Bob Kolasky is the managing editor of IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is bob@voxcap.com

A review of Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton By Kenneth S. Baer University Press of Kansas, 343 pp.,$29.95

Reinventing Democrats

In Reinventing Democrats, Kenneth Baer offers an important addition to the turn-of-the-century political-science canon. Baer's book -- the first in-depth look at the rise of the New Democratic movement -- takes as its protagonist the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), an influential Washington advocacy group, and offers readers a biography of the 15-year history of the DLC.

(As regular readers of these pages might know, I worked for the DLC from 1995-96, during the period when Baer began his research, and have some firsthand and secondhand knowledge of some of the events the book discusses.)

Reinventing Democrats is very much an "authorized" biography of the DLC -- both literally and figuratively. It is a book that the organization seems proud of -- it promotes the book on its Web site and hosted an author's party upon its release. The book tells the story the way the DLC President Al From might. In fact, interviews with From, and insights from his personal papers, seem to be one of the sources that Baer relied on the most in doing his research. Given that perspective, and knowing that Baer currently is employed as a speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, it is easy to imagine where the author's loyalties lie when telling the story of the DLC and the men (and it was mainly men) that made it possible.

Rising from the ashes

While Reinventing Democrats might be a New Democrat's take on New Democrats, it would be a mistake for readers and critics to dismiss it sight unseen. It has a compelling and important story to tell -- and as the Democratic Party enters the 2000 election at a crossroads for the party, the book provides valuable insight into the party's recent past and what it might mean for the future.

The story of the DLC, as Baer chooses to tell it, can be divided into two parts: before Bill Clinton is elected president and after. And the part of the book that describes the DLC pre-President Clinton makes for the more compelling read.

The DLC launched in 1985 as a response to "the entitlement strain of liberalism" and special-interest influence that its founders felt had overtaken the Democratic Party since 1972. Coming on the heels of Ronald Reagan's landslide presidential victory over Walter Mondale in 1984, the founders of the DLC -- which included then-Gov. Chuck Robb (VA), then-Sens. Sam Nunn (GA) and Al Gore (TN), and From -- started the organization to "moderate" the Democratic Party and keep it viable on the national level.

Baer describes the agenda circa 1985: "The DLC would advocate sustained economic growth, equal and expanding opportunity, and the aggressive defense of freedom with the promotion of democratic values abroad."

The DLC was met with skepticism, and some open hostility, among establishment Democrats. Almost immediately upon its founding the organization found itself at odds with the Democratic National Committee. Critics derided its white, Southern male bent, its attachment to business interests and its pro-market orientation.

At a conference held in 1986, prominent members of the Democratic left made plans to marginalize the DLC. The conference slogan read: "Because one Republican Party is more than enough." The hostility from entrenched Democratic leaders can best be understood as a reaction to the DLC's unwillingness to keep its criticisms of the party's policies private; instead, it chose to bring the case for the need for a new party to the public. The group was more than happy to air the Democrats' dirty laundry for all to see.

The DLC made progress but won few major victories between 1985 and 1988, and questions of its viability were common as the party establishment co-opted much of the DLC's agenda. At the same time the nascent organization, feeling pressure from within, tempered its criticism of the party. But all that changed with the resounding defeat of Michael Dukakis by a presumably beatable George Bush in the 1988 presidential contest.

Dukakis' defeat gave the DLC momentum, as its leaders were able to make the case that their more aggressive agenda to change the Democratic Party was the only one that could save the party. It also, according to Baer, gave the DLC its clearest mission yet. Baer quotes From's thinking in 1988 that success "would come when the DLC and the New Democrats took over the party and helped elect one of its own to the presidency. ¿ Until the White House was won, there would still be a role for the DLC in Democratic policies."

A deal with the devil?

Four years later, the DLC achieved its goal, as its former chairman, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton -- with much help from the organization -- was elected president. As Baer describes it, Clinton's election was the DLC's greatest victory. It validated the organization's reason for existing while at the same time being, paradoxically, a moment that soon would threaten its ability to survive.

With Clinton's election, the DLC -- and its now-formed companion think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute -- lost its status as the arbiter of New Democratic public policy. That mantle shifted to Clinton. "The election of Clinton resulted in his, not the DLC's, setting the bounds of what a New Democrat was," writes Baer. "Clinton's inability to implement the New Democratic agenda caused many to doubt his commitment to the New Democratic cause as well as the utility of the public philosophy generally."

