True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party 0812252993, 9780812252996

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True Blues

AMERICAN GOVERNANCE: POLITICS, POLICY, AND PUBLIC LAW Series Editors: Richard Valelly, Pamela Brandwein, Marie Gottschalk, Christopher Howard A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

True Blues The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party

Adam Hilton

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hilton, Adam, author. Title: True blues : the contentious transformation of the Democratic Party / Adam Hilton. Other titles: American governance. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Series: American governance: politics, policy, and public law | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020037061 | ISBN 9780812252996 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Democratic Party (U.S.)—History—20th century. | Democratic Party (U.S.)—History—21st century. | United States—Politics and government— 20th century. | United States—Politics and government—21st century. Classification: LCC JK2316 .H55 2021 | DDC 324.2736—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037061

For Ashlee

CONTENTS

Introduction. Who Governs Parties?

1

PART I. THE RISE OF THE ADVOCACY PARTY Chapter 1. In the Shadow of States’ Rights: The New Deal Democratic Party and the Prelude to Reform

25

Chapter 2. The Undemocratic Party: Antiwar Insurgents and the Party Crisis of 1968

47

Chapter 3. “Curing the Ills of Democracy”: Party Entrepreneurship in the McGovern-Fraser Commission

66

Chapter 4. The Party Turned Upside Down: The McGovern Nomination and the Backlash Against Reform

88

Chapter 5. Bringing the Counter-Reformers Back In: The Coalition for a Democratic Majority and the Making of the Advocacy Party

110

PART II. THE POLITICS OF THE ADVOCACY PARTY Chapter 6. The Limits of Group Influence: Jimmy Carter and the Demand for Full Employment Policy

131

Chapter 7. The Officeholders Strike Back: The Success and Failure of the New Democrats

147

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Contents

Chapter 8. The Advocate-in-Chief: Barack Obama’s Harnessing of the Advocacy Party

171

Conclusion. The Consequences of the Advocacy Party

192

Notes

207

Index

249

Acknowledgments

263

True Blues

INTRODUCTION

Who Governs Parties?

Who governs political parties? The question—a perennial concern among political scientists—was thrust to the center of public debate over the course of the turbulent 2016 presidential election in the United States. From the primaries to the conventions and finally election night itself, the contest to succeed Barack Obama as president delivered one surprise after another. Donald Trump’s overt shattering of the norms of American politics brought shock to nearly all concerned. Lacing his campaign promise to “Make America Great Again” with racist and xenophobic messages, Trump doubled down on his disruptive political style by breaking from a number of traditional Republican policy planks. Major party donors refused to fund him. Party leaders denounced him. Still more shocking, however, was how repeated predictions of his inevitable demise continually foundered on rising poll numbers and primary victories. His eventual triumph over Hillary Clinton in November and assumption of the presidency the following year delivered yet more surprises, as many incumbent Republicans retired before the 2018 midterm elections and those that stayed quickly fell into line behind their new leader. In the course of a few short years it seemed the GOP had become the party of Trump. Questions about who really governs parties swirled on the other side of the aisle too. While overshadowed by the rise of Trump on the right, 2016 delivered its own set of surprises to the Democrats on the left. What many had initially expected to be a straightforward coronation of Obama’s heir apparent turned into a drawn-out battle for the nomination and the soul of the Democratic Party. Harkening back to strains of the New Deal tradition and reaching abroad to Eu ropean social democracy, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and his brand of democratic socialism struck a nerve with the primary electorate and the wider public, especially young

2

Introduction

people. To draw out his differences with Clinton, Sanders deployed an economic populist rhetoric that transformed the nomination contest into a referendum on the trajectory of American society itself, calling for a “political revolution” to address the rising levels of inequality and frustration that fueled racial populists like Donald Trump.1 Although Clinton eventually clinched the nomination, her subsequent loss reopened a torrent of debate about the future of the Democratic Party.2 Sanders began polling as Amer ica’s “most popu lar” politician, and, despite the crowded field, the 2020 nomination contest was defined by many of his signature policy issues.3 In the course of a few short years, it seemed the Democrats had gone from the certainty of purpose of the early Obama era to being mired in an identity crisis. Beyond the public square, the events of 2016 and their aftermath also seemed to confound recent influential theories of parties in political science, which argued that despite the adoption of primary elections in the 1970s, party officials and officeholders still effectively controlled the nomination process by coordinating with interest groups behind the scenes and clearing the field for their preferred candidates.4  Confronted with evidence to the contrary, political scientists, like members of the public, could do little more than grope for answers in the face of a party crisis and political transformation that defied easy answers.5 The current crisis in American politics is rooted in the decades-long transformation of both political parties, and its resolution, if there is one, will require the parties to change yet again. Therefore, it is imperative to understand the historical processes of party change that led to the current conjuncture if we are to glean what theoretical and practical insights we can to guide further efforts at reform. Yet, as the unanimity of surprise at the 2016 election reveals, the dynamics of modern party politics remain poorly understood. Assertions of either elite control or interest-group dominance both failed dramatically to explain the Trump victory and the surprise of the Sanders insurgency and their subsequent reverberations through the American political landscape. This book is about the contentious politics of Democratic Party transformation since the end of the New Deal order. Its central argument is that Democratic Party change was a process driven principally by the recurrent conflict between extra-party groups and officeholders to define and control party identity, program, and policy. The outcome of this prolonged struggle was a new kind of party—what I call an advocacy party—which institutionalized

Introduction

3

greater party dependence on outside groups for legitimacy and organizational support, while also, in turn, fostering greater group dependency on the administrative presidency for the satisfaction of their symbolic and substantive demands. Together, the major claims of this book explain why and how the Democratic Party has come to its current crossroads, suggesting a new perspective for comprehending the dynamics polarizing American politics more broadly. The central argument of this book rests on three core claims: that political parties are contentious institutions; that entrepreneurial reformers and counter-reformers both played pivotal roles in reshaping the Democratic Party since the late 1960s; and that, paradoxically, despite the increased role of interest groups and movement actors within the party, the Democrats’ advocacy-party structure promotes presidential dominance over party governance, reinforcing forms of representational inequality by limiting agenda-setting influence to select groups that retain the capacity to mobilize their constituencies to ensure officeholders pay more than lip ser vice in exchange for group support. My within-case account of Democratic Party transformation uses a combination of methods—causal narrative, process tracing, and pattern matching—to describe, explain, and test processes of party change. Let me unpack these claims and their methodological underpinnings in turn.

