OT - Party Problems

Democratic National Committee

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Washington, D.C.
20003

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Related Profiles: Shadow Party, Democratic Socialists of America,
Progressive Caucus, America Coming Together , America Votes, American
Constitution Society for Law & Policy , Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Brennan Center for Justice, Center
for American Progress, EMILY's List, League of Conservation Voters,
Media Fund, MoveOn, National Abortion Rights Action League , National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People , People for the
American Way, Project Vote, Service Employees International Union,
Sierra Club, Thunder Road Group, USAction, Vote For Change, Working
Families Party

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One of two major political parties in the United States
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Increasingly a party of the left, similar to European Social
Democratic Parties
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"Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it?." -- MoveOn.org
leaders, December 2004
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"I hate Republicans and everything they stand for." -- Howard
Dean, 2005, days before he became chairman of Democratic National
Committee



The Democratic Party is presently the second largest political party in
the United States. On the right-left political spectrum it currently is
to the left of the larger, governing Republican Party, and well to the
left of the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy.

As a shrinking minority party in both houses of Congress that lost the
presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, the Democratic Party is trying
to redefine itself, in voter perception but also in its political
ideology - goals that may or may not be compatible with each other.

The words "Democracy" and "Democratic" come from the Greek roots demos,
"the people" and kratein, "to rule."

The Democratic Party used to describe itself as the political party of
"the People." In recent years it has instead become a coalition of
special interests and elitist constituencies who share mostly a belief
in using government to promote their own special agendas or privileges.

As a result of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms, a group of
private "527" political funding organizations have become a "shadow
party" that now has more influence over Democratic campaigns than the
Democratic National Committee, which heads the formal party apparatus.

This "shadow party" gets its money largely from wealthy leftwing
ideologues, organized by billionaire international financier George
Soros. Soros wrote explicitly that one reason he sought to defeat
Republican President George W. Bush was that the United States was "too
strong" relative to other nations such as France and Germany and ought
to be made weaker, more on a par with such nations. (Soros has been
indicted for insider trading in France, is known as the speculator who
"broke the Bank of England" by undermining the British Pound for his own
profit, and in 2003-04 was engaged in international manipulations that
weakened the U.S. dollar.)

The leaders of one of these shadow party organizations, MoveOn.org,
jointly said of the Democratic Party following the 2004 election: "Now
it's our Party: we bought it, we own it?."

In February 2005 the party's ruling Democratic National Committee
selected as its new Chairman former Vermont Governor and failed 2004
presidential primary candidate Howard Dean, who days before his election
had declared: "I hate Republicans and everything they stand for."

Dean is an outspoken anti-war Northeastern left-liberal who employed
MoveOn.org Internet specialist and former Ruckus Society radical Zack
Exley at the highest levels of his campaign. MoveOn.org in turn worked
enthusiastically for Dean, who now heads the DNC. Dean's ascent
apparently erases any differences between the Shadow Party and control
of the Democratic Party.

Dean supporters, sometimes called "Deaniacs," make up one sub-faction of
today's Democratic Party. They tend to be young, left-liberal, against
the war in Iraq and pro a host of politically-correct issues such as
unrestricted abortion rights. "Deaniacs" are part of today's ruling
Democratic Party faction, whose members include the Shadow Party ad its
constituent elements and call themselves progressive Democrats.

These Democrats themselves have a leftwing faction in the House of
Representatives which is formally organized into the Progressive Caucus.
The Caucus was founded in 1991 by newly elected Representative Bernie
Sanders, a nominally independent Congressman who votes with Democrats.
Sanders is the former socialist mayor of Burlington in Howard Dean's
Vermont.
Like several others in the Progressive Caucus, Sanders is an open member
of the radical group Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which
describes itself as "the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist
International." Many of the biggest European "social democrat" parties
of the left, such as the British Labour Party, are also members of the
Socialist International.

Most of the Democratic members of Congress who called for United Nations
ballot monitors from Communist Cuba and other undemocratic nations to
oversee America's 2004 elections were members of the Progressive Caucus,
a fact never reported to its audience by the establishment media, which
normally functions as an echo chamber for the progressive political
world.

