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Show An Explanation of the Organization through an Examination of Education Policy John hyman Three months after that joyous day in San Francisco, President Ronald Reagan carried 49 states in the presidential election, losing only Mondale's home state of Minnesota and the solidly Democratic District of Columbia. Some Democrats thought that Mondale was a poor candidate. Others thought that Ronald Reagan was too popular. Still others believed that the Republicans were better organized at a national level and were thus better equipped to persuade Americans that their policies were better than the Democrats'. But a small group of moderate Democrats led by Al From, Will Marshall, Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Charles Robb of Virginia, John Breux of Louisiana, and Al Gore of Tennessee, thought differently. This group of influential men - along with a then little-known Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton - believed there was something fundamentally wrong with their party. A Democrat could win on the local level. A Democrat could even do well on the state level. But when it came to the presidency something was wrong and the usual excuses - the Republicans had better candidates, more money, and better organization - were just not going to cut it. None of that could explain how the GOP won 49 out of 50 states in a presidential election in what was supposed to be a competitive two-party system. According to the New Democrats something was wrong with the party's ideas. The Democratic Party took a group of various interests - union workers, minorities, environmentalists, feminists - and tried to put them all under one banner. What was missing in the Democratic Party was a core identity. There needed to be goals and specific policies tailored for practical use instead of ones created to please the largest number of special interest groups. The Republicans had had great success during the 1960s and 1970s with policy ideas that had come from conservative think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, and now the Democrats wanted to catch up. Thus the Democratic Leadership Council was born. Its immediate goal was to elect a Democratic president. The earliest year the "New Democrats" hoped to do this was 1996; anything earlier they thought would be impossible because of the lack of prominent Democrats who believed in the new ideals that would be required to win (Marshall 1998). To achieve their goal, the DLC decided that the Democrats, as a party, needed to be more moderate. They realized that moving the party to the center was easier than trying to move the American people to the left. Starting as a small group of mostly white, Southern men, they began to recruit actively on a national level. They were looking for Democrats who were dissatisfied with the way things were going, and for elected officials who cared more about winning elections with common sense politics than winning intellectual arguments. There were, without a doubt, setbacks. One of the DLC's founders and chairmen, Richard Gephardt, dropped the New Democrat logo almost immediately after it had been attached to him and reverted to being a traditional liberal. Few New Democrats could win leadership positions in either the House or the Senate, because of entrenched Democrats who were further to the left than they were. For a time the DLC floundered. Critics from both sides of the political spectrum said that their ideas would never work because moderate politics does not inspire people. The Democratic Leadership Council was a collection of centrist Democrats without a way to get their message or policies to the American people. Then, in 1989, the executive director of the DLC, Al From, made a visit to Little Rock, Arkansas. There he asked Governor Bill Clinton to become Chairman of the DLC. Governor Clinton agreed, giving himself a national stage and giving the New Democrats the charismatic spokesman they so desperately needed. The partnership worked well and carried over into the presidential election of 1992. Bill Clinton, running on a promise to fix the economy and moderate stances on welfare reform, crime, and the environment was able to defeat George Bush. The DLC had hit it big. One of its candidates, running on its ideas, had won the biggest election in the land. Once in office, however, President Clinton began to look more and more like a tried and true liberal. His position on gays in the military and his failed health care plan caused an abrupt decline in his approval ratings and led to huge Republican gains in Congress in 1994. While this was a setback politically for the president, it reaffirmed the DLC's position that the American people were more happy with a centrist Democrat as president than with a liberal one. Finally the DLC had established itself on the national political scene. In 1989 the DLC had created an affiliated think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. The PPI examined national problems that were under debate in Congress and came up with moderate solutions for them. Early on, the group focused on crime, the environment, public school reform and the economy. Later it would add Social Security reform and health care to the list. The Institute produced policy papers on a regular basis and launched a magazine, the New Democrat Today, the DLC is a large organization which has begun to affect the politics in this country but still has much to do. Perhaps the best approach to understanding the purpose of the DLC and the meaning of the Third Way is to examine one specific policy area. Education policy is a good choice because it involves pronounced differences between liberals, conservatives and New Democrats. All have different ideas of what changes need to be made in America's schools. In many cases Republicans and Democrats even disagree among themselves about what to do with the nation's schools. The best way to understand the debate while at the same time examining the Third Way is to look at the education proposals advocated by the Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation, and Democratic Leadership Council. 48 |