethic, unapologetically intolerant of interparty compromise, came to be adopted by an array of disparate actors inside and outside the formal party in the years to come, spurring a flurry of institution-building, innovations in activism and fundraising, and reenergized congressional opposition under new congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and, starting in 2005, Harry Reid.

Congressional Democrats found their sea legs in 2005 offering a stand-pat defense of their New Deal birthright, beating back George W. Bush’s privatization plan for Social Security.

When a nervous member asked Nancy Pelosi when the party would offer an alternative proposal to Bush’s that could be the basis of a compromise, she responded, “Never. Is never good enough for you?”234 It was a valiant rearguard defense of a liberal verity more than the articulation of a vision for power; on trickier political terrain, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the caucus continued to hesitate.235

The Social Security fight highlighted both the potent efficacy that legislative party discipline could lend the opposition as well as the limitations of congressional leadership as a locus of party prophecy. House leader Pelosi née D’Alesandro, daughter and sister of Baltimore

233 Nick Penniman, “Goodbye to All That,” The American Prospect, November 6, 2002. 234 Perry Bacon, Jr., “Don’t Mess with Nancy Pelosi, Time, August 27, 2006. 235 Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 173-204.

64 mayors and protégé of legendary San Francisco liberal Phil Burton, embodied in her own biography the key party prophecies of postwar Democratic politics.236 She rose through leadership ranks on the strength (and beneficence) of her fundraising prowess and the steady support of liberal factions within the caucus, who generally outnumbered business-aligned moderates by the new century. Pelosi proved aggressive in influencing committee leadership and in pushing through tough party-line votes on the floor as soon as the whip count assured victory, in both the Bush years and, especially, during Barack Obama’s presidency. Her skills at consensus-building and parliamentary combat, however, hardly translated into the construction of a positive party agenda.237 In the Senate, Reid, a pro-life Mormon and ex-boxer (journalists never tired of invoking his history of pugilism), epitomized even more clearly the partisan rather than programmatic impetus of congressional Democrats’ renewed aggressiveness. A master of parliamentary tactics, Reid betrayed little of the bipartisan romanticism so common in the chamber, and proved willing to push the procedural envelope. Most significantly, in 2013 he rounded up the votes to “nuke” the sixty-vote cloture requirement for confirmation votes on executive and sub-Supreme Court judicial nominations.238

Likewise outside of Congress, Democrats’ rediscovery of partisanship was largely unaccompanied by a renewal of party. The newfound zeal did not, first of all, entail new programmatic or ideological commitments. “Netroots” activists, reveling in keyboard combat

236 Ronald M. Peters, Jr., and Cindy Simon Rosenthal, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the New American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3-4, 29-62. On her father’s battles in factionalized Baltimore, see Matthew A. Crenson, Baltimore: A Political History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), esp. 412-31. 237 House Democrats’ attempted emulation in 2006 of the GOP’s Contract with America, a “Six for ’06” legislative package included within a broader manifesto called “A New Direction for America,” reached particularly impressive lows in desultory poll-tested blandness. See House Democrats, 119th Congress, “A New Direction for America,” 2006, accessed at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/political-rallying-cry/new-direction-for- america.pdf. 238 In retirement, Reid has extended his position to support an outright end to all filibusters. Harry Reid, “The Filibuster is Suffocating the Will of the American People,” New York Times, August 12, 2019, A23.

65 while showcasing the internet’s extraordinary potential for political organizing and small-donor fundraising, offered a case in point.239 For all their gate-crashing rhetoric, they touted their own ideological flexibility and political realism, happy to support moderate candidates in red districts and states.240 Howard Dean’s netroots-backed presidential campaign in 2004 similarly harnessed

Democrats’ outrage at perceived capitulation to Republican misdeeds without advocating a dramatic ideological shift to the left. Netroots activists and newly energized megadonors converged on the same diagnoses, emphasizing communications more than ideological revamping or formal party-building. Their emulative awe at the conservative messaging machine and their general confidence in the substantive soundness of their agenda came together in the conviction that “being right is not enough”241 and a fad for mastering the subtle arts of political linguistics and framing—the old consultants’ hustle dressed up in the garb of academic psychology.242

The proximate impetus for the new paraparty institutions built in explicit emulation of the right was a PowerPoint presentation that attorney Rob Stein took on the road in the aftermath of the 2002 midterms, titled “The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix.”243 The Center for American Progress (liberals’ answer to the Heritage Foundation), the talk-radio venture Air

America, and the media criticism shop Media Matters soon appeared on the scene. CAP, notably,

239 David Karpf, The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 240 Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics (White River, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006). 241 Paul Waldman, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn from Conservative Success (New York: Wiley, 2006). 242 George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 2nd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives (White River, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004); Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007). Lakoff addressed the House Democratic caucus in December 2004. Box 473, Folder “Elections—Democratic Party 2003-4,” Frank Papers. 243 Matt Bai, The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake the Democratic Party (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 23-48.

66 positioned its programmatic work firmly in the mainstream of the Democratic Party even as

Heritage had long leaned toward the right-wing vanguard. And all the new efforts pursued the growth of the paraparty blob to the exclusion of organizational work inside the formal party.

Vexations of Empire

During the Bush years, and for the first time since the Vietnam era, matters of foreign policy constituted Democrats’ central political challenge. They did not rise to it. The “forever wars”244 of the Middle East initiated by the Bush administration following the attacks of

September 11, 2001, would help to determine the waning and waxing of the Democrats’ political fortunes even as they flummoxed and divided them as a party. The overwhelmingly domestic focus of the party’s key stakeholders relegated foreign affairs to the purview of both unrooted technocrats and mercenary consultants. In the roiling debates over American power in the new century, Democrats in and out of the opposition would embody a politics of listlessness that veered into abdication.