Political Parties as Contentious Institutions The first claim, that parties are contentious institutions, departs from the two prevailing perspectives on parties and party change found in the political science literature. The traditional perspective, stemming from the work of Anthony Downs, see parties as teams of office-seeking politicians whose overriding priority is election rather than enacting specific public policies.6 Not all politician-centered perspectives share Downs’s assumption that party actors care only about reelection or his faith in party convergence around the median voter. Party elites need loyal activists who volunteer their time and money to party activities, and for whom ideological or policy issues are of paramount concern.7 Social movement mobilization may alter the calculus of officeholders seeking out new positions to build their coalitions and ensure reelection.8 Finally, party elites themselves may play a formative role in shaping and reshaping voter preferences, using their unique

4

Introduction

set of material and discursive tools to structure commonsense understandings of the social world and its political cleavages.9 Recently, however, the traditional view of parties as creatures of politicians has been challenged by an alternative perspective, one that sees politicians as agents rather than as principals of party activity and change.10 Over the past decade, this stream of scholarship has extended the concept of party beyond the traditional focus on elite officeholders and their formal organizations to include interest groups, donor networks, issue-oriented advocates, and partisan media organizations. These “extended party networks,” it is claimed, are defined by the cooperation among their actors, which signal their preferences through elite endorsements, channel information to the formal party organization, share personnel, and reposition the parties by compelling officeholders to relent to their policy demands.11 While recognizing the contributions of both traditional and network approaches, this book departs from the existing scholarship by reconceptualizing parties as fundamentally and inextricably contentious institutions.12 Rather than the exclusive domain of officeholders or a harmonious nexus of politician-group cooperation, I theorize parties as institutional arenas in which politicians and party-oriented groups make rival and often discordant claims to representational legitimacy, leadership authority, and control over party governance—essentially, about who actually governs the party. As previous scholarship has demonstrated, ambitious office seekers prioritize winning elections, even when policy change is one of their goals.13 On the one hand, the work of constituency ser vice and policy making normally plods along at a slow place and unfolds over a lengthy time scale. Interest groups, advocacy organizations, and social movements, on the other hand, prioritize “ideological patronage” and policy change.14 Because movements unfold in unpredictable ways, their demands are often impetuous, needing to strike while the iron is hot while their public clout and disruptive capacity are at their height, before demobilization inevitably sets in.15 Different positions in the state-society nexus, different priorities and modes of operation, and different time frames thus set officeholders and groups in tension with each other. This does not eliminate the possibility of coalition and cooperation, of course. Indeed, officeholders and groups need each other and regularly ally as a means to their respective ends. However, the resulting alliance is likely to be an uneasy one, fraught with contentious relations that may be expressed more or less overtly, but are permanently present nonetheless.

Introduction

5

State

P

P

P

Party

G

G

G

Civil Society Figure 1. Groups (G) and Politicians (P) as Constituent Parts of Party.

At the most fundamental level, the forces of intraparty contention stem from an inherent ambiguity in what parties are and who they serve. As institutions that uniquely straddle the line between civil society and the state, parties carry the double mandate of public representative and government administrator. Long-held debates about “delegate” versus “trustee” forms of representation reflect contrary and mutually incompatible interpretations of this mandate, depending on whether party sovereignty is rooted in voter preferences or the expertise of policy makers.16 From one angle, parties appear as the essential mechanisms of democratic government, organizing, aggregating, and projecting the people’s voice into the state, and holding officeholders accountable for their per for mance in enacting the party program—a perspective immortalized in E. E. Schattschneider’s famous aphorism that “parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties.”17 From another angle, despite their basis in civil society, parties succumb to an “iron law of oligarchy” as elected elites use the power and privileges of office to entrench themselves in government and insulate policy making from excessive or disruptive democratic demands.18 This tendency need not apply only to corrupt or authoritarian politicians. Elected officials of all stripes are likely to feel pressure to protect the

6

Introduction

prerogatives of office and their future careers from outside interference, even if only to better promote their own view of the public good. Together, these push-and-pull forces twist parties in multiple directions simultaneously, subjecting them to rival claims of authority. At the same time, both politicians and citizen groups are internally heterogeneous collections of differently positioned actors with distinct stakes in the current order of things. Officeholders and office seekers are in competition with one another, if not always over a par ticular office, then at least over campaign donations, media exposure, elite endorsements, and a relative edge in terms of public prestige and influence in the polity. Groups also compete against one another in their unceasing contest to garner philanthropic funding, monopolize advocacy niches, and gain favorable access to decision makers and influence the policy process.19 Not all groups can hold pride of place in the party coalition at the same time, and in order to increase or even maintain their relative position in the context of a dynamic competitive environment, groups continuously jockey with one another, despite their cooperative relationship as coalition members. Finally, while the foregoing relations of contention are likely to affect all major political parties in the democratic world, the strict duopoly of the American party system is likely to exacerbate them. Due to the significant barriers to entry for newcomers, the American two-party system significantly raises the stakes for influence and control over the existing Democratic and Republican parties. Other exceptional features of the American party system, such as the private financing of campaigns and the role of primary elections, reinforce the tendency of movements, groups, and wealthy individuals to try to impress their preferred agendas onto one of the existing parties. Thus, while all parties are contentious institutions, American parties are likely to be especially contentious. The contentious parties framework developed here joins with other social scientists in the historical institutionalist tradition who see parties as “thick” collective actors that have developed over time, accreting layers of rules, norms, organizations, ideas, and relationships.20 From this perspective, officeholders, officials, interest groups, activists, primary voters, and other agents are all “engaged in a process of continuous negotiations” about what the party is, what it stands for, and what it should do.21 However, while these insights point toward a new horizon beyond the familiar politiciancentered/group-centered dichotomy, they have not gone far enough in producing a new theoretical synthesis. As the new historically oriented party

Introduction

7

scholarship shows, what parties are and what they do is indeed a question that requires an enlarged perspective that takes the actions of party and nonparty agents into account.22 However, this scholarship also suggests that the negotiations within party networks and across coalitions is more likely to be contentious rather than harmonious.  A theory of party-group relations that gives inadequate attention to the contentious dimension of parties will miss critical factors that determine who holds power in party politics and how and why that power changes over time.

Rethinking Democratic Party Reform In the following chapters, I deploy this framework foregrounding the dynamics of contention inherent in American party politics to explain the transformation of the Democratic Party since the end of the New Deal order. My selection of the post–New Deal Democrats for an intensive withincase analysis is motivated by several factors, including the need to rebalance the existing scholarship, which has focused primarily on the Republicans; the need to develop a conceptual model of entrepreneurial party change; and the necessity of revising the prevailing views of Democratic Party reform, which tend to mischaracterize the politics of the reform process by truncating its timeline and scope. First, the extant scholarship on American political parties is heavily lopsided toward the right, for good reason.23 It is, of course, no surprise that the GOP has seized the lion’s share of attention in recent decades. The Republicans’ transformation into a vehicle of extreme conservatism is arguably the single most important shift in the American political landscape in the last fifty years and the main driver of contemporary partisan polarization, legislative gridlock, and policy stalemate. That said, things have not remained static on the other side of the aisle. While congressional roll call scores and other data indicate that the Democrats have not shifted to the left to the same degree the Republicans have moved to the right, the Democrats have nevertheless undergone their own profound transformation, remaking themselves into a coalition that, while still rooted in the old New Deal economic alignment, has extended its identity and program to groups and issues previously unimaginable.24 The party of Jim Crow has become the party of Barack Obama. The party of many religious voters has become the party of reproductive freedom and LGBTQ rights. The party of Cold War