The DLC had made a political gamble that by backing a less-than-100% New Democrat -- in contrast to men like Robb and Nunn who were purists -- it could push the New Democratic agenda forward. But as with many others, Clinton initially disappointed the DLC. For example, the early Clinton administration chose to place a priority on crafting a plan for national healthcare -- a proposal that the DLC viewed tepidly -- rather than on the more New Democrat-friendly idea of welfare reform. Clinton's much-noted ability to appear all things to all people apparently blinded the DLC, and they were stuck with a public face that did not always adhere to the organization's principles.

In many ways that has been the story of the DLC the last eight years. It is a group that has largely been defined by its relationship with Clinton, but it is a relationship that has, at times, been one-sided.

Baer describes the rocky relationship in detail: At first, like a scorned lover, the DLC has a fit over Clinton's lack of fealty to its cause. In 1994, its then-chairman -- then-Rep. Dave McCurdy (OK) -- publicly denounced Clinton as having "the heart of an Old Democrat." In 1995 and early 1996, some DLC leaders toy with abandoning Clinton, and the Democratic Party in favor of a new party. By Election Day 1996, the group has made peace with the new "moderated," incremental Clinton -- who advocates measures like the v-chip, teenage curfews and expanding the Family and Medical Leave act rather than sweeping reforms -- and has resolved to work with the administration as much as possible. And by 1997, the organization has decided that although Clinton could not give the organization all it wanted, he is "one of them." Today, some in the DLC speak of working with Clinton to help secure his legacy after he leaves office.

Too early to tell?

Baer largely lets both the DLC and Clinton off the hook for the ups and downs of their relationship over the last eight years. Instead of criticizing the president for his failure to actively and consistently lobby for the New Democratic agenda, he offers the explanation that Clinton did what he could given external circumstances and that if circumstances had been different, he might have done more. Meanwhile, Baer does little questioning of the DLC's return to the Clinton fold and maintains that the president did enough to justify the re-embrace.

This section of the book also heightens one of the biggest flaws of Reinventing Democrats. Despite the fact that Clinton is central to the DLC's story, Baer offers no firsthand insight into the president's thinking about the DLC. As mentioned, this is the story of the DLC largely as told by the DLC, and while getting the president's thoughts of the organization might have been difficult, Baer's book would have been better served with more insight from within the White House.

In the end, perhaps because the DLC's relationship with Clinton has been historically ambivalent, Reinventing Democrats fails to convince in its central thesis that the Democratic Party has been permanently reinvented. Baer seems to acknowledge that it in his conclusion. "The challenge in interpreting the progress of the DLC is that all this evidence is preliminary," Baer writes. "It is too soon ... to know what will become of the New Democratic public philosophy."

A long march

The truth is that the DLC had huge success between 1985 and 1993, and it has spent the last seven years turning that success into a place in the Washington and Democratic Party establishments. In doing so, it has sacrificed some of its principles for a seat at the table. An organization that began as a constant advocate for change within the Democratic Party seems to have made peace with the current party's orthodoxy, raising questions about the organization's reason for existence.

This is crystallized by the DLC's apparent go-along-to-get-along relationship with Gore in 2000. Gore, a man with New Democratic credentials (Baer notes that he helped draft the DLC's initial press release in 1985), has proven himself a less-than-pure New Democrat in this campaign via his defense of much of the status quo in education, Medicare and Social Security and affirmative action. Yet, the DLC has offered few words of criticism -- neither about his policy proposals, nor his ties to Democratic special interests. A Gore victory means that the DLC once again will be given a seat at the table in a new administration, provided its leaders agree to temper their agenda.

As Reinventing Democrats shows, that might not necessarily be the best outcome for the DLC. The organization seems to be at its best when it is trying to overtake the establishment rather than working with it. Baer notes that "after fifteen years, the New Democratic project has succeeded to the degree that one defeat will not destroy it." He properly writes that the future of the New Democratic movement depends on the "long march" of creating a movement below the presidential level.

If the DLC is truly going to reinvent the Democratic Party, the long march is much more critical than any one election -- and perhaps it will take an electoral loss of a man who has lost his way to help the New Democratic movement regain its hunger to undertake such a march.