You Want to Know Why the DLC Sucks- Read This

Highlights of an article in 2001 about the DLC

http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/7/dreyfuss-r.html

"There's a New Democrat audience of about 5,000 to 10,000 people who get our stuff on a regular basis," says Matthew Frankel, the DLC's spokesman.

The DLC and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), have blossomed into a $7-million-a-year operation. The New Democrat Network (NDN), which provides funds to dozens of certified co-thinkers in federal, state, and local races, raised nearly $6 million last year. Twenty U.S. senators and 70 members of the House of Representatives have formally affiliated themselves with New Democrat caucuses

The DLC board of trustees is an elite body whose membership is reserved for major donors, and many of the trustees are financial wheeler-dealers who run investment companies and capital management firms--though senior executives from a handful of corporations, such as Koch, Aetna, and Coca-Cola, are included.

Today, Lewan helps recruit support for the DLC on K Street. "It's astonishing to me how much support the DLC is getting from the professional Washington people, the lawyers, the lobbyists," he says. "There's a relationship and a trust level that's been built up."

Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who is considering helping to organize a grass-roots-based, left-wing alternative to the DLC, sees the DLC as partly responsible for making the Democrats "much more of a money party and less of a grass-roots party." He adds: "The imperative of fundraising has weakened the policy performance. Whether or not the DLC should get most of the credit or not, I don't know. Certainly that is the direction that President Clinton took the party."