The politics of empire complicated Democrats’ search for party prophecy. The political economy of the American imperium severed the old republican fetters on permanent military mobilization and executive aggrandizement. Instead, the “warfare state” that Democratic leaders themselves substantially constructed during World War II and the early Cold War period championed military largesse as economic policy, distributing defense-related production and military facilities across a wide geographic expanse and a multitude of congressional districts.245

244 Mark Danner, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). 245 Ann Markusen et al., The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Michael Brenes, “For Right and Might: The Militarization of the Cold War and the Remaking of American Democracy” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2014); Rebecca U. Thorpe, The American Warfare State: The Domestic Politics of Military Spending (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

67 Its beneficiaries mobilized formidable resistance to defense cutbacks in the aftermath of the Cold

War.246 And, as a kind of common-denominator substitute for a national security agenda, the broad Democratic coalition rallied behind the military welfare state, for instance via expanding federal education benefits to service members.247

Countercurrent to those tendencies, in the wake of Vietnam the party absorbed a factional tendency that was openly critical of the Cold War consensus and the permanent projection of

American power. This accommodation was sufficiently partial and diffuse to prevent the anti- war movement from becoming a coalitional “anchoring group” that could transform the party’s fundamental agenda248—but was sufficiently meaningful to inculcate an enduring sense of political vulnerability to charges of unpatriotic dovishness. Even decades after the fall of Saigon,

Democrats worried about being seen as tough enough to lead.249

The September 11 attacks, the Bush administration’s belligerent policy response at home and abroad, and—in short order—the GOP’s deployment of hard-edged nationalistic political hits again Democratic opponents all exacerbated the pathologies of the Democrats’ political approach to war and peace. In each instance, Democrats showcased an overriding instinct to

246 Brenes, “For Right and Might,” 222-263. See, e.g., Clifford Kraus, “In Battle of Budget, Democrats Defend Military Hardware,” New York Times, May 17, 1992, 5. 247 Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 94-119. 248 Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2015), 119-128. 249 The most notable exception to this story came in the Reagan years, when the House used defense appropriations bills to restrict the use of funds in providing support for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. The Boland Amendments, authored by Tip O’Neill’s longtime Washington roommate Edward Boland, ultimately compelled National Security Council staff to pursue the illicit efforts that became the Iran-Contra scandal. And as that saga unfolded, congressional Democrats ventured further into outright competition with the Reagan administration in the conduct of diplomacy, as House Speaker Jim Wright pursued direct talks with both Sandinista officials and contra leaders concerning a peace process in 1987. See Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991), 17-26; Barry, The Ambition and the Power, 493-515; John Felton, “New Contra Politics: Wright the Dominant Force,” Congressional Quarterly, October 31, 1987, 2264-2265; Neil A. Lewis, “Wright Has Talks with Both Parties in Nicaragua War,” New York Times, November 13, 1987, A1. On grassroots activism regarding Reagan’s Central America policies, see Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 25-44.

68 inoculate themselves through substantive capitulation and then pivot rapidly to safer domestic- policy ground—its own kind of politics of evasion.250 In the run-up to the 2002 midterms, this was the message their consultants and pollsters were happy to tell them. A memo from the polling shop Garin-Hart-Yang that spring touted as good news for Dems that “the balance of power in this year’s elections will be held by voters who say they support President Bush on the war against terrorism but who have concerns about his policies on the economy and other domestic issues.”251 An election-eve Iraq War resolution passed with the support of 39 percent of

House Democrats and 58 percent of their Senate colleagues—and, a few weeks later, Democrats broke the historical midterm pattern by losing seats as the out-party.

Divisions and disarray among Democratic officials on these issues were compounded by the party’s foreign policy apparatus operating according to blob dynamics. The intraparty debate over Iraq among experts was both constricted and drastically tilted, encompassing left-liberal notions of humanitarian interventionism on one side252 and more conventionally security- oriented prowar analyses on the other253—and largely leaving full-throated opposition to the invasion an intellectually orphaned position despite its resonance with a majority of Democrats.

250 Matthew Yglesias, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008), 53-126. 251 Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group memo, April 9, 2002, Box 449, Folder 1, Richard A. Gephardt Congressional Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Mo. 252 See, as examples, George Packer, “The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq,” New York Times Magazine, December 8, 2002; The Fight Is For Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World, ed. George Packer (New York: Perennial, 2003); and Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003). Peter Beinart explicitly invoked Cold War liberalism as a party tradition to celebrate and draw from in The Good Fight: How Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (New York: Deckle Edge, 2006). For rejoinders, see David Rieff, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 153-254; and Stephen Holmes, The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157-196. 253 Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002); Kurt Campbell and Michael O’Hanlon, Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security (New York: Basic Books, 2006). Former Obama aide Ben Rhodes refers to this bipartisan establishment as “The Blob,” which overlaps but is hardly coterminous with our concept of parapatry blobs. See David Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru,” New York Times Magazine, May 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy- guru.html.

69 The principal-agent problems inherent to policy development via blob proved acute in these years—and the result was circular. When Democratic politicians, lacking strong preexisting foreign-policy commitments, took the consultants’ advice and skewed hawkish, that sent a signal to the very experts who in theory were meant to affect the politicians’ position.

