Thanks for the info, AM. A major piece on the Dem Party. A "Must Read," folks.
The Myth of the Democratic Establishment
Howard Dean's grassroots rebellion against the power that isn't.
Nicholas Confessore is an editor of The Washington Monthly.
It's not hard to discern the strengths that have turned Howard Dean from a dark-horse candidate to the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Over the last six months, the former Vermont governor has sparked a hardy, dedicated movement of more than half a million grassroots followers. Dean and his staff have harnessed the Web in innovative ways to organize and expand his following, huge crowds of which emerge at Dean's major campaign appearances. He's not only raised far more money than any other Democratic candidate; he's also taken about half of it in donations of less than $200, displaying a flair for small-donor fundraising in a party that has traditionally been terrible at it. And Dean has accomplished all this by taking a plain stance against a popular war and criticizing the Bush administration as often as possible, with an appealing bluntness few professional politicians are capable of pulling off.
But perhaps Dean's most impressive feat, admirers and critics alike agree, has been "taking on the Washington Democratic establishment," as pundit Tucker Carlson recently put it on CNN. Dean has faced a phalanx of Washington-based candidates--Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.)--each of whom enjoys such establishment advantages as name recognition, a passel of ace political consultants, and deep Beltway roots.
When those candidates didn't quite catch fire, Gen. Wesley Clark entered the race, promptly earning the explicit or implicit backing of many leading Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, whose fundraising network helped Clark build up a substantial war chest in a matter of weeks. But Dean has kept racking up poll leads and fundraising totals, leaving Washington insiders wondering how he could resist the establishment's onslaught. As one columnist for The Christian Science Monitor wrote in December, "Most establishment Democrats and liberals in the news media are waiting for someone--anyone--to dethrone former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as the party's presidential front-runner." Dean's own campaign sees itself as locked in mortal combat with "a pretty strong establishment" as campaign manager Joe Trippi described it in a December appearance on "This Week."
A week before Christmas, I decided to seek out the Democratic establishment, hoping to stride through its halls of power and behold its vastness firsthand. Catching a cab a few blocks from the White House, I made my way down K Street, passing by the trade associations and corporate offices that today rarely hire a lobbyist without approval from Republican leaders on the Hill. Veering onto Massachusetts Avenue, we drove by the gleaming wedge of glass and concrete that houses the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank spearheading President Bush's effort to privatize Social Security, and circled around the Capitol, where Republicans control both chambers of Congress and Democrats have trouble lining up rooms to caucus in. We passed by the Heritage Foundation, numerous alumni of which now help set national policy in the Bush administration, turned right, and meandered over to Capitol Hill, a funky neighborhood perpetually on the verge of gentrification.
The driver let me off in front of a modest, four-story brick office building which houses, among other things, a temp agency, a dry cleaners, and the National Barley Growers Association. The security guard ignored me as I slipped into the elevator, rode to the top floor, and stepped out into the modest, pastel-colored reception area of the Democratic Leadership Council, which helped get the last Democratic president into office, and whose early and frequent criticisms of Dean have helped highlight his fight against the Washington establishment. I was led through a quiet warren of cubicles to the large, paper-strewn office of Bruce Reed, the DLC's president, chief policy thinker, and resident wit. Reed is a cheerful, outgoing sort who usually appears younger than his 43 years. But today, an air of resignation lurks behind the smile.
When I ask him what the establishment is doing to stop Dean, Reed grimaces slightly, as if he's just taken a sip of castor oil. "What are we doing to stop him?" asks Reed. "From our standpoint, this has always been up to the candidates themselves." Reed and his colleagues at the DLC--often painted by liberals as a centrist Death Star, bulging with corporate money and insidious influence over party affairs--have published a few op-eds comparing Dean's candidacy to George McGovern's disastrous 1972 run. But that's about it. Some DLC operatives are working with Lieberman, others with Edwards. The New Democratic Network, a DLC-descended PAC, hasn't attacked Dean; instead, they've praised his use of the Internet to build a campaign organization. "Let's back up to your central premise," Reed continues, gazing wearily at a 7-inch-tall cup of Starbucks sitting before him on a conference table. "There is no establishment. We"--meaning Washington Democrats--"are a constellation of interest groups and ideologies and congressional voices. The evidence that there isn't an establishment is just the mere fact that we have so many candidates--and such a collective inability to choose between them."
Reed's point is hard to dispute. Liberal Democrats are as divided as centrists; many went early for Kerry, the early "establishment" candidate who has lately flopped. Labor is split down the middle, with the old industrial unions backing Gephardt, a longtime ally, and the service unions edging towards Dean. Most congressional Democrats and members of the Democratic National Committee--who, as convention "superdelegates," could conceivably swing behind and energize an anti-Dean candidate--are less interested in challenging the front-runner than in gauging the precise moment of his inevitability. "You have to realize, these people are all followers. Not leaders," says one Democratic strategist. "They put their finger to the wind." Democratic donors are also split. After Dean, no candidate has earned a sustained edge in campaign cash. Even the Clinton wing of the party, by some accounts the puppet masters behind the "stop Dean" movement, aren't much more than an inchoate collection of pollsters, consultants, and former White House staffers divvied up among the rival campaigns of other candidates. "You could undoubtedly find an enormous number of people who would want to stop Dean," one Democratic strategist told me in December. "But there's nowhere to go with them. What are you going to do--spend the holidays convincing other candidates to drop out of the races?"
