From MSNBC transcripts
TODD: The only problem that Edwards would have, even if he won Iowa and New Hampshire, is that the Democratic elite can‘t stand Edwards. There is this weird establishment problem that Edwards has and they take it as a badge of honor.
And they say, see, these people in D.C., they don‘t like me because I‘m speaking the truth or I‘m a populist. But you know what, at the end of the day, if he ends up as her chief challenger, I think she could rally the establishment and win this thing in one of these delegate fights. And that‘s the real hurdle Edwards would have if he...
MATTHEWS: Give me some names of the establishment?
TODD: I‘m not going to sit here and name names.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: . the establishment over here. Who are these dark figures that.
TODD: It‘s called the Democratic National Committee.
MATTHEWS: Who are these people? Anne Wexler? Ann Lewis? Who are these people?
TODD: Yes, it‘s called the Democratic National Committee.
If we are to believe Chuck Todd, which I certainly do, I think this little moment of candor, uttered late at night after the one of the recent Democratic debates, speaks volumes about the state of the Democratic party. What kind of people "can't stand" John Edwards? The same kind of people who stood with AT&T and Verizon against the American people. The same kind of people who are benefiting from the way our corrupt Washington culture operates, and so therefore feel threatened by any upstarts coming along trying to change things.
The same kind of people who bow at the feet of radical right-winger, disciple of Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan. When Ayn Rand, whose philosophy of sociopathic individualism, and an enemy of everything Franklin D. Roosevelt stood for, infiltrates the ideological center of Democratic power in Washington, you can pretty much pronounce our party dead. And now that Alan Greenspan has revealed he can't stand Edwards too, watch the jackals howl with delight.
The fundamental issue facing our nation is as old as dirt. And it is the issue from which almost all other issues derive - monied interests versus the public interests. You can call it Wall Street vs. Main Street. And Franklin Roosevelt, a child of the monied establishment himself, became a champion of the public interests. He understood full well that the inevitable tendency of capitalism to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of the few was a threat to our democracy and our way of life. And so he fought through measures that helped reign in capital power and ensured a more equitable distribution of wealth. He demonstrated that democratic government can be an agent of common good, and exemplified our commitment, not just to ourselves, but to society as a whole.
And the jackals have been chipping away at it ever since. I think we can safely say, in the year 2007, that FDR's social compact is dead, Ayn Rand's dream of social and economic Darwinism has been made real under the auspices of the "free market", and the party of the people has been overthrown by its traditional enemies.
Big money never liked the New Deal and its interventions on business. But it wasn't until the 70s that they decided to get nasty. As Markos points out in Crashing the Gate, the infamous Powell Memo was a call to arms and inspired the launch of a massive political campaign by a coalition of business interests to influence politics and policy. But what few know is how that campaign, led by a newly formed lobby group called the Business Roundtable, resulted in one of the greatest political realignments in American history and, eventually, resulted in the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council.
It wasn't just the Powell memo. As Clawson, Neustadtl, and Weller write in their book 'Dollars and Votes - How Business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy':
From I969 through I972, virtually the entire American business community experienced a series of political setbacks without parallel in the postwar period. In the space of only four years, Congress enacted a significant tax-reform bill, four major environmental laws, an occupational safety and health act, and a series of additional consumer-protection statutes. The government also created a number of important new regulatory agencies, including the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), investing them with broad powers over a wide range of business decisions. In contrast to the I960s, many of the regulatory laws enacted during the early I970s were broader in scope and more ambitious in their objectives. As a result, corporations felt under attack and vulnerable.
So what did big business do? They retaliated. Continuing...
In the mid to late 1970s, business began its own countermobilization, operating simultaneously on many fronts. Money was shifted out of liberal and moderate think tanks and policy organizations (the Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations, and Committee for Economic Development) to newly founded or reinvigorated conservative equivalents (the American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution, and Heritage Foundation). In 1965 and 1970, the three moderate organizations had more than triple the funding of the three conservative ones; by 1975, this advantage was much diminished, and by 1980, the conservative organizations spent substantially more than the moderate ones.
Advocacy advertising expanded enormously. Traditional advertising tries to sell a product: Presta-Glop cleans teeth whiter than Ultra-Goo. Advocacy advertising has no explicit connection with a corporation's products but, rather, it promotes a message, often explicitly political, sometimes simply "image." In 1979 David Vogel estimated corporations were spending one-third of their advertising budgets on such campaigns. The business press began the admittedly difficult task of redefining reality: "It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow-the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.... Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality."
Business also began to exert its muscle in more straightforwardly political arenas. One crucial step was the rise to prominence of the Business Roundtable. Founded in the early 1970s, the Roundtable differed from earlier business policy organizations in two crucial respects. First, it was open only to chief executive officers of corporations-most earlier organizations had allowed in a few hand-picked academics, not to mention corporate vice presidents. Second, previous organizations focused primarily on the process of developing "appropriate" policy, which generally involved long-range study commissions and a primary focus on the executive branch. The Roundtable, by contrast, devoted most of its energy to direct lobbying activities, often focusing on Congress, the site of many of business's political losses.
The full extent of this campaign and its instruments are too extensive to address here, but to say that by the end of the 1980 election, the Democrats were scared. The Roundtable lobby had fully demonstrated its power and the Democratic leadership reacted.
After the I980 election, pro-business Democrats mobilized to persuade business that they deserved support. Tony Coelho, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and perhaps the most successful Democratic fundraiser in the interval between Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton, led this effort. Coelho went to corporate PACS and told them, "You people are determined to get rid of the Democratic party. The records show it. I just want you to know we are going to be in the majority of the House for many, many years and I don't think it makes good business sense for you to try to destroy us." Coelho is convinced that it was this kind of fundraising that helped revive the Democratic party and prevent a realignment: "What had happened, in I980, we had our butts kicked. If the Republicans had been successful, they would have completed the job.
It would only be four years later when a group of Democrats would form a coalition that sought to concede to the business lobby and redefine the Democratic party as the new, other party of big business.
As always, nothing in politics is simple or cut and dry. But it can be clearly shown that the rise of the business lobby in the early 70s and beyond led to a dramatic shift towards economic conservatism in the Democratic party and the country as a whole. It didn't happen completely or all at once. But it did happen in some rather large shifts including Bill Clinton's presidency.
It is important to understand that what we have seen over the last 40 years was not just a natural trend but an orchestrated campaign by powerful business interests. Utilizing their control of thinktanks, mass media, and direct political influence, the monied interests have sought to destroy the Democratic party and everything it stood for, replacing it with an empty shell.
The Democratic party, as a political organization, is no longer quite real itself. The various strands of personal communication and loyalty that once made it representative and responsive to the people are gone. It exists as a historical artifact, an organizational fiction. William Greider - "Who Will Tell the People"
Is William Greider right? Has our party been replaced with an organizational fiction? It depends on what you call the Democratic party. Is it the jackals at the DC cocktail circuit who can't stand John Edwards? Or is it us?