As Republicans defeat and replace Democratic officeholders in moderate
districts, the self-described progressive Democrats from safely
gerrymandered districts are a growing force. House Minority Leader Nancy
Pelosi (D.-California) is a member of the Progressive Caucus.

These Democrats use the word "progressive" because it causes a less
negative reaction than calling themselves leftists, liberals or
socialists, terms which have come to be fairly synonymous in current
political terms.

Other Democratic Party factions include the following:

Southern Democrats by seniority used to chair most House and Senate
committees, thereby wielding even more power than their numbers. All
were white during the past era of Democratic dominance, owing to
Democrat success in suppressing African-American voting rights in
segregated states, and most tended to be strong supporters of military
spending. In the enlightened modern South, however, the majority of
white voters have become conservative Republicans, and Democratic
politicians are increasingly African-American and politically far to the
left (an exception is the moderate Harold Ford of Tennessee. Yellow Dog
Democrats are a shrinking bloc that once described 30 mostly-Southern
members of Congress who often took the Republican side on issues.

During the primaries, Howard Dean stereotypically described the South,
once the pillar of the New Deal, as a land whose people had gun racks
and Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.

Since the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, every elected
Democratic President except the narrowly-elected John F. Kennedy has
come from the South or border South. President Harry Truman came from
Missouri, President Lyndon Baines Johnson from Texas, President Jimmy
Carter from Georgia and President Bill Clinton from Arkansas. The last
Democrat elected President with more than 50 percent of the popular vote
was Mr. Carter, who won with 50.3 percent in 1976. If Democrats concede
the Southern states to the Republican Party, their chances of regaining
the presidency are greatly diminished.

"In Southern and Western states, we have to start by showing up," New
Mexico Governor Bill Richardson told Democrats who elected Dean as
chairman. According to the wire service Reuters, Gov. Richardson also
urged his fellow Democratic leaders "to listen for a change to input
from west of the Potomac River" that borders Washington, D.C.

New Democrats are centrists associated with the Democratic Leadership
Council (DLC). The best known of these is Bill Clinton. Others would
include Senators Joseph Lieberman and Evan Bayh. President Clinton
supported the death penalty, signed legislation that ended welfare as an
entitlement, and signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) favored by business. New Democrats believe that the future
survival and success of the Democratic Party depends on its being
perceived as returning from the left to the political center.

"Bill is a moderate who pretends to be a liberal," the Clintons' former
chief political advisor *** Morris has said, but "Hillary [Clinton, at
present a U.S. Senator from New York] is a leftist who pretends to be
moderate." Democrats who identify with and support either Bill or
Hillary Clinton are sometimes referred to by their conservative
detractors to as "Clintonistas."

Other Democratic factions orbit specific special interest groups such as
organized labor and the Black Caucus. These auxiliaries, which usually
work in concert with the Progressive Caucus, also tend to behave as if
they own (or are owned by) the Democratic Party.

As one example, a major problem in African-American inner city
communities is the poor quality of public schools. Up to 70 percent of
black parents want the option of school vouchers, essentially government
provided scholarships that would allow them to send their children to
private schools. The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) and the Black Caucus however, oppose vouchers
because powerful teacher unions in the labor bloc of the Democratic
coalition do. Even though NAACP opposition to parental choice vouchers
betrays and dooms millions of black children, this group's first loyalty
is to the Democratic Party and to unions such as the National Education
Association (NEA) that provide money and power to NAACP leaders.

History of the Democratic Party

The Democratic Party traces its ancestry to the original Republican
Party (also known as the "Democratic-Republican Party") founded in 1794
by Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809). The U.S. Constitution never mentions
political parties because the Founders saw them as generators of
division or "faction." But as the young Republic polarized between the
urban, big government centralized politics of Alexander Hamilton, John
Adams and their Federalists and the rural, small government, states
rights ideals of Jefferson, Americans coalesced into these factions and
formalized coalitions.

By the 1820s even Adams' son President John Quincy Adams had become a
Democrat, albeit one who favored a strong national government. He was
opposed by Tennessee Democratic-Republican President Andrew Jackson
(1829-37), a slave-owner whose anti-National Bank faction became the
core of the Democratic Party. The Federalist Party disintegrated,
replaced as America's opposition party from 1833 until 1856 by the new
party co-founded by Adams, the Whigs, dedicated to high tariffs and
protectionism. Democratic President James Polk led America into and
through the Mexican-American War that added today's Southwestern states
to America's map.