8

Introduction

anticommunism has become a party that is seriously debating the merits of democratic socialism. The Republican story has been investigated and analyzed to great effect, and valuable studies have compared the two stories of party transformations side by side.25 However, no recent study has looked in depth at the post–New Deal Democratic Party in its own right, and the resulting imbalance in our collective understanding of America’s “party of the people” has limited our ability to explain its evolution, trajectory, and current identity crisis. Second, this book goes beyond much of the previous scholarship by opening the “black box” of party to examine in fine-grained detail the precise mechanisms of entrepreneurial party change.26 Parties change for a variety of reasons: changing voter preferences, elite decision making, or exogenous shocks like an economic downturn or a foreign policy crisis. But sometimes parties change because political entrepreneurs—those who seek to change the rules in order to win the political game—set out to change them.27 This book ties together elements of contingency, agency, and structure to develop a process-tracing model that can answer the question of exactly how entrepreneurs change parties when they have the opportunity to do so. Elections create winners and losers, not only between parties but within them as well. For presidential campaigns—which involve complicated, often controversial, claims about the appropriate mix of messaging and mobilization—a victory or a loss in the general election can vindicate or undermine the legitimacy of the party nominee, their platform, and their strategy. Losses tend to dredge up acrimonious debates that relitigate what went wrong, who is to blame, and what can be done about it four years down the road. Fueling these debates is the fundamental ambiguity surrounding voter choice. Electoral outcomes do not speak for themselves; their results require interpretation and explanation, and often lend themselves to multiple interpretations. Political scientists have explained why voters vote the way they do as a result of near-term macroeconomic performance, wars, and the extent of partisan identification in the electorate.28 Victorious nominees often interpret their victory as a mandate for specific policy action.29 Political entrepreneurs, by contrast, often supply very different explanations, ones based on their motivation to seize the opportunity provided by an electoral upset to transform how parties work. The process by which political entrepreneurs transform parties can be theorized as a three-step process, as depicted in Figure 2. In the first stage, a

Introduction Stage 1: Party Crisis Party entrepreneurs diagnose a structural crisis, propose reforms Incumbents, silenced by defeat, acquiesce to reform demands

Stage 2: Electoral Test If reform leads to victory, entrepreneurs consolidate party reconstruction If reform leads to defeat, incumbents propose counterreforms

9 Stage 3: Contentious Party Change Reformers and counter-reformers struggle over party structure Dynamics of contention produce mixed and layered institutional changes

Figure 2. The Process of Entrepreneurial Party Change.

party crisis beyond the usual alternation of office is a necessary contextual condition. Electorally, this may take the form of a landslide loss across multiple levels of office or merely an unexpected, yet narrow, defeat. Substantively, it may signal a larger rejection of the political regime overseen by the incumbent party.30 Whatever the exact cause, party entrepreneurs can leverage the legitimacy crisis engulfing the defeated party and its leadership to implicate the mechanisms of leadership selection themselves, proposing structural reforms to those institutions as a means to resolve the crisis and chart a path back to victory. Meanwhile, as entrepreneurs propose more or less far-reaching reforms, incumbents with the most to lose from reform find that they have little in the way of defense. Depending on the nature and severity of the crisis, incumbents will likely find it very difficult to defend the existing way of doing things. The electoral results seem to underscore their obvious inadequacy. Effectively silenced by the sting of defeat then, incumbents acquiesce to reformers, if not out of genuine enthusiasm, then at the very least with the hope that reform will be of limited disruption and the party will return to power at the next election, putting the issue to rest. With the initiative in hand, party entrepreneurs then face a double challenge in the next stage: they must formulate, propose, and engineer changes to the party’s rules and procedures in such a way that they plausibly resolve

10

Introduction

the party crisis; and they must also take their reformed party into battle and see if it passes the electoral test. Proof of the effectiveness of party reform is ultimately whether it succeeds where the old party could not—winning public office. Should they succeed, the value of reform becomes undeniable, and entrepreneurs will have the mandate to consolidate their reform project further, cementing their changes in place. Should they fail to win, however, electoral defeat provides incumbents and other reform skeptics what they previously lacked: a compelling rationale for opposing reform. And by employing the same kind of political entrepreneurialism exhibited by their opponents, counter-reformers are likely to then set about unmaking the reforms. In the final stage, reformers and counter-reformers engage in contentious struggle over the structure of the party. Each side in the contest presents competing claims regarding what ails the party and how it can return to power. As they do battle, each side scores partial victories and suffers partial defeats. Some old practices are restored, some new reforms are retained, and some compromise changes are introduced, mixing and layering institutional change into a new, unforeseen composite. These mechanisms connecting party crises, entrepreneurial agency, and institutional change are clearly observable in the case of Democratic Party reform. As Chapter  1 argues, the Democrats’ decentralized federal party structure was instrumental in reproducing the strange-bedfellow coalition of labor-liberals and southern conservatives underpinning the New Deal order from its origins in the 1930s to its end in the mid-1960s. However, precisely because the Democrats’ party structure limited the reach of New Deal liberalism, it became a frequent, though elusive target of New Deal reformers. By 1968, as I show in Chapters 2 and 3, the contradictions inherent in the New Deal order could no longer be managed. In the wake of the party crisis triggered by internal domestic and foreign policy disputes, the insurgent campaigns of senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, the violence and disorder of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and electoral defeat that November, “New Politics” reformers—hailing from segments of the civil rights, student, antiwar, and feminist movements, as well as liberal union leaders—capitalized on the atmosphere of disarray and the temporary disgrace of incumbent leaders to promulgate a narrative diagnosing the party crisis as a product of barriers to participation, inadequate representation, and the absence of democratic accountability. Over the next two years, under the auspices of the McGovern-Fraser Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, New Politics reformers dismantled

Introduction

11

procedures that empowered party officials, officeholders, and other “bosses” to monopolize candidate selection in fabled smoke-filled backrooms.31 In their place, reformers ushered into being the modern process of binding primary elections familiar today. What’s more, after having engineered major alterations to the rules governing convention delegate selection and the process of presidential nomination during 1968–1972, further attempts were made between 1972 and 1974 to reconstruct the national party organization itself, including introducing a dues-paying rank-and-file membership; creating a more representative Democratic National Committee; building new institutions, such as regional party organizations, to interface between state and national committees; and holding midterm party conferences to strengthen the national party’s policy-making capacities and act as mechanisms for party members to hold officeholders accountable to the party platform. My model of entrepreneurial party change not only illuminates the mechanisms characterizing the tactics of the New Politics reformers in their efforts to rebuild the Democratic Party. It also explains the entrepreneurship of their opponents. As detailed in Chapters 4 and 5, under the banner of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), party officeholders and officials, labor leaders, foreign policy hawks, and anticommunist Cold Warriors mobilized party stakeholders to thwart the reformers’ plans to reconstruct the national party organization. Just as party reformers seized the opportunity provided by the 1968 defeat, so too did counter-reformers seize on the 1972 landslide defeat of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, the standard bearer of the New Politics movement. In the immediate aftermath of the election, the CDM and its allies launched a rearguard battle across multiple fronts of the party to scuttle the structural phase of reform and weaken some of the new delegate selection rules. Ironically, CDM members utilized the new party bodies and institutional authority of the national committee created by the reformers to coordinate their antireform campaign, ultimately codifying the loosely organized, federated party structure they preferred in the party’s new constitution, the Democratic Party charter, bringing the New Politics movement to an end. While an intensive within-case analysis such as this one can confirm the causal mechanisms theorized to be at work in the process of entrepreneurial party change, its applicability to other cases has obvious limits. A processtracing model such as this one knowingly sacrifices social scientists’ traditional goal of generalizability for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms

12

Introduction

and processes that produce change over time.32 But, as a first step toward building a more comprehensive understanding of party change, this study aims to demonstrate the utility of process tracing for understanding conceptually how entrepreneurial party transformation works at the national party level, focusing mostly on what has been called the presidential party, and I leave it to others to test its veracity in other cases.33 Fi nally, a third factor motivating this study is the need to revise prevailing narratives of Democratic Party reform. The party reforms of the McGovern-Fraser Commission have been extensively researched and analyzed.34 Yet most accounts focus almost exclusively on the reforms made to the presidential nomination process, neglecting similar efforts directed at reconstructing the party organization.35 This truncated analysis has tended to mischaracterize the project of the New Politics reformers, obscure the pivotal role played by counter-reformers, and flatten out the convoluted and contentious process that eventually put the Democrats on the path to the advocacy party. With few exceptions, most accounts of Democratic Party reform mischaracterize New Politics reformers as “antiparty.”36  These scholars rightly observe that opening up delegate selection procedures to voter participation diminished the role of the formal party organization in selecting presidential nominees. Before the reforms, each stage of the nominating process, from the local precinct meetings all the way up to the national convention, was conducted under the supervision and control of party leaders. After the reforms, the authority of the party chieftains was drastically reduced in favor of grassroots activists and primary voters. Consequently, the national convention was reduced to “a body dominated by candidate enthusiasts and interest group delegates,” surviving “primarily as spectacle.”37 But it is odd to characterize the McGovern-Fraser reformers as antiparty when their project was itself an unprecedented assertion of national party authority, not only over its state and local affiliates, but also over state laws under which the subnational parties operated.38 Neither the formal authority nor the institutional capacity of the national party to formulate and impose a universal code of standards for party governance existed prior to the McGovern-Fraser reforms and therefore had to be built in the process of their implementation and enforcement.39 Moreover, the party-building orientation of the New Politics movement is undeniable when the post-1972 phase of national party reconstruction is brought back into the narrative. It is striking that this history makes no

Introduction

13

appearance in the critical literature.40 It could be argued that because the structural reforms were less successful than those made to the nominating process, devoting exclusive analytical attention to the latter is justified. But such a teleological retelling reads the outcome of the reform struggle back into the past, resulting in a one-sided and ultimately misleading account of the reform process.41 To better understand how and why party reform unfolded the way it did, it is necessary to reconnect the first phase of delegate selection reform with the second phase of organizational reconstruction. That the latter was largely unsuccessful does not render it irrelevant. On the contrary, the mix of victory and defeat decisively reshaped the Democratic Party in ways few anticipated, and it was instrumental to the rise of the advocacy party. New Politics reformers, while not antiparty, held a mix of ideas and orientations that both connected them with past political traditions and broke from them as well.42 Like their New Deal predecessors, New Politics liberals advocated for programmatic rights in the New Deal mold, looking to set policy achievements outside the remit of “normal politics,” such as elections and alternating partisan control of government, by cementing them in expanding administrative structures and guaranteed government protections and ser vices. Unlike their New Deal predecessors, however, New Politics liberals simultaneously turned a skeptical eye on those same government agencies charged with delivering programmatic entitlements. In the midst of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and an ongoing exposé of FBI abuses and assassinations, the new generation of liberal activists and intellectuals sharpened a two-sided critique. On the one hand, they fought to dismantle the social and political hierarchies that had limited the reach of the New Deal state primarily to white, breadwinning, middle-class men, and that had always been anathema to New Deal liberalism. On the other hand, they turned their criticism and activism against the same executive branch in which postwar liberals had vested their faith as the paramount instrument of liberal reformism.43 This two-sidedness of New Politics liberalism helps explain its proponents’ emphasis on party reform. Whereas New Deal liberals had opted to overcome the constraints of the decentralized Democratic Party by building the modern executive as an alternative institution to the party system, New Politics liberals turned away from any easy embrace of executive power, effectively taking up the project that New Dealers had abandoned: reconstructing the Democratic Party into an agent of programmatic reform.44

14

Introduction

Without any nostalgia for the days of local and state party machines, New Politics reformers sought to build a nationally integrated, programmatically liberal party that could both escape the parochialisms of the past and curb the aggrandized and abusive powers of the executive branch. As they saw it, only by transforming the Democratic Party into an issue-oriented, participatory organization, more attuned to the will of its activists and organized groups, could the subordination of the party to politicians, local or national, be eliminated and a full-scale revival of responsible party politics be effected. As one key reform architect put it, they intended to “build the party as an institution [to be] bigger than any of its officeholders, bigger than any of its candidates.”45 Thus, as much as the New Politics reform movement was about overthrowing the old party structures to effect a more direct connection with policy makers, it was equally about constraining those policy makers, especially the president, to govern according to the principles and policies established by the party. The reconstructed party they envisioned would be powerful enough to override the state and local politicians who had limited New Deal liberalism in the past, but it would equally check the autonomy of the president to reshape the political agenda upon taking office by retethering the executive to the party. It goes without saying that New Politics reformers’ ambitious project of party reconstruction entailed imposing serious costs on party stakeholders with vested interests in the old ways of party governance. However, previous accounts have obscured the role and significance of the counter-reformers in derailing the reform project and subsequently reshaping the party to suit their own interests. For instance, despite the exhaustive detail found in Byron Shafer’s seminal Quiet Revolution: The Strug gle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics, the narrative stops short of McGovern’s 1972 nomination, precluding analysis of the second, structural phase of reform, its mobilized opposition, and its eventual demise. Ironically, despite featuring “struggle” in its subtitle, Shafer’s tome contains very little of it. This is no oversight of omission. Rather, it is an accurate retelling of the truncated timeline under his examination. As Sam Rosenfeld has put it, during the first phase of reform from 1968 to 1972, centered on changing the presidential nomination process, reformers experienced so little in the way of organized resistance they were essentially “pushing through an open door.”46 As David Plotke has explained, the absence of any formidable antireform campaign before McGovern’s nomination reflected most party

Introduction

15

stakeholders’ disbelief that the McGovern-Fraser Commission would actually be effective in making substantive changes. More importantly, reform skeptics simply had no persuasive alternative to offer in response to the party’s legitimacy crisis in the aftermath of the violent and chaotic 1968 Chicago convention and the subsequent electoral defeat in November.47 All this changed four years later with McGovern’s dramatic defeat, which provided counter-reformers with the opportunity to pin the loss on reformers and set about reforming the reforms. Over the next several years, reformers and counter-reformers struggled over the structure and identity of the Democratic Party in a process of dynamic contention that left the party open to grassroots activism but bereft of any “orga nizational features designed to integrate or even encompass the multiple rather than singular concerns of citizens”—a hybrid institutional structure constitutive of the advocacy party.48 But the larger importance of bringing the counter-reformers back in goes beyond merely getting history right. As this book argues, the outcome of the prolonged struggle within the Democratic Party was a new kind of party, an amalgam of institutional reforms, each layered on top of what came before, without any wholesale reconstruction to rationalize its structure. The resulting new party was not the handiwork of reformers alone. Crucially, the entwinning of reform and counter-reform did create a more national, issue-oriented Democratic Party than before. However, rather than marrying participatory and centralized forms of democracy and restraining excessive executive power, the party that emerged was more dependent than ever on using expansive administrative power as its principal instrument for achieving progressive policy victories.  The new party had many authors, none of whom can claim full ownership, responsibility, or blame for its evolution.