“When it became clear that leading Democrats would support the war,” wrote journalist Matthew

Yglesias, “it was useful from a careerist perspective [for experts] to likewise back the war; cast doubts about its feasibility only in the form of advice about its conduct; and mute or otherwise downplay criticism.”254

These dynamics at the elite level perpetuated a programmatic muddle on the preeminent issues of the era, while exacerbating the divide between elite and rank-and-file Democrats. It was grassroots anti-war sentiment that powered mass street demonstrations; prompted the flourishing of advocacy organizations like MoveOn; carried congressional Democrats to victory in 2006; and set the context for Barack Obama’s eventual victory in the 2008 presidential nominating contest. Yet once those Democrats entered office, groups like MoveOn shifted priorities, the protests ebbed—and the forever war continued.255 Obama’s presidency marked a break from the ideologically charged crusading of his predecessor, but it did not occasion any new reckoning with the core questions of American global domination and executive aggrandizement—and neither, tellingly, did even the radical insurgent Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the party nomination in 2016.256

254 Yglesias, Heads in the Sand, 72. 255 Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 256 Molly O’Toole, “Top Advisor Says Sanders Missed Opportunity on Foreign Policy,” Politico, April 26, 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/26/top-advisor-says-sanders-missed-opportunity-on-foreign-policy/. On radical possibilities, see Aziz Rana, “The Left’s Missing Foreign Policy, n+1, March 28, 2018, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-lefts-missing-foreign-policy/.

70 From Labor to Laborism: Unions and the Democrats

No account of modern Democratic listlessness and muted prophecy can fail to emphasize the fate of the party’s venerable partners in organized labor. The decades since Reagan’s election proved devastating to unions.257 Under assault from structural dislocations worsened by aggressive antilabor tactics, union membership tumbled from 21.4 percent of the American workforce in 1981 to 10.4 percent in 2018. In the private sector, the rate fell from 18.7 percent to

6.4 percent.258 Though the rifts following 1968 ultimately healed, when labor reengaged in

Democratic politics it did so as a weaker player. Over time, Democrats moved to reembrace their old allies and promote a robust agenda for workers—but as resurgent laborite politics in the

2010s sought to seize the moment, it faced a hobbled movement and a hollowed-out party.

At the outset of the era, on a September afternoon in 1981, the house of labor summoned a show of force a quarter-million strong on the National Mall: Solidarity Day. Lane Kirkland, the union bureaucrat who had succeeded the crusty George Meany at the helm of the AFL-CIO two years prior, sought to mend fences with potential allies. He marched arm-in-arm with Eleanor

Smeal of NOW, Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, and Coretta Scott King. Kirkland’s agenda meshed with that of the DNC’s Manatt, happy to accept labor’s cash in exchange for 15 labor seats on the committee.259 Though Solidarity Day went off without a hitch, it was a swan song.

257 For general histories, see Nelson Lichtenstein, The State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2013), 141-296; and Steven Greenhouse, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019). On the AFL-CIO, see Timothy J. Minchin, Labor Under Fire: A History of the AFL-CIO Since 1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). On the labor-Democratic partnership, see Taylor E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1999); and Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties, esp. 172-97 and 242-56. 258 Data from unionstats.com. 259 Addressing the AFL-CIO convention in November 1981, Tip O’Neill deployed a redolent phrase. “Some of you are old enough to remember the 1930s and when, together, we made America great. Together, the Democrats and labor made a middle-class America.” Warren Brown, “Democrats and AFL-CIO Leaders Hold a Love Feast,” Washington Post, November 18, 1981, A8.

71 “In spite of this turnout, there is no guarantee that our task will succeed,” warned Jerry Wurf of

AFSCME, a left-leaning thorn in the AFL-CIO leadership’s side. “This is the beginning of a long, difficult frustrating process to turn the country around.”260

Just how long, difficult, and frustrating was coming clear. The Professional Air Traffic

Controllers Organization (PATCO), a small union that had actually gone against the AFL-CIO and endorsed Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, had blundered into an illegal strike the previous month. The president swiftly ordered the controllers back to work. When the strike continued after his forty-eight hour deadline, Reagan fired the controllers, banned them from their jobs for life, and replaced them with permanent strikebreakers.261

Kirkland’s strategy was to manage union decline more than to counter it.262 Unions faced pressures from all sides: normalization of striker replacement, intensification of employer opposition, abandonment of full employment as a preeminent goal, and falling employment in the basic industries on which their success had long rested. The AFL-CIO worked closely with congressional Democrats, modernizing its lobbying operation, and embracing the new PAC game with gusto.263 Though it held the line after 1981 on hostile legislation from Congress, its substantive agenda was defensive and frequently particularistic. Unions’ opposition to trade deals, most prominently the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), largely came

260 Eric Pianin and Warren Brown, “Crowd Proclaims Labor’s Solidarity,” Washington Post, September 20, 1981, A1. 261 Joseph A. McCartin, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 262 For a good statement of his worldview, see Lane Kirkland, “‘It Has All Been Said Before…,’” in Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1986), 393-404. 263 Dark, The Unions and the Democrats, 141-57; Marick F. Masters, Robert S. Atkin, and John Thomas Delaney, “Unions, Political Action, and Public Policies: A Review of the Past Decade,” Policy Studies Journal 18 (1989): 471-80.

72 without a broader vision of American workers’ role in an interconnected world. Labor played the new game on behalf of old constituencies.