There is, to be sure, a group of Democrats in Washington who think of themselves as part of an establishment. They have helped raise money for and steer talent to different candidates for the party's nomination. They have access to the press, to whom they have dispensed a litany of on-and-off-the-record doubts about Dean's electability. They convene for anxious steak lunches at the Palm. But to call them an "establishment" is like calling the House of Lords a force in British legislative affairs. It is almost impossible to exaggerate how incoherent today's Democratic establishment is, or how little power it has to accomplish anything of substance. Howard Dean has overcome many hurdles on his way to becoming the Democratic frontrunner. But the Democratic establishment is not exactly at the top of the list.
Party crashing
The absence of a true Democratic establishment is the central fact not only of the current presidential contest, but also of the last three years of Beltway politics. Washington Democrats are not wholly without political and strategic assets. But when you put it all together, there's not much to look at.
Democrats not only lack control of the White House and either chamber of Congress, they don't even have strong party institutions to fall back on. Not long after the 2000 elections, party chieftains installed fundraising Wunderkind Terry McAuliffe at the Democratic National Committee with a mandate to rebuild the party's long-dilapidated political infrastructure. He's succeeded about as well as anyone could, considering that after he became chairman, those same party chieftains successfully pushed through Congress a campaign finance reform which deprived the DNC of most of its income. These days, McAuliffe is reduced to bragging that his new small-donor program brings in enough money to cover the DNC's operating expenses.
The Democrats also lack the kind of idea factories which, in the absence of controlling any branch of government, are vital to helping parties formulate policy and strategy. The Brookings Institution, supposedly the brain trust of left-leaning intellectuals, houses a number of former Clinton policy hands and publishes well-turned monographs on nuclear nonproliferation and pension reform. But it's hardly a node in the Democratic resistance--until recently, it was run by a Republican. The foremost advocacy-oriented think tanks on the left--the Economic Policy Institute, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the DLC's Progressive Policy Institute--together spend about as much in a year as does just one of the three prominent conservative policy shops, the American Enterprise Institute. Meanwhile, the pressures of Republican rule are beginning to undermine the Democrats' relationship with such long-time allies as the AARP, which recently endorsed GOP-authored prescription-drug legislation, handing Bush a major legislative victory to tout during his reelection campaign. And while Beltway Republicans can count on the likes of the The Washington Times and the FOX News Channel to function as de facto party organs, the Democrats have no such relationship with the mainstream media. NPR has a liberal temperament but, to say the least, lacks a Rush Limbaugh-like taste for political warfare. And The Washington Post, once the liberal Beltway media's high command, if anything now reflects a center-right perspective. The paper's editorial page, having spent the Clinton years hyperventilating about Whitewater, opined that Enron's White House contacts weren't worth a congressional investigation and strongly supported the war in Iraq.
Washington Democrats have recognized their own disarray, and complain about it often. Yet they have continued to behave in many respects as a party in power, negotiating with Republican leaders on the Hill as if they, and not the GOP, govern the nation. "Democrats are inclined to legislate," says Chris Jennings, who ran the health-care portfolio during the Clinton administration. "They always want to be the dealmaker." Nowadays, however, instead of making a deal, the Democrats usually get rolled. Most recently, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) helped congressional Republicans craft their prescription-drug proposal on the understanding that it would not include provisions aimed at privatizing Medicare--provisions which nevertheless made their way into the final legislation, unveiled in December and now signed into law. "It's not just that Ted Kennedy was the old liberal lion, but that he supposedly knew how to play the game," says one union strategist, describing the shock many Washington Democrats felt at how the Medicare debate played out. "He's been on the Hill for 40 years. How could he get conned like this?"
Even as out-of-power Democrats act like establishmentarians, the city's ascendant GOP ruling class retain the instincts of revolutionaries. For three years, Democratic voters and activists across the country have watched the Republican Party assail, with seeming impunity, everything they hold dear. Aside from filibustering the GOP's energy plan and blocking a handful of exceptionally reactionary judicial nominees, there are few success stories to which Democratic leaders can point. There's no question that this experience has created a wellspring of anger against both congressional Republicans and President Bush. But the GOP's romp has also elicited from the Democratic grassroots a deep contempt for the party's Washington leadership. That frustration is the defining characteristic of the ongoing primary contest, dwarfing debates over policy, ideology, or electoral strategy. Dean and his movement have risen up to do battle against an establishment that doesn't really exist--which is why he will almost certainly be the next Democratic nominee. "Dean's people are motivated, they're coherent and cohesive," says one Democratic insider. "They're giving him money hand over fist. And he can just knock over this Potemkin village."