The Politics of the Advocacy Party As an outcome of the prolonged struggle over party structure and identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Democrats became what I have termed an advocacy party—a form of organization in which extra-party groups substitute for the diminished institutional capacity and popu lar legitimacy of the formal party apparatus.49 Democrats have long been considered to be a coalition made up of distinct interest groups and advocacy organizations

16

Introduction

in contrast to the Republicans’ more unified commitment to conservative ideology.50 Yet, for all its insight, this take on party asymmetry should not be interpreted to suggest that Democrats are not ideological, nor that Republicans do not have deeply institutionalized affiliations with interest groups.51 To develop a more precise understanding, I conceptualize advocacy as the public claim that political actors make to represent often marginalized or excluded identity or issue groups, and advocacy party as partisan commitments of support for those groups to curry their electoral assistance and incorporate their constituents into the party coalition.52 Given the Democrats’ historical legacy as the “party of the people” and their ongoing association with various minority outgroups, “advocacy” better captures what sets the Democrats apart from the GOP.53 Moreover, as I will develop further, advocacy is an inherently ambiguous form of representation. Advocates are typically self-appointed representatives. Whether or not they have organic connections to the relevant community of interest, individual and collective actors can and do make claims to represent groups affected by political decision making without any formal or institutionalized mechanisms of authorization and accountability.54 Who speaks for x? can be a complicated empirical and normative question.55 This is not to suggest that advocates necessarily lack democratic legitimacy or that they cannot empower the groups for whom they claim to represent. What can be problematic, however, is when advocates deviate from constituency preferences in the absence of any effective sanctions.56 Of course, advocacy, in its generic meaning, has always been a feature of American party politics. However, two key historical developments distinguish the Democrats’ current advocacy party form from its predecessors. Considering first what we might call the demand side, politicians and office seekers have become increasingly dependent on the electorally relevant resources that advocacy groups are uniquely situated to provide.57 The patronage that once fueled the mass parties of the nineteenth century has been sharply curtailed by good government reformers, sending state and local machines into decline.58 And although formal party organizations have rebounded in the early twenty-first century and improved their fundraising capacity, they are, in Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s apt phrase, “hollow parties,” unable to command on their own the manpower, networks, information, and skills that groups can provide, let alone the popular legitimacy that movements can lend parties, which tend to score low levels of public trust in opinion polls.59

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17

On the supply side, as James  Q. Wilson famously observed over fifty years ago, party politics has been invaded by legions of “amateurs” seeking to use parties for their substantive ends.60 Since the “advocacy explosion” of the 1960s and 1970s, a proliferating number of professionalized interest groups and nonprofit organizations have been increasingly well equipped to supply the goods and ser vices that parties require.61 Moreover, changes to campaign finance laws, including pivotal decisions by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, as well as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of Congress in 2002, tightened the legal restraints on formal party organizations to raise funds, all the while letting loose the electoral activity of political action committees (PACs), Super PACs, 527 organizations, social welfare groups, and many others. Every election cycle that raises the costs of competing for office increases the dependence of candidates on well-resourced groups to assist them to victory. In exchange for ser vices rendered, advocacy groups expect politicians to endorse their cause, sell the public on their policy priorities, and generally work on their behalf in office. Groups may seek the symbolic legitimacy that mainstream recognition can supply or pursue broadly ideological ends or only narrow material benefits. No matter the nature of the demand, politicians are uniquely positioned to provide the policy victories that interest groups and movement actors need. Dependence, therefore, runs both ways: parties need groups, and groups need parties.62 The historical development of the advocacy party is summarized in Figure 3. At the core of the advocacy party, then, is the imperative for politicians to secure group resources by becoming advocates themselves. But contrary to what some influential theories of parties predict, increased party dependence on groups for their legitimacy and campaign resources does not necessarily result in effective group control of parties. Rather, as a contentious institutions perspective suggests, officeholders have incentives to take what group resources they can while ceding as little agenda-setting influence as possible. “Advocacy,” as a form of representation, helps politicians manage this tension by extending promissory commitments without giving up their autonomy. Four critical variables must be considered when assessing group influence on parties: electoral dynamics, group capture, the asymmetry of group-politician relations, and the potential for officeholders to offer lip service in exchange for group support. First, the competitive standing of a party—whether it is in the majority or the minority, whether its coalition is weak or strong—may influence

18

Introduction New Politics Reformers

1968 Party Crisis

Dynamic Contention

Hollow Party

Counter-Reformers

Advocacy Explosion

Advocacy Party

Figure 3. The Rise of the Advocacy Party.

officeholders’ strategic approach to groups.63 Politicians may adopt more or less exploitative relationships with groups depending on their electoral prospects. Should officeholders feel confident that their hold on office and policy-making authority is secure, they will have fewer incentives to placate groups with access and influence beyond what is relatively costless for them to provide. However, if party actors are vulnerable or seeking to construct a majority coalition, they may be willing to offer groups much more to incorporate their constituents into the party. Second, once incorporated, groups may lose leverage over party actors. Groups, of course, can be more or less integrated with parties. Partygroup relations vary over time and across groups as both parties and groups undergo internal processes of orga nizational change as well as exogenous transformation through repeated interactions in the electoral and legislative arenas.64 Conventional wisdom holds that as groups develop greater amounts of electoral resources, they can exert greater leverage over parties, which need help to win elections and produce legislation. However, possession of significant resources and the cultivation of durable partisan relationships might not be sufficient for groups to exert effective control. Party-group connections are more likely to reflect a curvilinear relationship between the degree of institutionalization and the degree of group influence. While relationships may become so well established that some become “anchoring groups” in the coalition, after a certain point