If the AFL-CIO and the Democrats resumed their operational partnership, the broader struggle to build an inclusive coalition advanced only fitfully. The Progressive Alliance’s dissolution took with it any lingering labor push for party responsibility. Outreach to grassroots liberalism, meanwhile, remained hampered by the federation’s insularity and hawkishness.264 For their part, the Watergate Babies’ concerns lay far from those of unions; Richard Trumka of the

United Mine Workers, who would later lead the AFL-CIO, bemoaned “an indifference bordering on contempt from a new generation of Democrats who grew up as children of the very middle class that young CIO organizers made possible a few decades before.”265

By 1995, long-restive liberal unions finally rounded up enough allies to force Kirkland into retirement. John Sweeney of the fast-growing Service Employees International Union

(SEIU) then defeated Kirkland’s ally, Thomas Donohue, for the AFL-CIO presidency. The victory augured hopes that membership would revive and labor would return to the apex of the left-liberal firmament.266 The first goal failed. After a pause in the late 1990s, membership resumed its decline. In 2004, amid squabbling over tactics and the jurisdictional disputes endemic to American unions, the SEIU under Sweeney’s protégé Andrew Stern left the AFL-

CIO to form a rival federation called Change to Win that would, it said, reinvigorate organizing.267 In practice, the dispute did little except to increase the relative influence inside the

264 Compare Arch Puddington, Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor (New York: John Wiley, 2005); and Daniel Cantor and Juliet Schor, Tunnel Vision: Labor, the World Economy, and Central America (Boston: South End, 1989). Minchin credits Kirkland with moving the federation “more firmly into a coalition model of relations with its progressive allies” but also stresses those efforts’ limits. Labor Under Fire, 107, and, more broadly, 48-149. 265 Richard L. Trumka, “On Becoming a Movement,” Dissent, Winter 1992, 57. 266 Harold Meyerson, “Mother Jones Returns,” LA Weekly, November 3, 1995, 18-23; Julie Kosterlitz, “Laboring Uphill,” National Journal, March 2, 1996. 267 Harold Meyerson, “Labor’s Civil War,” American Prospect, June 2005, 45–50; Harold Meyerson, “A Labor War Ended,” American Prospect, July 27, 2010, https://prospect.org/article/labor-war-ended-0.

73 federation of the conservative building trades, old-school deal-cutters ill at ease in broader liberal coalitions.268

Laborite politics, by contrast, did revive in fits and starts. Early in the Sweeney years, labor’s political operation ramped up, with union professionals parachuted in to swing districts to run the “ground game” from which the party organizations had largely retreated.269 The new federation leadership, many of whom got their start in the upheavals of the 1960s, worked to heal the breach between the labor movement and the intelligentsia. In 1986, progressive unions had established the Economic Policy Institute to get labor-friendly policies into the Democrats’ policy bloodstream.270 Sweeney’s Union Summer initiative gave college students experience in organizing. A teach-in at Columbia University in 1996 attracted 1500 participants and provided a key moment to imagine a movement embracing the diverse panoply of American workers.271 Yet the 1990s proved an unpropitious time to realize such dreams. It would take nearly two more decades for the questions aired at Columbia to reach the core of party politics.

By the time of Barack Obama’s election, polarization had culled the ranks of Democrats who would buck labor and party leadership on critical votes. But hard numbers on the party’s dwindling right alongside comparative indifference among a swath of its mainstream proved sufficient to kill unions’ highest priority. The labor law reform known as the Employee Free

Choice Act fell victim to the Senate filibuster. As had happened so often over the decades, a core

268 Steven Greenhouse, “Can Trump Win Over Big Labor?” New York Times, April 9, 2017, SR5. 269 James A. Barnes and Richard E. Cohen, “Divided Democrats,” National Journal, November 15, 1997; Steven Greenhouse, “Despite Defeat On China Bill, Labor Is on Rise,” New York Times, May 30, 2000; Gary C. Jacobson, “The Effect of the AFL-CIO's ‘Voter Education’ Campaigns on the 1996 House Elections,” Journal of Politics 61 (1999): 185-94. 270 Paul Taylor, “Analyzing Alternatives in Labor’s Think Tank,” Washington Post, February 25, 1987, A25; Jeff Faux, The Party’s Not Over: A New Vision for the Democrats (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 271 Nelson Lichtenstein, “Revitalizing America’s Labor Movement,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 31, 1996, B1; Denise K. Magner, “Labor Leaders and Academics Seek a New Alliance,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 11, 1996, A11. Teach-in writings are collected in Steven Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman, eds., Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of America, eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

74 party priority—here the Affordable Care Act—came before legislation to help a steady ally.

With the 2011 passage of Wisconsin’s Act 10 to drastically curtail public-sector collective bargaining, meanwhile, Republicans’ state-level assault on unions as linchpin Democratic partners swung into high gear.272 Labor’s strategy since 1981 to direct resources to politics as a way of punching above its weight finally reached its limits as unions cut back on their electoral spending and directed resources inwards. In 2016, Donald Trump’s victories in the deindustrialized Rust Belt came where unions once dwelled, among both racially resentful whites who turned to Trump and African-Americans who stayed home.

Even as unions failed to revive, Democrats began to embrace a far more robust vision for workers and the economy than had prevailed in the post-New Deal era. This “laborism without labor” had two interwoven strands.273 First, elite liberalism came around. Two decades after the first Union Summer and the Columbia teach-in, technocratic liberals increasingly saw the fall in union clout as a key factor in the upward redistribution of wealth and power.274 Second, potent new grassroots efforts surfaced, from workplace-focused “alt labor” groups outside formal unions to the fast-food-worker-led “Fight for 15” that made a massive minimum-wage hike de rigueur for Democrats. Teachers struck, first in 2012 against Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel—

272 Richard B. Freeman and Eunice Han, “The War Against Public Sector Collective Bargaining in the US,” Journal of Industrial Relations 54 (2012): 386-408; Gordon Lafer, “The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012,” EPI Briefing Paper 364 (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2013); Jake Rosenfeld, What Unions No Longer Do (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 159-81; James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Vanessa Williamson, “From the Bargaining Table to the Ballot Box: Downstream Effects of Right-to-Work Laws,” typescript, 2019. 273 Jake Rosenfeld, “US Labor Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Understanding Laborism Without Labor,” Annual Review of Sociology 45 (2019): 449-65; Daniel J. Galvin, “From Labor Law to Employment Law: The Changing Politics of Workers’ Rights,” Studies in American Political Development 33 (2019): 50-86; Rich Yeselson, “How Labor Advocates Pushed the Democratic Party Left,” Dissent, February 11, 2016, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/how-labor-advocates-pushed-democratic-party-left-democratic-socialism- bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton. 274 See, e.g., Nicholas Kristof, “The Cost of a Decline in Unions,” New York Times, February 19, 2015, A25; Paul Krugman, “Don’t Blame Robots for Low Wages,” New York Times, March 15, 2019, A31.

