Twenty-five years ago, the
so-called New Democrats were triumphant. Today, their political heirs are eager
to prevent the Democratic Party from living up to its name. At stake is whether
democracy will have a chance to function.
A fundamental battle for democracy
is in progress—a conflict over whether to reduce the number of superdelegates to
the party’s national convention in 2020, or maybe even eliminate them entirely.
That struggle is set to reach a threshold at a party committee meeting next
week and then be decided by the full Democratic National Committee before the
end of this summer.
To understand the Democratic
Party’s current internal battle lines and what’s at stake, it’s important to
know how we got here.
After a dozen years of awful
Republican presidencies, Bill Clinton and running mate Al Gore proved to be
just the ticket for the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. Clinton settled
into the White House in early 1993 as the leader of pathbreaking New Democrats.
Many media outlets hailed him as a visionary who had overcome left-leaning
liberalism to set the party straight.
Although candidate Clinton had
criticized Republican trickle-down economics and spoken about the need for
public investment by the federal government, as president he proceeded along
the lines of what Washington Post economics reporter Hobart Rowan described as
a formula of “fiscal conservatism and social liberalism.” That formula provided
a template that the next Democratic president, Barack Obama, deftly filled.
Both Clinton and Obama were
youthful and articulate, breaths of fresh air after repugnant Republican
predecessors in the White House. Yet our two most recent Democratic presidents
were down with corporate power—not as far down as the GOP, but nevertheless in
the thrall of Wall Street and the big banks.
From the outset of the Clinton
and Obama administrations, top appointees reflected and propelled the deference
to oligarchic power. Robert Rubin went from being co-chair of Goldman Sachs
(paid $17 million in 1992) to serving wealthy interests as director of
Clinton’s National Economic Council, a post so powerful that it earned him the
title of “economic czar.” Two years later, Rubin began a long stint as
secretary of the treasury, succeeding former Texas senator and big-business
tool Lloyd Bentsen. They were just two of the numerous corporate functionaries
in the upper realms of the Clinton administration.
“Ron Brown, corporate lawyer
and lobbyist for American Express and Duvalier’s Haiti, would supervise a
Clinton industrial policy at the Department of Commerce,” economic analyst Doug
Henwood wrote after eight months of Clinton’s presidency. “Mickey Kantor,
corporate lawyer, would negotiate trade deals. Warren Christopher, corporate
lawyer, would oversee the New World Order. Hillary Rodham Clinton, corporate
lawyer and board member at Walmart, the low-wage retailer that’s destroyed
countless rural downtowns, would supervise health care.”
While that kind of lineup went
over big with moneyed interests, its policy pursuits would end up driving a
wedge between the Democratic Party and the working class. Of course the guys
driving Clinton’s economic train loved the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Why wouldn’t they? Workers were costs, not people. Corporate trade deals were
profit boosters.
Weeks after pushing NAFTA
through Congress with an alliance of Republicans and corporate-friendly
Democrats, Clinton signed the trade pact in December 1993—a move that was
unpopular with working-class voters across the political spectrum. A year
later, Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, a GOP grip
over the body that went uninterrupted for 12 years.
During his first term,
Clinton’s signature accomplishments to serve economic elites went beyond NAFTA
to include the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996. That same year, riding
a wave that included ample undertows of misogyny and racism, Clinton celebrated
his signing of the welfare “reform” bill into law. The legislation created a
gold rush for media conglomerates to gobble up broadcast stations, while
low-income women found their financial plights becoming even more dire.
Heartbroken over the new
welfare law, one of the lone holdouts against the corporate sensibilities in
the Clinton Cabinet, Labor Secretary Robert Reich, exited as the first term
ended. Meanwhile, Clinton doubled down on selecting an intensely corporate crew
for the administration. “The firm—er, team—is still adding partners—er, members,” Time
reported in December 1996, cataloging the array of investment bankers,
stock-market-friendly lawyers and wealthy financiers who had reached key posts.
The newcomers “are
don’t-rock-the-boat appointments, and they are exactly what Wall Street wants,”
a senior economist at an investment banking firm told the magazine. During the
last years of his presidency, Clinton’s economic team implemented reckless Wall
Street deregulation, paving
the way for the financial meltdown of 2007-2008.
The political similarities
between how Presidents Clinton and Obama behaved in office—and the electoral
disasters that ensued for Democrats—are grimly acute. Only two years into their
service to corporate America as presidents, the bottom fell out of support from
the Democratic base to such an extent that in both instances the Democrats lost
control of Congress.
Arriving in the Oval Office
while a huge financial crisis threatened the homes of millions, Obama proceeded
to bail out the big banks, offering little help to people whose houses were
“under water” and who faced foreclosures.
Not coincidentally, like
Clinton, Obama stocked his Cabinet with Wall Street favorites. His first-term
treasury secretary was Rubin protégé Timothy Geithner. During the second Obama
term, the job went to Jack Lew, a former top executive whose achievements from
2006 till 2008 included
overseeing “a unit of Citigroup that made money by betting against the
housing market as it prepared to implode.”