Introduction

19

groups may become “captured” by parties as any threat of withdrawal or defection becomes implausible.65 A necessary condition of group capture in a two-party system is the repositioning of the other party against the group in question or its key issues. Thus, not only does exit from an allied party become less feasible due to a group’s sunk costs in that party, but entry into the other party becomes untenable. Paul Frymer applies this theory principally to African American voters in the Democratic Party, but there is no reason why the same logic cannot be extended to organized groups, especially under modern conditions of polarization.66 Without the meaningful threat of exit, group support is likely to be taken for granted by party actors, and the former’s demands deprioritized as a result. Third, the group-control thesis underestimates officeholders’ capacity for relatively autonomous action, stemming in part from the inherent principalagent asymmetries in the politician-group relation. As Kathleen Bawn and her coauthors acknowledge (but decline to develop), “officeholders always have an information advantage over policy demanders” because “the official can tell whether the group is contributing [electoral resources] or not; it is much harder for the group to know whether the official is really advancing its agenda” behind the scenes.67 Officeholders are also more likely to be better attuned to the opportunity structure facing any specific policy proposal. Accordingly, officeholders may persuade groups about the limits of the possible, the likelihood of success for this or that issue, and the costs and benefits of par ticu lar ways of framing their demands. While scholars have emphasized the proactive and generative role officeholders and other political leaders can play in shaping voter preferences, that insight has not been extended to groups themselves, especially when officeholders have wellestablished links with groups.68 Group interests themselves may be partly endogenous to party linkages. No officeholder has greater capacity for autonomous action and reshaping group demands than the president.69 The power and prestige that attend the position provide the occupant of the Oval Office with the authority to define the policy agenda, apportion political capital, lobby legislators, grant special access to interest groups, staff the judiciary, and reorient the administrative state. As Chapter 6 shows, officeholder advantage over groups was clearly observable in President Carter’s efforts to resist the demands of full employment policy demanders in the 1970s. As groups and their congressional allies fought to hold the president’s feet to the fire on his policy

20

Introduction

pledges, the Carter White House threatened to deny groups access to the president and limit his support for their other legislative priorities. Lastly, as Boris Heersink has observed, “it is not clear whether elected officials and other party leaders actually follow through on their promises” to policy-demanding groups, despite the latter’s importance in securing nomination and election.70 Of course, there are many reasons why officeholders do not deliver on their promises, ranging from electoral results that deny legislative majorities, to domestic or foreign crises that unexpectedly shift the agenda. Yet another plausible scenario is that officeholders may simply pay lip ser vice to the group in question, offering in exchange for their electoral support only superficial recognition for their cause or halfhearted legislative or executive action that amounts to little substantive change. While lip ser vice risks incurring group reaction and threats of defection, these risks may be mitigated by factors such as term limits or capture, and could encourage groups to double down on their partisan engagement rather than exit, judging that even greater influence is necessary. Much of the oversight of these factors in the new party literature stems from their focus on nominations as the key site of group influence. To be sure, nominations and elections are critical moments in which office seekers are especially dependent on groups’ delivery of money, labor, votes, and other electorally relevant resources. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that groups eager to “get a genuine friend nominated and elected to office” offer ambitious office seekers assistance in return for specific policy pledges.71 However, this approach begs the question of what happens after nominations. Do politicians follow through on their pledges? Bracketing off these important questions forecloses a critical test of whether group influence in the presidential nomination process results in group control over parties and policy making. To address this issue, in Chapters 7 and 8, I examine how the contentious politics of the advocacy party have played out across two Democratic administrations in the postreform era. While the advocacy party defined the institutional context within which both presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama related to their party, the two leaders held divergent views of the efficacy of the new party politics and adopted vastly different approaches to the advocacy party itself. Clinton and his faction of New Democrats unsuccessfully tried to dismantle the New Politics inheritance by empowering Democratic officials and officeholders in the nomination process and diminishing the clout and visibility of affiliated interest groups, such as labor

Introduction

21

unions and civil rights organizations. By contrast, Obama sought with much greater success to harness the potential of the advocacy party by campaigning and governing as a veritable advocate-in-chief. Obama’s advocacy politics did not diminish the contentiousness of Democratic Party politics, as new and traditional groups continued to express frustration with the content and pace of the president’s fulfillment of his campaign promises. On the contrary, the Obama years displayed the central dynamic at the heart of the new Democratic Party: the tacit alliance of interest and movement groups with the growth of executive power and presidential dominance over the party. While the New Politics project had sought to restrain the executive and subordinate politicians to the party, the advocacy party has given way to groups’ embrace of presidential unilateralism insofar as it delivers on their demands. Stepping back and placing the transformation of the Democratic Party in a wider perspective, the rise of the advocacy party has had complex consequences for the course of American political development and the quality of American democracy. In the Conclusion, I consider the impact of the advocacy party on three durable shifts in modern American governance: the rise of executive-centered partisanship, the radicalization of the Republican Party and the asymmetric polarization of American politics, and the effects of increasing economic inequality on political participation and democratic responsiveness. Party reform, of course, did not directly cause any of these three major developments. But the advocacy party that has come about as a result of contentious party politics in the past reinforces their powerful and pathological dynamics in the present. While proposing practical solutions for escaping these problems goes beyond the scope of this book, I conclude by examining the normative assessments about the contemporary party system and the prospects for resolving the current crisis in American party politics.

CHAPTER 1

In the Shadow of States’ Rights The New Deal Democratic Party and the Prelude to Reform

In the sweltering heat of the Philadelphia summer, Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey took the podium to address the assembled Democratic National Convention on a motion to insert a strongly worded pro–civil rights plank in the party’s 1948 platform. He did not mince words: “To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights—I say to them, we are 172 years late. To those who say this bill is an infringement on states’ rights, I say . . . the time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”1 The target of Humphrey’s speech was not Republicans; it was the southern members of his own party, who did not fail to hear the confrontational message implicitly directed at them. After Humphrey’s barn-burning speech swung the convention in favor of the plank, delegates from South Carolina and Mississippi staged a boisterous walkout, subsequently launching the States’ Rights Democratic Party (or Dixiecrat Party) with a rival presidential ticket, leaving the national Democratic Party visibly fractured. While it had the appearance of spontaneity, the drama of the 1948 Philadelphia convention had been years in the making. The Supreme Court had struck the first blow in 1944 by outlawing the white primary, one of the key pillars of the Jim Crow regime. Once thought to have been a safe replacement for Henry Wallace as Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 vice presidential nominee, President Harry Truman had moved against the South upon taking the Oval Office, appointing a Presidential Committee on Civil Rights and vowing to “make the Federal Government a friendly, vigilant defender of the rights and equality of all Americans.”2 Southern Democrats, feeling

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increasingly under threat by the national party leadership, had anticipated a showdown at the 1948 convention and planned accordingly. At a large, preconvention gathering in Birmingham, Alabama, the soon-to-be Dixiecrats vowed to “preserve our civilization in the South” by any means necessary, including bolting from the national party.3 The 1948 convention appeared to many participants and observers as a crossroads in the struggle to define the identity of the Democratic Party and the scope of postwar liberalism. Would the Democrats continue, as Humphrey had put it, to live in the shadow of states’ rights or would they advance the cause of African American civil rights under a broader agenda of programmatic liberalism? As this episode of intraparty strife suggests, the doctrine of states’ rights meant more than just program or policy. It implicated Democratic Party organization as well. As V. O. Key noted in his magisterial study of southern politics, published only a year later, “a basic doctrine of the Dixiecrat rebellion was that the Democratic party of each state was an independent entity, not bound by the actions of the national convention.”4 These two dimensions of party—structure and program—were not unrelated. Indeed, as I will argue, the confederal structure of the national Democratic Party was an indispensable mechanism in reproducing the contradictory coalition undergirding the New Deal regime. A programmatic, disciplined, and cohesive national party could not have si multa neously contained what Nicol Rae describes as “the most liberal and the most conservative elements . . . in American society.”5 Moreover, the Democrats’ decentralized party structure significantly straitjacketed New Dealers from using the party as a vehicle for liberal reform. Even as the executive-centered New Deal administration represented a substantial centralization of political power at the national level, structurally the New Deal Democratic Party remained in the shadow of states’ rights. Attention to these contradictions and the confederal party structure that maintained them helps explain not only the limits of New Deal liberalism but also the persistent, if unsuccessful, attempts at party reform in the pre-1968 period. As the fractious 1948 convention displayed, the national Democratic Party had little ability or authority to discipline state party affiliates that defied the party platform or broke from the national ticket. On the contrary, as I will show, the Dixiecrat revolt displayed the capacity of state parties to discipline the national party in moments of sharp contention. In the decade and a half following the upheaval, the Democratic leadership resisted several high-profile intraparty attempts to promote African

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American civil rights, despite the growth of the southern black insurgency and landmark federal court decisions spurring the movement forward. It is no coincidence that when the stability of the party was engulfed in crisis in the late 1960s, party structure became one of the main targets for reform.