75 erstwhile Coelho aide, welfare reformer in the Clinton White House, and recruiter of House moderates—then in 2018 across a wave of red states devastated by budget cuts.275

As with so much in the contemporary Democratic Party, these were jerry-rigged pieces— woke elites, alt labor, wildcat strikes—with shallow institutional roots and few connections to the formal party. They suggested glimmers but did not fill out the details of a future politics. It would be a complicated dance. The new, multiracial working class would have to find its way together with The New Affluent and even the more-than-affluent inside the same Democratic

Party.276

Party Hollowness in the Obama Years

The 2008 nomination contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama unfolded within a party energized by oppositional activism and, by historical standards, relatively ideologically cohesive—but also unresolved in its sense of a project for power. For all their newfound espousal of partisan combat, Democrats proved more susceptible to the grander reformist and transpartisan notes sounded by Obama than to Clinton’s hardnosed—to detractors, tawdry—pragmatism. The candidates’ hazy programmatic agreement, moreover, reflected no real intraparty consensus on priorities or overall mission. Both the trials and the triumphs of the

Obama presidency would flow as consequences.277

275 On the alt labor landscape, see Richard B. Freeman, “What Can Labor Organizations Do for U.S. Workers When Unions Can’t Do What Unions Used to Do?” in What Works for Workers?. For a critique of prior union strategy (especially from the SEIU) that proved influential in these strikes, see Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 276 See the debate between Gabriel Winant, “The New Working Class,” Dissent, June 27, 2017, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/new-working-class-precarity-race-gender-democrats, and, closer to the view here, Michael Kazin, “Democrats Need More Than the Working Class,” Dissent, June 27, 2017, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/democrats-working-class-coalition-strategy. 277 On Obama and party politics, see Sidney M. Milkis, Jesse H. Rhodes and Emily J. Charnock, “What Happened to Post-Partisanship? Barack Obama and the New American Party System,” Perspectives on Politics 10 (2012): 57-76;

76 Disparate and at times contradictory party strands intertwined in Obama’s leadership. He entered office with an ambitious agenda that suggested continuities with the policy-reform tradition, while his discomfort with small politics and his faith in expertise led back to the

Progressives and the anti-party tradition.278 If the Obama operation did not have the laser focus on Information Age voters of the late Clinton years, its self-consciously cerebral approach to the political game, not to mention a love affair with the tech industry, linked back to the Ataris. And the personalism intrinsic to Obama’s leadership hindered his overall approach to party politics.

In short order, Obama’s post-partisan dream came down to earth given the realities of polarized politics. Already by December 2008, the ever-caustic Barney Frank complained of suffering from “post-partisan depression.”279 Intransigent Republican opposition defined both the two climactic years of unified Democratic control and the six long years of trench warfare amid divided government. The departure of Democratic moderates, the drumbeat of political change over the past four decades, continued—and in some places reached the end of the line. When

Obama entered office, he could rely on a total of seven Democratic Senators in Arkansas,

Louisiana, Nebraska, and both Dakotas. When he left office, there were none.

Ideologically, Obama planted himself somewhere between his Democratic predecessor and the party’s liberals. The Obama operation disliked carping from what the president’s press secretary in 2010 termed “the professional left,” and in a conscious difference with Franklin

Roosevelt and even Lyndon Johnson, it discouraged mass movements on the left that would

and Julia R. Azari, “Party Foul: How Obama Made Partisan, Not Party, Politics in a Polarized Environment,” in The Obama Legacy, eds. Bert A. Rockman and Andrew Rudalevige (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019). 278 James T. Kloppenberg, “Barack Obama and the Traditions of Progressive Reform,” in The Progressives’ Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State, eds. Stephen Skowronek, Stephen M. Engel, Bruce Ackerman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 279 Ryan Grim, “Barney Frank has post-partisan depression,” Politico, December 22, 2008, https://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-now/2008/12/barney-frank-has-post-partisan-depression-014959

77 exert grassroots pressure to push the system.280 Still, Obama’s irritation hardly rose to the heights of Tsongas’s or Hart’s scolding, or Clinton’s triangulation. Obama never joined the DLC, and refrained from the kind of sniping at the party’s constituencies that defined the New Democrats.

His neoliberalism reflected continuities with Rubinomics, above all in the response to the Great

Recession: solicitous of the banks, despite muscling through the Dodd-Frank law in 2010, and limited in its response to the wave of foreclosures and, in an undersized stimulus, to the collapse in demand. After flirting early in 2011 with a “Grand Bargain” that might have cut Social

Security and Medicare, Obama by December returned to Osawatomie, Kansas, site of a famous

TR speech, to enlist the capital-P Progressive legacy in the cause of fighting inequality.281

The multiple transmogrifications of Obama’s 2-million strong 2008 volunteer organization Obama for America dramatized the dilemmas of party hollowness.282 Obama’s campaign had developed a potent and innovative “blend of community organizing and modern electioneering.”283 After his election, in a move that might have signified a new commitment to formal party-building, Obama folded the organization, now renamed Organizing for America, into the DNC. Under those auspices during his first term, the outfit hewed to the traditional path of presidential party leadership in turning into a one-way mouthpiece for the administration’s policy agenda. As one activist lamented to scholars Hahrie Han and Elizabeth McKenna,

