In 2002, Ford challenged Pelosi in the race to become House minority leader. As Anthony York noted in Salon at the time, Ford mocked San Francisco's Pelosi as a "throwback" who practiced a "destructive and obstructive" style of politics. "I don't think Nancy Pelosi's kind of politics is what's needed right now," groused Ford, sounding every bit the Blue Dog Democrat. "Nancy's message, and the course she wants to take us on, is not where America wants to go." The American public settled that dispute two months ago.
Within days of the fateful election that crowned Pelosi as the nation's first female speaker, centrist pundit-in-chief James Carville criticized Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean for not doing everything possible to add a few more seats to Pelosi's new majority. Carville is probably right that, short of reserving the barest of post-election operating budgets, Dean should have begged, borrowed or stolen every possible cent he could and poured it into some of the closest races. But Carville's frustrations caused him to overreach, suggesting that Ford should replace Dean at the DNC. Democratic regulars settled that issue two years ago.
Perhaps Ford's arrival at the DLC signals a generational transfer of power away from Al From and Will Marshall, both of whom are about two decades his senior. Only 44-year-old DLC president Bruce Reed, the policy wunderkind of the Clinton administration, is roughly the same age as the former congressman, who was elected to the first of five terms in the House at age 26. But Ford's youth cannot mask the fact that he inherits the DLC reins at a moment when the organization finds itself increasingly out of step with the zeitgeist. A partisan wave swept Democrats back into power in both chambers of Congress after 12 years of Republican rule that began, not coincidentally, when the bipartisan, triangulating DLC was at the peak of its influence over both the Democratic Party and national policy.
Indeed, there is an imperfect, but revealing historical analogue to the situation in which Ford, the DLC and other party centrists now find themselves. In the late stages of the 19th century, Democratic New York Gov. Grover Cleveland broke the Republicans' grip on the White House by fashioning himself as an acceptably moderate Democrat willing to accede to Republicans on key policies. Like Bill Clinton, Cleveland won twice -- albeit non-consecutively -- without obtaining 50 percent of the popular vote in either election.
William Whitney, the corporate benefactor of the conservative "Bourbon Democrat" wing of the party, was a top advisor to Cleveland. Just as Clinton would adopt the Republican position on trade protectionism a century later, Cleveland adopted the Republican position on the major financial question of his era, the dispute over whether to add silver to gold in a new, bimetallic monetary policy. Cleveland favored gold, while the nascent farmer-populist wing of the party wanted "bimetalism." At the party's 1896 nominating convention, Cleveland paid for his choice. Democrats rejected the incumbent Cleveland as their presidential candidate in favor of populist William Jennings Bryan, who swung the crowd his way with his famous "Cross of Gold" speech.
The short view of history is that Cleveland helped Democrats temporarily postpone the Republican realignment that began with William McKinley's election that autumn and, had they followed his lead, may have prevented it. William Jennings Bryan, after all, was the Democratic nominee for president in three elections (1896, 1900 and 1908) and lost by wider margins each time. But the longer view invalidates the tack advocated by the Bourbon Democrats, who ignored the underlying currents that, as early as the 1890s, brought "Coxey's Army" on foot all the way from Ohio to Washington to protest unemployment and poverty. Two later New York governors, Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, understood what those rumblings meant, and their ideas ultimately led to the New Deal coalition and an enduring Democratic hegemony.
A century after Cleveland's interregnum, DLC founder Al From -- Bill Clinton's William Whitney -- is betting that Harold Ford embodies the Democrats' future. The trouble for From and Ford is that the centrists' future has already passed them by.
About the writer
Thomas F. Schaller is assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the author of "Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South."
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