Demise of the machine
The Democratic establishment was once vigorous and powerful, encompassing not only Washington's Hill barons, party officials, and a large labor movement, but also the heads of various state and city Democratic organizations, ranging from the courthouse cliques of the Solid South to Richard J. Daley's Chicago machine. The old Democratic establishment was not necessarily democratic, and not always progressive. But by linking the local and state institutions that engaged average citizens to the Washington elites who crafted legislation, this establishment provided crucial capacities to the Democratic Party. It could hash out compromises on everything from labor law to presidential candidates (often in the proverbial smoke-filled room). In the days before television, it communicated the party's message and organized rank-and-file voters. And for three decades, this establishment held together the disparate blocs--conservative Southerners, urban autocrats, blacks, union members, and northern liberals--that made the Democrats a majority party. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the Democrats won seven out of nine presidential elections and usually controlled both houses of Congress as well.
But the same forces that dismantled the old Democratic coalition during the next two decades also dismantled the old Democratic establishment. Conservative whites deserted the party over its support for civil rights and began to vote Republican. The labor movement began a slow decline in membership and influence. Civil-service laws whittled away at the power of the big-city machines. What prerogatives the Democratic establishment retained were slowly stripped away by liberal reformers within the party. During the late 1970s, a DNC-sponsored commission chaired by George McGovern eviscerated the establishment's power over nominations, linking delegate selection to the outcome of primary elections rather than the fiat of state-level party bosses.
The reformers succeeded in breaking up the old system. But the effect was less to devolve power to the party's grassroots than to shrink what had been a national Democratic establishment into a largely Washington-based one, which absorbed the reformers into its ranks. Power flowed away from the disintegrating state organizations and to a growing array of Washington-based pressure groups descended from the civil rights, feminist, consumer, and environmental movements. But these--the Children's Defense Fund, Common Cause, and Public Citizen, among others--increasingly were Beltway-based organizations run by professional activists. They raised money from members but didn't involve them much in day-to-day politics the way, say, neighborhood party organizations turned out voters in return for filling potholes. These groups influenced politics largely through endorsements, lobbying their allies on the Hill, direct mail, and media campaigns. (The exceptions were labor and the black urban machines which supplanted the white ethnic ones, both of which could still turn out voters the old-fashioned way.) Similarly, as advertising and free media began to supplant state parties and urban machines as the establishment's conduit to voters, a burgeoning class of Washington-based pollsters, political consultants, and fundraisers came to the fore. The reign of the bosses gave way to the reign of the experts.
But although this post-1972 Democratic establishment owned a huge chunk of Washington real estate, it was not particularly well-organized. The younger members of congress and newly-assertive liberal activists coexisted uneasily with the remnants of the pre-reform establishment. By Ronald Reagan's first inauguration, the DNC and other party organizations were metaphorically atrophied and, at times, literally bankrupt. For most of the 1980s, the Democrats had no clear leader and, after three successive presidential losses, no governing ideology to replace the old Cold War liberalism.
What gave the Democratic ruling class power was its permanence. Decades of Democratic dominance in Washington had bequeathed a wealth of experience and talent, people who knew the levers of power and how to work them. Many of Washington's key trade associations, law firms, and lobby shops were run by operatives who had cut their teeth in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. (Among the last of them is Jack Valenti, the former Johnson aide and long-time head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who this year announced his decision to retire.) Control of the House and Senate helped the congressional wing of the party extract jobs and campaign contributions from Republican-leaning business interests, while giving Democratic-leaning interests a purchase on policymaking and at least some incentive to cooperate and compromise with one another. With a majority in the House, Democrats could control the committee staffs, which provided a research engine to develop and implement policy. The Speaker's Office, especially under Rep. Tip O'Neill (D-Mass.), provided a message of the day around which other Democrats and their allies could align themselves. Indeed, to many Democrats--not to mention many Republicans--the permanence of Democratic rule on the Hill was an accepted fact of Washington life.
When it came to presidential primaries, the Washington-based Democratic establishment wasn't as dominant as its earlier incarnation. Small groups of party officials could no longer handpick delegates and tell them whom to vote for. Insurgent or "entrepreneurial" candidates could in theory win the nomination simply by winning the affections of Democratic primary voters, as Jimmy Carter did in 1976. But thanks to the earlier campaign finance reforms, a candidate's ability to raise money became the chief criteria for whether or not he or she could make a successful run for the nomination. During the early 1980s, party leaders reasserted their power by front-loading the primary schedule. That made it hard for later entrepreneurial candidates, such as Gary Hart, to raise money quickly enough to sustain a surge, and put a premium on the fundraising advantages that usually accrued to candidates blessed by the establishment, such as Walter Mondale. Day to day, the establishment could exert real power in Washington even when on the defensive. Not long after Reagan's 1980 victory, for example, a group of party strategists began to meet biweekly with O'Neill's general counsel, Kirk O'Donnell, to plot strategy. Seizing on Reagan's proposal to cut the Social Security benefits of some retirees, the Democrats began to introduce legislation to put House conservatives on the wrong side of the issue. "It was drip, drip," says Tony Coelho, the former California congressman who at the time ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "We created a voting record where the Republicans were voting wrong on Social Security and so forth. They were winning, but in '82, we ran against them on a lot of the stuff we had forced them to vote on. We picked up 26 seats and then we kept going from there."
end of part one |