“they’re still just running it like electoral campaigners and saying, this is the menu you can order

280 Sam Stein, “Robert Gibbs Clarifies ‘Professional Left’ Criticism, Calls Initial Comments Inartful,” Huffington Post, August 10, 2010, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-gibbs-clarifies-pr_n_676934. This is a theme of Grim, We’ve Got People; see a revealing anecdote at p. 130. 281 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas,” December 6, 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/06/remarks-president-economy-osawatomie-kansas 282 Sidney M. Milkis and John Warren York, “Barack Obama, Organizing for Action, and Executive-Centered Partisanship,” Studies in American Political Development 31 (April 2017): 1-23. See also Karpf, The MoveOn Effect, 96-99; Charles Homans, “The Party of Obama,” Washington Monthly, January 1, 2010; and Sam Graham- Felsen, “Has Obama Forgotten His Roots?” Washington Post, December 17, 2010, A33. 283 Hahrie Han and Elizabeth McKenna, Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2. Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 184.

78 off of. But it’s not a potluck.”284 If, alternatively, Obama and the DNC had empowered OFA chapters, it likely would have prompted conflict with existing local party actors—a fact only underscoring the distance separating a candidate-centered campaign operation like Obama’s, however robustly people-powered, from parties as rooted civic organizations. By Obama’s second term, the DNC experiment was abandoned and OFA—rechristened yet again as

Organizing for Action—was spun out as one among countless 501(c) advocacy groups in the paraparty blob.

Collectively, Obama’s achievements and failings emerged from decades where the

Democratic Party had failed to develop an effective strategy as a party. The Obama prophecy was not that policy was divorced from politics—he was far shrewder than that—but that good policy could sell itself, as if political parties’ hard work to define alternatives and reach voters could somehow be short-circuited.285 Sharing this outlook, along with the perception that challenging the system’s limits would overwhelm it, the spin doctors and the technocrats achieved symbiosis.

The political folks worried most of all about Obama’s good-government image, and took note of the public’s professed concern with the budget deficit.286 When Obama was debating a rescue for the auto industry—a latter-day version of the Chrysler bailout that gave Ataris so much heartburn—his chief strategist, David Axelrod, did not list the players on each side, or remind his boss about the contributions of the UAW to Democratic victories, but pointed to polling: even in Michigan, respondents told pollsters that they hated bailouts.287 A decision that

284 Han and McKenna, Groundbreakers, 199. 285 Daniel J. Galvin and Chloe M. Thurston, “The Democrats’ Misplaced Faith in Policy Feedback,” The Forum 15.2 (2017): 333-343. 286 As another staffer recalled, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel repeatedly insisted that ‘We’ve got to fucking to do something on the deficit, we’ve got to fucking do something on the deficit.’” Quoted in Noam Scheiber, The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 248. 287 Reed Hundt, A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions (New York: Rosetta Books, 2019), 307-8

79 reaped political dividends across the Midwest in 2012 came about because Obama overruled his chief strategist. At the same time, the very technocrats whose legitimacy derived from their claims to speak without fear or favor tailored their advice to what they deemed to be the political winds. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that Obama signed four weeks into his term amidst economic freefall was, in retrospect, too small a stimulus to fill the hole. Though

Lawrence Summers, Obama’s top adviser on the economy, later claimed the price-tag “was as big as the political traffic would bear,”288 the administration never gave a clear estimate of what it thought Congress ought to spend. In a cruel irony, many of the moderate Democrats who, citing the deficit, whittled down the stimulus lost their seats in 2010 as victims of an anemic recovery.

The perverse fate met by such moderates pointed to a more fundamental fragility, beyond the exigencies of presidential leadership, in Democrats’ collective sense of purpose. The

ACA limped to the finish line as the president’s preeminent programmatic achievement after a drawn-out and electorally costly legislative process that laid bare its accommodation with stakeholders: everything from guarantees to Big Pharma to the Cornhusker Kickback (a ploy for a sixtieth Senate vote). On the one hand, this sweeping, expensive, highly redistributive fulfillment of a Democratic dream eight decades in the making—in Vice President Joe Biden’s piquant phrase, “a big fucking deal”—did, in the end, become law, thanks especially to decisive eleventh-hour commitments by the key principals, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.289 On the other hand, it only took one loss in a special Senate election—Democrats’ surprise January 2010 defeat in the race to replace the late Ted Kennedy—to produce the very eleventh-hour crisis that

288 Quoted in Hundt, A Crisis Wasted, 321. One can trace continuities back to the claims in Roger Altman and Lawrence Summers, “The Democrats: Better for Business,” Wall Street Journal, October 31, 1988, A18. 289 Jonathan Cohn, “How They Did It,” The New Republic, June 10, 2010, 14-25; John E. McDonough, Inside National Health Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

80 nearly killed the bill. Immediate post-election calls to abandon the ACA effort came not only from skittish congressional moderates and longstanding White House skeptics like Rahm

Emanuel, but from the staunchly liberal Barney Frank.290 The palpable desire by a wide swath of party actors to find a pretext for relinquishing the very power they held in their grasp told the tale of a party still suffused with listlessness, even as circumstance and the contingent impact of strong leadership forced their hand.