In 1856 the new Republican Party mobilized around opposition to slavery
and ran its first presidential candidate, trailblazer and California
U.S. Senator John C. Fremont. Four years later, owing to a party schism
that put two rival Democrats on the ballot, Republican Abraham Lincoln
was elected President by a plurality and led the Union during the War
Between the States, also known as the Civil War.

The Democratic Party was the party of Southern slave owners, such as
Jefferson and Jackson (who also brutally forced Native Americans onto
the Trail of Tears). It became the party of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Jim
Crow and Bull Connor. Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)
praised the racist, pro-KKK film The Birth of a Nation. At its 1924
National Convention the Democratic Party voted against a resolution
condemning the Klan.

The New Deal would be built on the cornerstone of Southern
segregationist Democrats, and its architect President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45) not only tacitly accepted anti-black racism but also
exploited racist attitudes to send Japanese-Americans to camps such as
Manzanar during World War II. President Harry Truman was a member of the
KKK who quit not because it preached hatred of blacks but because it
preached hatred of Catholics. The senior Democratic member of the
Congress in 2005, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, is a former
Grand Kleagle of the KKK who in 2005 tried to block President Bush's
nomination of Condoleezza Rice to be the first African-American female
Secretary of State. Democratic Party leaders continue to celebrate
annually with Jefferson and Jackson Day banquets, and to use race as a
way to divide and conquer voters.

Republicans won most of the presidential elections between 1864 and
1912, when a schism between President William Howard Taft and former
progressive Republican President Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican
vote and led to the election and re-election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Republicans returned to power following World War I, but during the
Great Depression, beginning in 1932, were beaten in four elections by
Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who built his New Deal coalition of
liberals and Southern segregationists. In the "solid South," Democrats
for generations grew up in one-party states whose voters would "rather
vote for a yellow dog" than any candidate of the party of Lincoln.
Roosevelt died in office in 1945 and was succeeded by his Vice President
Harry Truman (1945-53), who won election on his own in 1948.

In 1960 Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy (1961-63) was elected
President in a close vote decided by Texas and Illinois, where
historians agree that Democratic ballot fraud was extensive. Kennedy
withdrew promised air support from Cuban freedom fighters as they
engaged Communist dictator Fidel Castro's Soviet-armed troops at the Bay
of Pigs. But Kennedy, whose brother and Attorney General Robert F.
"Bobby" Kennedy had been a lawyer working for anti-Communist Senator
Joseph McCarthy, sent the first 16,000 armed U.S. troops into South
Vietnam, something his predecessor Republican President Dwight D.
Eisenhower had refused to do.

Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 and was succeeded by his Vice
President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69). LBJ defeated Arizona Senator
Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, but Goldwater carried
several traditionally-Democratic Southern states, a crack in the
Democratic cornerstone that was a harbinger of huge change. Johnson
signed landmark civil rights legislation, passed in Congress with a
higher percentage of Republican than Democratic votes. Johnson also
launched a massive expansion of FDR's New Deal welfare state that LBJ
called the Great Society, which by 2000 would transfer more than $7
trillion from productive earners to a non-working welfare-dependent
underclass. These subsidies promoted a tremendous expansion of this
underclass.

Johnson greatly expanded JFK's war in Vietnam and military conscription.
Bobby Kennedy ran for the Democratic nomination but was killed by
Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles the evening he won the
California primary. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago
became a propaganda stage for leftwing anti-war protests and reflected a
growing fissure in the Democratic Party and the nation over Democratic
policies.

LBJ's pro-war Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota liberal, was
defeated in 1968 by the Republican whose election JFK may have stolen in
1960, former Eisenhower Vice President Richard Nixon. In 1972 the
Democrats nominated anti-Vietnam War candidate George McGovern, who ran
on the slogan "America Come Home" and lost 49 of the 50 states to Nixon,
with Massachusetts as the lone hold out. But just as Goldwater had made
the Republican Party conservative, McGovern and the anti-war radicals
who flocked to his campaign moved the Democratic Party dramatically to
the left, where it remains today.

