The actual takeover from the 54th floor of the convention. It was quite real.
I posted some of this about a year ago.
Today I was reading that Howard Dean has declared his superdelegate vote will go to Hillary even if Bernie wins the popular vote. To heck with the wishes of the Vermont voters.
He has given his allegiance to a group of Democrats who held a press conference to say he would never be president. Go figure.
They were up high above the convention hall in 2000. Setting policy. A few men.
This is John Nichols' unforgettable column in the Progressive 2000. This is the archived version with all the dates above the article.
Behind the DLC Takeover
At the national convention of a major political party, an ideologically rigid sectarian clique secures the ultimate triumph. It inserts two of its own as nominees for the Presidency and the Vice Presidency. Heavily financed by the most powerful corporations in the world, the group's leaders gather in a private club fifty-four floors above the convention hall, apart from the delegates of the party they had infiltrated. There, they carefully monitor the convention's acceptance of a platform the organization had drafted almost in its entirety. Then, with the ticket secured and with the policy course of the party set, they introduce a team of 100 shock troops to deploy across the country to lock up the party's grassroots.
This is not some fantastic political thriller starring Harrison Ford or Sharon Stone. This is the real-life version of Invasion of the Party Snatchers--with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) burrowing into the pod that is the Democratic Party.
Founded in the mid-1980s with essentially the same purpose as the Christian Coalition--to pull a broad political party dramatically to the right--the DLC has been far more successful than its headline-grabbing Republican counterpart. After Walter Mondale's 1984 defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, a group of mostly Southern, conservative Democrats hatched the theory that their party was in trouble because it had grown too sympathetic to the agendas of organized labor, feminists, African Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, peace activists, and egalitarians.
....A day is soon coming when "we'll finally be able to proclaim that all Democrats are, indeed, New Democrats," declared DLC President Al From on the eve of this year's Democratic National Convention.
They closed their doors in 2011 proclaiming that their purposes had been achieved. Some days it's hard to find argument with that.
I think the most disheartening thing this group ever did was to have a press conference in 2003 to declare that Howard Dean was not the man to be president.
What the DLC said about Dean in 2003
More than 50 centrist Democrats, including Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner, met here yesterday to plot strategy for the "New Democrat" movement. To help get the ball rolling they read a memo by Al From and Bruce Reed, the chairman and president of the Democratic Leadership Council. The memo dismissed Dean as an elitist liberal from the "McGovern-Mondale wing" of the party -- "the wing that lost 49 states in two elections, and transformed Democrats from a strong national party into a much weaker regional one."
"It is a shame that the DLC is trying to divide the party along these lines," said Dean spokesman Joe Trippi. "Governor Dean's record as a centrist on health care and balancing the budget speaks for itself."
As founder of the DLC, From has been pushing the Democratic Party to the right for nearly 20 years. He was in tall cotton, philosophically speaking, when an early leader of the DLC, Bill Clinton, was elected president in 1992. As Clinton's domestic policy guru, Reed pushed New Democrat ideas -- such as welfare reform -- that were often unpopular with party liberals.
"We are increasingly confident that President Bush can be beaten next year, but Dean is not the man to do it," Reed and From wrote. "Most Democrats aren't elitists who think they know better than everyone else."
That article by a David Von Drehle is no longer available at the WP as far as I can see.
See how easy it all was? Lots of rich donors, overlooking the convention floor from 54 stories high? Not bad.
And their power over the party has never ended.[link:http://|
= new reply since forum marked as read
But this is all a moot point. Bernie is not going to win the pledged delegates any way. But I will agree with you in one respect - he'd have to win over her by 100 delegates or more to get any measure of the supers to switch. There is NO WAY that will happen though, so again moot point.
But they did it for Obama when the actual count was very, very close. Which was proper. However, they won't do that for someone trying to hijack the party. They exist to stop non-Dems from hijacking the party. Moral of the story is learn the party rules before trying to hijack a party you have dissed for 30 years. 
Bernie is like Democrats used to be. For myself...I've never ever failed to vote Democratic. In every election since I was old enough to vote.
SO MaggieD you say I am hijacking the party. Then I must not be considered worthy enough to be a Democrat in your eyes.
Encourage your fellow revolutionaries to get off the couch, elect blue state legislatures and get rid of gerrymandering. Once you get rid of the GOPers you will realize the GOPers were the problem. Not Democrats.
Papers change the URLs when they archive articles. Searching for the article title (if you have it) usually brings it up.
Thanks for the DLC history!
Yep, I've learned to search for titles. I even have found a few DLC articles from that time even though their website disappeared.
Thanks, nice to read about those TX Democrats again. We were all pulling for them here.
You said:
You and everyone else had the opportunity to vote for Jerry Brown, who stayed in for the duration. But I guess the voters just weren't as smart as you were...