American Party Development While American politics has frequently been said to be “exceptional” in nature, few features of the American political system are as distinctive as its parties. Rather than a “contagion of the left,” as Maurice Duverger famously depicted the spread of mass parties in Western Europe, the development of mass partisan organization in the United States is better characterized as a contagion of ambitious officeholders, specifically those members of the political class competing for the office of the presidency.6 In Western Europe, where propertyless citizens by and large lacked voting rights and civil liberties and responded by building mass organ izations to break into the political system from the outside, parliamentary elites were compelled to construct rival mass organizations to try to retain office. Thus, European mass parties were “externally mobilized,” originating as extra-parliamentary organizations in pursuit of full citizenship status, but subsequently spreading throughout as elites were forced to mimic the mobilizing successes of subaltern social groups.7 In the United States, however, the revolutionary rupture of 1776 and the political dynamics that followed, especially the persistence of armed farmer militias, produced a very different pattern of party development with profound effects. As early as the 1790s, major policy disputes over the powers of the federal government opened cleavages within the group of the founders, and ad hoc coalitions took shape along differing political visions for the nascent republic. The recently ratified U.S. Constitution made no mention of political parties or how elections were to be organized and funded, allowing the practices that guide organized political contestation to be improvised by the states and an assortment of private actors. However, by the 1830s, in sharp contrast to Europe, extensive white male suffrage and the popu lar selection of presidential electors presented contending elite groups with the opportunity to go out and mobilize mass followings behind their political coalition.8 Interelite competition over national power thus spiraled outward from the state into organized partisan conflict in civil society, producing

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“internally mobilized parties.”9 Under the leadership of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the Democrats built the world’s first mass political party, mobilizing a heterogeneous group of farmers, laborers, and small business owners, all demanding greater access to political power and administrative spoils. The Jacksonians’ political opponents responded in kind, building their own mass organizations around distinct ethnocultural, religious, and economic cleavages in their effort to win election and retake national power.10 Early and extensive suffrage for white male citizens and their mobilization into mass partisan organizations had lasting consequences for American class formation. While European working classes had forged durable forms of consciousness and organization in their collective struggle for full citizenship, the American working class was durably fractured and segmented, not only between rival party organizations that politicized laborers along distinct ethnoreligious lines, but also between the white, male, native-born members, who enjoyed something close to full citizenship, and those who did not: women, African Americans, immigrants. This did not prevent American workers from engaging in forms of class organization. But the kinds of organizations they did produce, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), premised their activities on protecting the wages and working conditions of relatively skilled craft workers, reinforcing the social hierarchies that skewed these abilities according to race, gender, and status. When, in the Gilded Age, it seemed that the historic divisions within the American working class could be overcome by the development of more inclusive political organizations such as the Knights of Labor in the 1880s or the People’s Party in the 1890s, those efforts failed due to a combination of state repression, internal conflict, and calculated absorption by the existing party system. After the historic election of 1896, when the Democrats cemented their lock on the southern states and assimilated the agrarian bloc, a dynamic of political demobilization set in, engineered by the architects of Jim Crow in the South, and facilitated in the North by the AFL’s official policy of nonpartisanship. Despite several attempts between 1906 and 1918 to forge a lasting alliance linking the AFL and the Democratic Party, electoral demobilization and widespread voter abstentionism among workers would remain until the 1930s the overriding features of American class politics. Also setting American parties apart from their counterparts across the Atlantic was their material basis in patronage.11 The contagious mass parties

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of Western Europe built hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations around large dues-paying memberships, whose contributions funded local party branches in their community organizing and campaigning activities. Partisan identity was formed around a distinct ideology and party program, often promoting full citizenship for the working-class constituents of the trade unions that supplied the dues-paying rank and file. American parties, by contrast, while not without their own ideological or programmatic content, throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, subsidized their mass mobilizing activities by exchanging material rewards for voters’ support.12 Bosses of state and local party organizations and precinct captains distributed government jobs (for example, public administration, fire, police, sanitation), government contracts, business licenses, immigration cards, and more to their partisan clients, all with the expectation that recipients’ votes as well as a percentage of their salaries would be offered in support of the party come campaign season. These interpersonal, transactional relationships held together the centrifugal forces of the far-flung (and growing) American polity, what Stephen Skowronek has called a “state of courts and parties.”13 But if the major American political parties were born at the national level, the phrase “national political parties” is something of a misnomer in the U.S. context. Organizationally, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the national Democratic Party was nothing more than a loose confederation of state Democratic parties, each unit sovereign and independent in its internal affairs and its external affiliations. The national party had no independent existence apart from the state parties when they met in convention, aside from the periodic meeting of its national committee, a body that functioned for most of its existence as a “headless, drifting organization” linking one convention to the next.14 The national party’s exclusive reason for being was to nominate a presidential candidate and assist in the general election campaign. Thus, outside the quadrennial presidential election cycle, the national party could barely be said to exist as an organized force in American politics, constituting what E.  E. Schattschneider called “ghost parties.”15 While the quadrennial nominating convention was formally the highest authority in the party, decision-making power remained in the hands of the state party leaders. From 1832 to 1908, delegates to the Democratic conventions were selected by state party organizations, making their choice through either district caucuses or state conventions or central committee

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appointments or some combination of the three.16 Beginning in 1912, primary elections were introduced in many states’ delegate selection process to circumvent the intermediation of state and local party organizations or their leaders. However, they did little to dislodge the influence of party leaders over determining the eventual nominee. After World War I, amid the general crisis in Progressivism, party leaders rolled back the number of primary states from twenty-six in 1916 to fifteen by 1935. The results of those that remained were often defined as “beauty contests” rather than binding events, leaving party leaders free to take their results under advisement at their discretion.17