A break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex
by operatives connected to the White House led to a scandal that the
Democrats and pro-Democrat media, led by the Washington Post, escalated
into a political coup d'etat forcing Nixon's resignation. Eight of the
eleven special prosecutors who toppled Nixon were members of the Kennedy
brothers' inner circle and had served on their staffs. Ted Kennedy was
the chair of the Judiciary Committee that prosecuted Nixon, who resigned
in 1974 to avoid formal impeachment by the Democrat-controlled House.
Nixon's appointed successor, Vice President Gerald Ford, was defeated in
the 1976 presidential election by Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter
(1977-81), a "progressive" product of the liberal media who as an
obscure Southern governor favored by the left had been featured on four
Time Magazine covers.

Carter's single term presidency would be among the worst in American
history. The incompetent Democrat allowed inflation to soar to
double-digit levels, stealing half the life savings' purchasing power of
every American family. Carter withdrew American support from the Shah of
Iran (whose government had given rights to women and was a U.S. ally) on
the grounds that he was a human rights violator.

President Carter's destabilization of the Shah's regime led in 1979 to
the theocratic and radical Islamist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, to the
execution of tens of thousands of Iranians and to the Iran-Iraq War that
slaughtered half a million people and turned Saddam Hussein into a major
military threat to the region. The Carter-induced toppling of the Shah
also precipitated the Soviet invasion of adjacent Afghanistan, that same
year, which empowered Osama bin Laden, the Islamist leader of the
anti-Soviet guerrilla group al Qaeda; bin Laden would later plan and
fund the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center
towers. Today's war on terror and U.S. incursions into Afghanistan and
Iraq are among the fruits of the Carter Administration's leftist
policies.

In 1980 the American people ejected President Carter and elected
Republican Ronald Reagan, who served two terms and was succeeded by his
Vice President George H.W. Bush, father of President George W. Bush.
During the Reagan Administration the voters also, for the first time in
four decades, elected a Republican majority in the House of
Representatives where all spending and taxing bills must originate.

Reagan, a former union president of the Screen Actors Guild, had been a
passionate New Deal Democrat. But after fighting the radical left in
Hollywood, he would say: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The
Democratic Party left me." Millions of "Reagan Democrats" have followed
his migration away from a Democratic Party that continues to move left.

This erosion in Democratic power had been slowed by gerrymandering. In
1974, e.g., congressional Democratic candidates received only 125,000
more votes in the entire nation than did Republicans - but because
Democrats had drawn and rigged the boundaries of congressional
districts, this near-tie vote produced 41 more Democratic Members of
Congress and solid control over the House of Representatives. By the
1980s the rising tide of voter disgust was overcoming this rigged game
and sweeping Democrats from power.

In 1992 President Bush was defeated by three factors. One was the
liberal national media that conspired to depict the economy as worse
than it actually was. Second was a Southern Governor of Arkansas named
Bill Clinton who ran using Republican rhetoric, saying he would "end
welfare as we know it" and calling himself a "New Democrat." The third
was a Texas eccentric named Ross Perot (who became a billionaire through
government contracts) who ran as a third party candidate and siphoned
more votes from Bush than from his Democrat opponent.

Investigative reporter Lowell Ponte has set forth a circumstantial case
that Perot acted as a stalking horse for Bill Clinton. What Perot had to
gain, suggested Ponte, was that the Clintons promised to funnel the
contracts for their national health plan through Perot companies -
thereby raising him from the 44th richest person in America to the
richest. Perot ran for president by bashing incumbent Bush. When polls
showed that Perot might defeat both Bush and Clinton, Perot dropped out
of the race and threw his support to the Democratic candidate. Then,
when in a two-way race Bush pulled ahead in the polls, Perot re-entered
the race and re-doubled his attacks on the Republican incumbent. Perot's
behavior, argues Ponte, was not that of a candidate who wanted to become
President but that of someone trying to help Clinton win.

In 1992 Clinton was elected with 43 percent of the vote. Bush received
37 percent and Perot 20 percent.

Thomas Jefferson, father of the Democratic Party, had warned that "great
innovations should not be forced on slender majorities." President
William Jefferson Clinton (1993-2001) ignored this wisdom. Having won
the White House with one of the smallest pluralities of voter support in
history, Clinton immediately forced into law the largest tax increase in
history, and made it retroactive. Clinton also attempted to force
socialized medicine into law - in order (as critics charged) to
"nationalize one-seventh of the nation's economy." Even the restored
Democratic majority in Congress balked at this high-handed health scheme
and refused to pass it.