Even more than Obama, the party politics of Hillary Clinton emerged from the travails of the prior decades—and in few politicians did the twinned, contradictory stories of polarization and neoliberalism run so tightly together. The candidate of the Goldman Sachs speeches also offered the most robustly liberal policy agenda in decades.291 Like so many in her generation,

Clinton retained a core of New Politics idealism, determined to use the political system especially to benefit women and children, even as she made compromises, and got rich, along the way. Her skills combined the technocrat’s attention to policy detail, the incrementalist’s acceptance of half a loaf, and the modern Democratic institutionalist’s realism about partisan conflict and electoral exigencies.292 The result, not for the first time in this story, was a politics smaller than the sum of its parts.

Clinton won support from across the institutional Democratic Party on her road to the nomination, supplementing her narrow majority among pledged delegates with the overwhelming majority of superdelegates. Yet it was a not entirely requited love affair. The

290 “Our respect for democratic procedures,” Frank declared on election night, “must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened.” Meredith Shiner, “Frank: Congress should not bypass the election results,” Politico, January 20, 2010, https://www.politico.com/livepulse/0110/Frank_Congress_should_not_bypass_the_election_results.html. 291 Paul Starr, “What Is Hillary Clinton’s Agenda,” American Prospect, Summer 2016, 18-23. 292 See Ezra Klein, “Hillary Clinton and the Audacity of Political Realism,” Vox, January 28, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10858464/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-political-realism; and Ezra Klein, “Understanding Hillary,” Vox, July 11, 2016, https://www.vox.com/a/hillary-clinton-interview/the-gap-listener- leadership-quality.

81 Clinton campaign, burdened with multiple power centers accreted over decades in public life, invested less than the Obama campaigns in building local capacity, and ignored warnings about her weakness in the Rust Belt.293 Clinton ran against her opponent’s character more than she promoted classic Democratic themes.294 The demographic story of the 2016 election followed a playbook urged in fits and starts since McGovern-Fraser: forge an alliance between college- educated professionals and people of color.295 But with a steep decline in support from white voters without a college education, it did not produce a majority in the Electoral College.296

The other important development in 2016 came as mostly young activists rallied to an old candidate and worked to revive the long-dormant radical strand of American party politics. But neither he nor they showed any prophetic sense for how a political party might be forged to realize their vision. Clinton’s opponent for the 2016 nomination, the self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, had railed for decades, on the fringes in Vermont, as mayor of

Burlington, in the House and in the Senate, against “millionaires and billionaires,” and advocated for big-ticket universal programs paid for with hefty tax increases. Sanders’s supporters thrilled to his Old Left themes, little changed by the New Politics and resistant to the New Affluent.297

293 Edward-Isaac Dovere, “How Clinton lost Michigan—and blew the election,” Politico, December 14, 2016, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-lists-told-us-otherwise/. Daniel Schlozman, “The Lists Told us Otherwise,” n+1, December 24, 2016, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-lists-told-us-otherwise/. 294 John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 130-153. 295 For McGovern-Fraser-era articulations, see Frederick Dutton, Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971); Lanny J. Davis, The Emerging Democratic Majority: Lessons and Legacies From the New Politics (New York: Stein and Day, 1974); and Stephen C. Schlesinger, The New Reformers: Forces For Change in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). An updated blueprint is John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (New York: Scribner, 2002), esp. 37-68. 296 For an important corrective to much hot air around “economic anxiety,” see Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, “Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism.” Political Science Quarterly 133 (2018): 9-34. 297 On the historical roots of Sanders’s politics, compare Daniel Schlozman, “The Sanders Phenomenon,” n+1, October 13, 2015, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-sanders-phenomenon/; and Matthew Karp, “The Long Shot,” The Nation, May 20, 2019, 27-31. Sanders voters hardly shared all of the candidate’s views; see Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, “Do Sanders’s Supporters Favor His Policies?” New York Times, May

82 Though a caucus member and loyal partisan on votes in Congress, Sanders stubbornly refused to call himself a Democrat and, in the nomination fight, blasted the Democratic National

Committee for a “rigged” process. (The firmest evidence of rigging was that the DNC scheduled debates at unpopular times like Saturday nights.) In contrast to Jesse Jackson, whom he endorsed in 1988, Sanders showed little interest, beyond a few platform demands, in affecting the work of the Democratic convention. Rather than embrace the radical possibilities of a mass party formation, Sanders and his supporters stuck to criticizing insiders, sounding notes of procedural reformism that ran through McGovern-Fraser back to the Progressives.

Post-election, Democrats reverted to form, pursuing factional rapprochement via laborious process-tinkering. The results testified both to the institutionalists’ instinct to accommodate party stakeholders and to the left dissidents’ thin sense of party. Tasked by the national convention to recommend reforms ensuring an “accessible, transparent and inclusive” nominating process,298 the Unity Reform Commission homed in on superdelegates. Though serving as Sanders supporters’ bete noire for situational reasons, the long-underlegitimized institution found ever fewer open defenders by 2017.299 Their most vocal proponents, significantly, were black office-holders adhering to the party-pragmatic tradition that had secured their seat at the table. “There should be enough room in the process,” declared CBC chairman

Cedric Richmond, “to include the perspective of local party activists and officials, and Members

23, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/opinion/campaign-stops/do-sanders-supporters-favor-his- policies.html. 298 The language of the convention resolution is included as an appendix to the final Report of the Unity Reform Commission, December 2019, p. 29, accessed at: https://democrats.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/10/URC_Report_FINAL.pdf. 299 The breadth of opposition to superdelegates among major party actors, up to and including Clinton’s running- mate and former DNC chair Tim Kaine, is conveyed in “Democrats Want to Change the Party. They Just Disagree on How,” Politico, December 7, 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/07/democrats-want-to- change-the-democratic-party-they-just-disagree-on-how-216055.

