2.) A New Democrat Response to Robert Reich
We've gotten a number of e-mails and phone calls from New Democrats wondering if we had anything to say about former Labor Secretary Robert Reich's angry screed in the March 12 Washington Post declaring the Democratic Party "dead." Reich also took a few wild swings at the DLC.
DLC founder and CEO Al From responds in a political memo on NDOL.org:
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=86&subid=84&contentid=3163
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Political Memo | DLC | March 16, 2001 A Response to Robert Reich Al From
Robert B. Reich says the Democratic Party is dead. He's dead wrong. A new Democratic Party, with new emerging leaders, is ready to challenge President Bush on the battlefield of ideas and for the right to lead America in the 21st century.
I'm saddened that Bob Reich, who has so much to offer and with whom I served when we were both deputy directors of the 1992 Clinton transition, has chosen to hurl invectives at the party's leadership rather than offer constructive suggestions about the course it should take. I'm particularly disappointed at the broadsides he takes at the Democratic Leadership Council, which has led our party's modernization and which Reich, himself, sought out as a forum for his ideas during his stint as Secretary of Labor.
Like Reich, I want to see progressive governance prosper again. But we fundamentally differ on how to achieve that goal. It appears that he would like to see a return to the pre-Clinton status quo. But that isn't going to happen -- and for good reason.
America is changing and our party must change with it. Our failure to modernize in the 1980s caused us to lose touch with ordinary voters, including too many Democrats, and the American people told us that clearly in three presidential landslides.
If we had not changed, then Reich would have been right. Our party would have died.
Fortunately, we did change. Bill Clinton and the New Democrats forged a New Democratic Party. That new party, which has governed America successfully for the past eight years, is saving progressive governance by modernizing it for the information age. Now it is poised to tackle the new challenges of the 21st century.
Today's New Democratic Party furthers our party's most cherished values and highest ideals with new and innovative ideas. By reconnecting with our first principles and grandest traditions, it is defining a new, modern progressivism.
Opportunity for all, special privilege for none has been our party's first principle since the days of Andrew Jackson. Today's New Democratic Partyhonors that principle by fostering fiscal discipline and promoting a course for private sector economic growth.
Today's New Democrats unite our party's policies with the values most Americans share -- work, family, responsibility, individual liberty, faith, tolerance, and inclusion. We support expanding medical and family leave, moving people from welfare to work, and expanding the earned income tax credit so that no full-time worker must raise their family in poverty.
Today's New Democrats honor John Kennedy's civic ethic of mutual responsibility. We believe in asking citizens to give something back to their country and want to increase opportunities, like AmeriCorps, for citizens to serve each other.
Today's New Democrats are restoring our party's historic global outlook by promoting democratic and humanitarian values throughout the world, and byexpanding trade to foster prosperity and upward mobility at home, and better labor and environmental conditions abroad.
Finally, today's New Democrats honor Franklin Roosevelt's true legacy of innovation by modernizing government and providing people with the tools they need to solve problems in their own communities. We support charter schools, empowerment zones, and expanded community policing.
By putting those principles to work during the past eight years, today's NewDemocratic Party produced an incredible record for America: the best economy in our lifetime with the longest period of sustained growth in our history; record high employment, low unemployment and low inflation; a balanced budget and declining federal debt; rising incomes and wages and falling poverty; welfare rolls cut in half; crime down eight straight years; the lowest teen pregnancy rate in six decades; and the smallest federal government since the Kennedy Administration.
At the dawn of a new century, we must take on new challenges. We need to keep our prosperity going and extend its reach to those who have not yetbenefitted from that prosperity. We need to redeem the fundamental promise of opportunity for all by giving every American child a quality public education. We need to honor the duty we have to our parents and future generations by providing for the Baby Boom retirement and modernizing and strengthening Social Security and Medicare. We need to provide a wayfor every American to purchase quality health insurance. And, we need to strengthen our democracy by reforming our campaign finance system and by fixing our election system so that every vote counts and every vote is counted.
Today's New Democratic Party stands ready to tackle these new challenges. And we'll do it the way our party always has: by furthering our enduring values with new ideas appropriate for an ever-changing America.
Our new party has shattered old myths and shed old labels. Today's New Democrats stand for economic growth and opportunity, for fiscal responsibility, for work not welfare, for preventing crime and punishing criminals, for non-bureaucratic, empowering government and for fostering a new sense of community and an ethic of mutual responsibility by asking citizens to give something back to their country.
To be sure, today's New Democratic Party is not yet the majority party in America. But, even with a less-than-stellar campaign last year, we won a plurality of the popular vote for President, achieved parity in the Senate, near-parity in the House, and won back key state legislative bodies.
We're hardly a dead party. We're a party alive and vibrant, ready to carry a great political tradition into a new era and to lead America to new and even greater heights.
Al From is founder and chief executive officer of the Democratic Leadership Council.