The elephant in the room

The protesters at the DLC's convention derided them as Republicans. But the real pachyderm in the Denver Hyatt was Iraq -- a subject Hillary Clinton and other moderate Democrats don't want to talk about.

By Eileen Welsome

Read more: Democratic Party, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, News, 2006 Elections

AP Photo/Ed Andrieski

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., addresses the Democratic Leadership Council in Denver on Monday.

July 25, 2006 | DENVER -- Inside a packed ballroom at the high-rise Hyatt Regency hotel on Monday, Sen. Hillary Clinton told nearly 400 elected officials attending the Democratic Leadership Council's annual conference of a plan she claims will help her party regain control of Congress and the White House. The "American Dream Initiative" focuses Clinton and the party's other avowed centrists on the bread-and-butter, middle-class issues that carried her husband to the presidency more than a dozen years ago.

"This is an agenda," said Clinton, "that can help Democrats as they campaign around the country." The plan, which she developed in concert with the DLC, addresses middle-class jitters by calling for improved healthcare, protection of retirement benefits, more college loans and a return to balanced budgets. The senator sold the initiative with a 20-page pamphlet and a slogan that was an intentional echo of James Carville's 1992 catchphrase about the economy -- "It's the American Dream, stupid."

But those were different times, before a second president named Bush had invaded Iraq and before the Internet gave birth to a new Democratic insurgency that questions the power and the very purpose of the erstwhile insurgents in the DLC. Bill Clinton and the DLC shared success in the 1990s by challenging party power brokers, co-opting Republican issues, and moving the Democrats to the center, and his wife has continued to employ that formula as a senator and presidential hopeful. Mere hours before Bill Clinton would speak on behalf of DLC stalwart Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, his wife took the dais in Denver and immediately reminded the crowd that she'd addressed the convention the year before as well. "I'm back," she said. "And I'm glad to be back."

But the former president was in Connecticut because Joe Lieberman needs his help, and Lieberman needs his help in large part because of his unalloyed support for the current president's Iraq adventure. Up to 60 percent of the American public now says the war wasn't worth fighting. In fact, in nearly every poll, regardless of where they stand on it, voters choose Iraq as the most important issue facing the country. Yet in her speech Sen. Clinton chose to focus on the issue that always comes in a close second, the economy, and dispatched Iraq by twitting the Bush administration for "the disastrous policies they have followed abroad."

Throughout the three-day event, both in speeches and in casual hallway conversations, the DLC as a whole mostly steered clear of Iraq. Though Iowa governor and presidential hopeful Tom Vilsack paid lengthy tribute to the courage of a wounded veteran he'd met, and Indiana's Evan Bayh called Iraq "a tragic mess," nobody issued a 20-page pamphlet about when and how U.S. troops should come home. DLC president (and former Bill Clinton advisor) Bruce Reed has, after all, said, "I don't think it's a good issue for anybody." It is also a war that every Democratic member of Congress who's been mentioned as White House material except Russ Feingold, including Hillary Clinton, voted to authorize.

The incendiary topic of Iraq was left to the people outside the glass-walled Hyatt, a knot of demonstrators never larger than two dozen who marched up and down the sidewalk in the 90-degree heat. They protested the war and the DLC itself, echoing Howard Dean's jab about the group being "the Republican wing of the Democratic Party." "DLC, where you been? You're acting like Republicans," they chanted, straining for a rhyme.

A young woman in matching pink socks, sneakers and hair had come expressly to protest Sen. Clinton's voting record on the Iraq war. "I won't vote for her," the woman insisted, "unless she starts changing her position." She was handing out a flier that listed all of Hillary's Iraq-related sins.

Except for the hotel's security guards, who paced the perimeter and whispered into black walkie-talkies, the protesters drew little attention. Ed Kilgore, the DLC's vice president for policy, said he was only "dimly aware" of the protesters, though he probably saw them as much as anyone at the conference, since the hotel's no smoking policy forced him to duck outside into the heat for cigarettes. "Anyone who can't tell the difference between us and the Republicans needs to pay closer attention," he said mildly. He noted that the conference did, in fact, have a panel that touched on Iraq.

With his long, unstylish hair and heavily scratched eyeglasses, Kilgore looks like a protester himself, and he claimed some common ground with the folks outside the hotel and with the blogosphere. The DLC, explained Kilgore, "has always seen itself as outsiders. We're a very diverse group, too, ethnically and ideologically."

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