83 of Congress.”300 This was the closest a contemporary Democrat might come to evoking the Hunt

Commission’s original theme of strengthening the party as “a cohesive force” in government and society, and it wasn’t enough.301 In the end, the DNC replaced the reform commission’s recommendation to reduce superdelegates’ numbers with a deft alternative—to strip them of voting privileges on the first presidential ballot at the convention if their votes would tip the outcome. The reform formally denied superdelegates a power they had never had the standing to actually attempt, namely to block an earned-delegate winner from the nomination.302 It was a fittingly clever compromise (the final deal was the brainchild of Ken Martin, chair of the

Minnesota DFL Party) that, just as fittingly, did nothing to evoke or revive a positive claim for party legitimacy.

Conclusion: Back to the Future?

Amid a particularly brutal round of soul-searching and finger-pointing after the 2016 election, signs emerged that this time might be different. The green shoots of party revival finally appeared. Grassroots groups across the land, many starting from the Indivisible Guide to civic activism written by two former Congressional staffers, began to work with and take over local

300 David Siders, “Black caucus chairman opposes DNC plan to weaken superdelegate influence,” Politico, August 14, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/14/dnc-super-delegates-cedric-richmond-776345. 301 The Report of the Commission on Presidential Nominations, p. 2, Box 1073, Folder “Hunt Commission,” DNC Papers. 302 On the final deliberations inside the DNC, see David Weigel, “Democrats weaken ‘superdelegates’ in effort to avoid repeat of bitter primaries,” Washington Post, August 26, 2018, A2; and Alex Seitz-Wald, “ Democrats strip superdelegates of power and reform caucuses in 'historic' move,” NBC News, August 25, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/democrats-vs-trump/democrats-strip-super-delegates-power-reform-caucuses- historic-move-n903866. For rules, see p. 16 in “Call for the 2020 Democratic National Convention.” https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/07/2020-Call-for-Convention-WITH-Attachments- 2.26.19.pdf.

84 parties, bringing new life to long-moribund operations even in places where Democrats had long been scarce on the ground.303

Complementary to but largely separate from the mostly white, college-educated women of the Resistance who practiced a kind of liberal pragmatism attuned to what particular districts could bear, the youth-led left settled in for the long haul.304 The Democratic Socialists of

America, whose membership had sputtered in the four digits for decades, garnered more than

50,000 members by 2019.305 In contrast to anti-globalization activism, the Nader campaign, and the anarchism-inflected Occupy protests of 2011, in which so many of the rising leaders had gotten their starts,306 the resurgent left accepted the realities of two-party politics, and signed up as Democrats without the pussyfooting that rubbed so many partisans the wrong way. And, learning most proximately from the Sanders campaign but more broadly from the failures of so many movements past, they tried to build an inclusive vision for social transformation.

The story of the New Deal majority was written in the urban ethnic neighborhoods where so many of its young supporters came of age. Now many of those same neighborhoods, mixing longtime residents worried about being priced out and debt-laden gentrifiers marching in, again seemed ready to remake the Democratic Party. If the victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be dismissed as an inevitable story of ethnic succession or a one-off win for a politician of

303 Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol, “Middle America Reboots Democracy,” Democracy, February 20, 2018, https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/middle-america-reboots-democracy/; Leah E. Gose and Theda Skocpol, “Resist, Persist, and Transform: The Emergence and Impact of Grassroots Groups Opposing the Trump Presidency,” Mobilization 24 (2019): 293-317. 304 New Democrats had long predicted a generational politics inside the Democratic Party, with youth rebelling against too-generous benefits pledged to their grandparents. A rising Millennial cohort not just more socially tolerant but demanding more government precisely reversed their expectations. See, from a future founder of Third Way, Rob Nelson and Jon Cowan, Revolution X: A Survival Guide for Our Generation (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1994); and Galston and Kamarck, “5 Realities.” 305 Doug Henwood, “The Socialist Network,” The New Republic, June 2019, 12-19. 306 Emily Stewart, “We are (still) the 99 Percent,” Vox, April 30, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the- highlight/2019/4/23/18284303/occupy-wall-street-bernie-sanders-dsa-socialism.

85 impressive charisma, it also drew on powerful forces that offered the glimpse of rapprochement between the revived American left and the Democratic Party.

It all began to suggest a party prophecy that might escape from the strictures not only of the past four decades but the New Deal era itself and, taking sustenance from adversity, build anew on the party’s legacy. At a 1998 conference, the venerable William Leuchtenburg offered a prediction: “When all is going well, paeans to the free market are voiced hourly. But when there is a downturn and millions here and abroad need cushioning from the ravages of the market,

New Deal approaches are no longer likely to be thought obsolete.”307 The New Deal has returned to the contemporary Democratic Party, less as a specific memory—the Democrats have not ended their convention with “Happy Days Are Here Again” since 1980—than as metaphor and aspiration.308 The Great Recession amply demonstrated Leuchtenburg’s proposition. It recurs in the call for a nationwide program to reorient the economy for a low-carbon future. Though its prospects remain uncertain at best, the Green New Deal proposes that the federal government may yet embed itself in communities across the land, tame the hazards and vicissitudes of life, restore some trust in government to do big things and so, perhaps, benefit the party that enacted it. As unlikely as the sentiment would have seemed in 1981, and as rough as the road the

Democrats have trod in the decades since, the New Deal vision and political formula may have some life in it yet.

307 William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism, eds. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 28. 308 This emphasis differs from Stephen Skowronek, who argues that Democratic revival “would need to be something broader than just harping on the old lines of cleavage.” See full interview in Richard Kreitner, “What Time Is It? Here’s What the 2016 Election Tells Us About Obama, Trump, and What Comes Next,” The Nation, November 22, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/what-time-is-it-heres-what-the-2016-election-tells-us-about- obama-trump-and-what-comes-next/.

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