In fact, profiteering from the
2008 housing implosion was in keeping with what helped make Obama’s election to
the presidency possible. In 2007, his campaign was lubricated by bountiful
donations from the biggest Wall Street investment banks. And more than
anyone else, his financial patron in the quest for the White House was Penny
Pritzker, a billionaire real estate magnate who profited
handsomely from the 2008 subprime mortgage disaster that befell so
many low- and moderate-income Americans, a large proportion of them people of
color.
In 2013, Obama made Pritzker
the secretary of commerce, a position she held through the end of his
presidency. Of all the people to choose for that Cabinet role, he selected
someone with an estimated wealth of more than $2 billion who just happened to
be the most important financial backer of his political career.
After his re-election, Obama
lost interest in the Democratic National Committee, leaving its finances in
shambles by the time the 2016 election rolled around. And, as measured by
votes, the Democratic base eroded
nationwide. During Obama’s eight years in office, his party lost about 1,000
seats in state legislatures.
Now, the New Democrats and
those walking in their footsteps are battling to retain control of the national
party.
This year’s midterm election
campaign has seen lots
of intervention efforts by the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee, favoring
establishment candidates over progressive opponents in party primaries
from California to Texas to Pennsylvania. Days ago—after the release of a
secretly recorded audio
tape that exposed how House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer tried to
pressure a progressive congressional candidate to pull out of a race in
Colorado—House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi defended
Hoyer at a news conference.
Later this year, as the 2020
election grows larger on the horizon, the DNC will make decisions about party
rules with major effects on the race for the presidential nomination. Insiders
who don’t want to democratize the Democratic Party are weighing their options.
Consider, for instance, a
long-standing New Democrat named Elaine Kamarck. She’s one of only a few people
(all of them Clinton 2016 primary supporters) on both the DNC’s Unity Reform
Commission and its powerful Rules and Bylaws Committee—which will meet in
Washington next week to vote on such matters as superdelegates to the 2020
Democratic National Convention.
Based at the Brookings
Institution, Kamarck has been on the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee since
1997. Her official
Brookings biography says that “she has participated actively in four
presidential campaigns and in 10 nominating conventions—including two
Republican conventions.”
The bio goes on to tout
Kamarck this way: “In the 1980s, she was one of the founders of the New
Democrat movement that helped elect Bill Clinton president. She served in the
White House from 1993 to 1997, where she created and managed the Clinton
administration’s National Performance Review, also known as the ‘reinventing
government initiative.’ ”
In her role on the Rules and
Bylaws Committee, Kamarck is part of the process that could end up—as
recommended by the party’s Unity Reform Commission that included Clintonites
and progressives—eliminating 60 percent of the existing 712 superdelegates
(more than one-seventh of the total) in time for the 2020 national convention.
The distorting and
undemocratic impacts of superdelegates have gone way beyond their
numbers. By November 2015, Hillary Clinton had already gained public
commitments of support from 50 percent of all the superdelegates—fully 11 weeks
before any voter had cast a ballot in a state caucus or primary election. Such
a front-loaded delegate count, made possible by high-ranking party officials
who are superdelegates, can give enormous early momentum to an establishment
candidate.
Many Democrats are eager to
substantially reduce or eliminate superdelegates as antithetical to democracy.
But Kamarck has quite a different agenda. She doesn’t want to get rid of
superdelegates. In fact, she’d like more of them.
That makes sense, when you
consider that Kamarck is working to lower corporate taxes. She’s co-chair of
the big business organization RATE (Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably)
Coalition, which has the explicit mission of “reducing the corporate income tax
rate.”
Such an agenda is best served
in the long run by choking off democracy as much as possible, lest the riffraff
get away with undermining the ruling elites.
“Kamarck has backed the
original Unity Reform Commission proposal, but also made clear that she
believes that, in the long term, more so-called peer review by veteran party
leaders produces stronger presidential nominees,”BuzzFeed
reported in April.
Kamarck’s idea is for party authorities
to screen candidates. BuzzFeed explained: “In a forthcoming study for New York
University’s law journal, she said, she will propose a number of changes to the
nominating system, from an increase in superdelegates to a new pre-primary
endorsement process where the party’s top elected officials would meet with the
candidates, question their positions, and issue votes of confidence or no
confidence. Candidates who fail to meet a certain threshold would be barred
from debates or from a spot on the ballot, depending on how the party decided
to structure the system, she said.”
Let’s face it: Democracy is
dangerous to the powerful who rely on big money, institutional leverage and
mass media to work their will. The insurgencies of this decade against economic
injustice—embodied in the Occupy movement and then Bernie Sanders’ presidential
campaign—are potentially dire threats to the established unjust order.
For those determined to retain
their positions in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party hierarchy,
democracy within the party sounds truly scary. And inauthenticity of the
party—and its corresponding heavy losses of seats from state legislatures to
Capitol Hill during the last 10 years—don’t seem nearly as worrisome to
Democratic elites as the prospect that upsurges of grass-roots activities might
remove them from their privileged quarters.
As Sanders told
a New York Times Magazine reporter in early 2017: “Certainly there are
some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They
would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”
Columnist
Norman Solomon is the
coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org...