In 1994 the voters swept Democrats out of power in both the House and
Senate. For the next six years the Clinton Administration governed
largely through executive orders, recess appointments and the use of
emergency powers, even though no emergency existed.

In 1996 Clinton eked out a less-than-50-percent re-election with the
help of liberal allies in the media and another Perot candidacy that
again attacked Republicans and drew about nine percent of the vote.
Clinton's second term was hobbled by scandal and perjury that made him
the first elected President in American history to be impeached by the
House of Representatives.

Democrats in Congress debated whether to defend Clinton or remove him
from office, choosing at last to defend him. Had Clinton been removed
from office by the U.S. Senate, he would have been succeeded by Democrat
Vice President Albert Gore, who as the incumbent President would almost
certainly have won the 2000 Presidential election and been re-elected in
2004.

As the Democratic candidate for President in 2000, Gore was tainted by
his embrace of an obviously corrupt and immoral President Clinton and
lost to Republican George W. Bush. The Green Party candidacy of
left-liberal activist Ralph Nader carried enough votes in key states
such as Florida to deny Gore victory. Gore, however, also failed to
carry his home state of Tennessee, where the voters who knew him best
rejected him. Democrats for 18 months reclaimed control of the U.S.
Senate, but only because a Vermont Senator chose to switch parties weeks
after his re-election, and threw his support to Senate Democrats.
Republicans regained Senate control in the 2002 election.

In 2004 Democratic candidate John F. Kerry of Massachusetts lost by more
than three million popular votes. During the campaign Kerry described
himself as a military hero, then refused to sign Form 180 that would
allow the press to see his official military record, which became a
matter of controversy.

Democratic Party politicians, in a maneuver almost unrivaled for its
cynicism, demanded that President Bush enact Campaign Finance Reform to
reduce the influence of wealthy contributors. But these Democrats
included in the legislation a tiny provision for so-called "527"
organizations that allowed ultra-wealthy radicals such as their ally
George Soros to circumvent new campaign finance rules that restricted
and silenced ordinary Americans. Despite astronomical amounts of money
from leftwing "shadow government" activists spent to support Kerry, the
Democratic ticket went down to defeat.

The leaders of one of these shadow party organizations, MoveOn.org,
jointly said of the Democratic Party following the 2004 election: "Now
it's our Party: we bought it, we own it?."

The party of any President seeking re-election usually loses seats in
the House and Senate, but in 2004 the incumbent Republican Party made
strong gains in both houses of Congress.

Republicans also held a majority of state legislative houses and state
governorships, including the governorships of Texas, Florida, New York
and California. For the first time in generations, polls found that more
Americans described themselves as Republicans than as Democrats, and
that nearly twice as many described themselves as conservatives than as
liberals.

In 2005 the Democratic National Committee selected as its new Chairman
former Vermont Governor and failed 2004 presidential primary candidate
Howard Dean, who days before his election had declared: "I hate
Republicans and everything they stand for."

Dean is an outspoken anti-war Northeastern left-liberal who employed
MoveOn.org Internet specialist and former Ruckus Society radical Zack
Exley at the highest levels of his campaign. MoveOn.org in turn worked
enthusiastically for Dean. Dean's ascent as DNC head apparently erases
any differences between the special interest shadow party and control of
the Democratic Party.

During the primaries, Dean described the South, once the cornerstone on
which the New Deal was built, as a land whose people had gun racks and
Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.

Since the death of FDR, every elected Democratic President except
narrowly-elected John F. Kennedy has come from the South or border
South. Truman came from Missouri, Johnson from Texas, Carter from
Georgia and Clinton from Arkansas. The last Democrat elected President
with more than 50 percent of the popular vote was Jimmy Carter, who won
by 50.3 percent in 1976. If Democrats concede the Southern states to the
Republican Party, their chances of regaining the presidency are greatly
diminished.

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose
and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology
has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence,
and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years. It
has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special
pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and
complete as the collapse of British power.

Theodore Dalrymple




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