The New Deal Coalition This pattern of development produced some of the most decentralized party organizations the democratic world has ever known, as well as a critical institutional factor in the formation and reproduction of the New Deal order. With the exceptions of Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, Democratic control of the White House had remained elusive in the postbellum period. The rapid industrialization and transformation of the American economy in the wake of Reconstruction was a project conducted under the leadership of the Republican Party. However, when that regime faltered in the crash of 1929, and the economic crisis deepened over the next election cycle, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party achieved a historic electoral mandate, several times over, to reconstruct American politics in the name of economic recovery. The New Deal regime that resulted stood on three pillars: the labor-liberal alliance, northern political machines, and southern party-states. Together these coalitional players cemented together a distinctive set of institutions, policies, discourses, and practices that embedded a new common sense about the relationship between state and society, citizen and market.18 The Labor-Liberal Alliance First, the New Deal coalition fundamentally reshaped American class politics. While working-class political mobilization had begun to reverse its secular decline in 1928 through the ill-fated presidential candidacy of Al Smith, the New Deal years saw not only increasingly active support from

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working-class voters for Democratic candidates, but also, more significantly, a veritable explosion of proletarian social and political struggle. This included not only the massive strike waves of 1933–1934, the famous sit-down strikes in the Midwest automobile plants, and the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a more radical, more politically engaged alternative to the AFL, but also the veterans’ marches on the Capitol, the Hooverville tent cities erected across the urban landscape, and the populist challenges to Roosevelt’s political leadership from Louisiana’s Huey Long and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) Party. By the mid-1930s, the Democratic Party alliance with the new labor movement had formally reversed the long-standing depoliticization of the U.S. working class, pulling it into mainstream politics and into the Democratic Party.19 However, because the Democratic Party was not an internally uniform party, it is misleading to pose the labor-Democratic partnership in such general terms. Rather, as Andrew Battista has insisted, labor established an alliance with a part of the Democratic Party: namely, its northern liberal wing.20 Drawing liberals and labor together was a shared commitment to the expansion of federal capacities to restore stability to the political economy and an ideological discourse that emphasized a capacious notion of programmatic rights, including the collective rights of industrial workers. The severity of the Depression and the broader electoral realignment spanning the 1928 and 1936 election cycles provided liberals and labor unions with a common political and regional basis on which to come together, as well as a shared set of commitments and goals orienting their political strategy. The upsurge of labor organizing resulted in and flowed from favorable legislation such as the National Industrial Recovery Act and later the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) of 1935, recognizing the right of workers to form unions and institutionalizing it in systems of collective bargaining. The growth of industrial unionism through the breakaway CIO eclipsed the antistatism of the AFL. Consequently, as the voluntarism of craft unionism was overtaken by the success of the CIO, a durable relationship took shape between American unions, New Deal administrators, and the Democratic Party.21 Far from a “barren marriage,” the labor-liberal alliance proved to be mutually beneficial, supplying unions with legitimacy and legal protections and providing liberal Democrats with enormous electoral resources.22 Together, labor-liberals played a leading role in the formation and passage of

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key New Deal legislative milestones, including the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. In exchange for policy victories, the labor movement had come to function by 1936 as a surrogate electoral organization for the party in many major industrial states with a large share of the Electoral College. Through official bodies, such as labor’s Nonpartisan League, as well as through unofficial channels, labor performed a variety of functions for the Democrats, including registering and mobilizing voters, collecting campaign contributions, distributing literature, and even aggregating diverse interests across Democratic constituencies such as civil rights groups. After Republican victories in the 1942 midterm elections, the CIO launched its political action committee (PAC) as a permanent campaign apparatus. In establishing a network of state organizations, the CIO-PAC sought “to create a new ‘CIO voter’ whose adherence to the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party would become as natural and reliable as that of a British laborite or European social democrat.”23 As  J. David Greenstone concluded in his study of American labor politics, “organized labor functioned as the most important nationwide electoral organization for the Democratic party.”24 While the CIO (and later, after 1955, the merged American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations [AFL-CIO]) was a relatively successful force in getting out the vote for Democratic candidates in some large industrial states, the nature of the labor federation’s political activity did not effectively encourage the formation of a collective identity of liberal Democratic worker-voters, as some had hoped. On the contrary, for all its electoral success, labor’s Committee on Political Education (COPE) had little educational capacity when it came to engaging rank-and-file workers around the federation’s social democratic agenda being pursued in Washington.25 With a decentralized organizational structure, liberal labor leaders could not compel state federations of labor and municipal central labor councils to engage in coordinated political activity at state and local levels. This resulted in a bifurcated labor movement that was simultaneously in the vanguard of progressive action at the national level and an unreliably liberal force at subnational levels.26 These divisions within the labor movement reinforced the leadership’s reliance on the national level of political power, especially the presidency, as a conduit to public policy influence. As an impor tant source of electoral support, labor’s point of leverage was on the selection of presidential nominees. As a longtime treasury secretary and president of the AFL-CIO, Lane

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Kirkland, later reflected, it was “a tacit, invisible but real arrangement” between top trade union officials and leaders of the Democratic Party.27 Labor “ didn’t go out and seek delegates [for the national convention]. That wasn’t the instrument through which we influenced events. . . . We had a bargaining relationship with the leadership of the party. . . . [T]he party leaders knew that, in the general election, they needed labor to draw some of the water and hew some of the wood. The leaders of the party wanted to win. They wouldn’t nominate anyone who was too offensive to the trade union movement. So, we would hold discussions, and our wishes would be made known to those who were particularly active in party affairs.”28 But trade unions’ integration into the Democratic Party on the basis of elite brokerage had double-edged effects. While it proved a valuable entry point for influence, it reinforced the leadership’s top-heavy approach to politics, which disincentivized membership education, politicization, and mobilization. Moreover, their investment in the smoke-filled backrooms would place many in the union leadership at odds with the democratizing thrust of the New Politics project in the late 1960s. Northern Political Machines While prior to the New Deal, the Democrats’ base of electoral strength stretched across the South, the party also had important bastions of partisan strength north of the Mason-Dixon line. Throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, these bastions took the characteristic organizational form of American politics: the political machine. While most typically associated with urban governance due to high-profile machines such as New York’s Tammany Hall, Frank Hague’s New Jersey organization, or the famous Chicago Democratic Party under Mayor Richard Daley, machine organizations dotted the American landscape, stretching past city limits into suburban and rural communities as well.29 Powered by patronage, these transactional party structures mobilized electoral coalitions through armies of party activists, campaign workers, ward and precinct captains, and partisan voters. Due to the high ratio of elective to appointive positions at the local level, government jobs were the most common currency transacted. (One out of three New York Democratic voters held a Tammany job in the 1910s; Chicago’s Cook County organization distributed as many as thirty thousand jobs as late as the 1970s.) But material rewards for partisan loyalty also included immigration and naturalization

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assistance, public ser vice provision, shots of whiskey, or the famed Christmas turkey.30 Aside from its impressively robust mobilizing capacities, another vital function of any political machine was to control the local or state nominating processes. As Tammany’s Boss Tweed is reputed to have said, “I don’t care who does the electing, just so long as I can do the nominating.”31 Machine control was especially easy when local nominating contests were conducted through caucus-conventions, where machines could handily provide the majority of participants. Turn-of-the-century Progressive reformers who attempted to supplant machine power with the direct primary had greater success in regions, such as the western and mountain states, that were not already monopolized by machine bosses.32 However, even in those places, “good government” reform coalitions often constructed machines of their own, reshaping electoral institutions and public policy to bias incumbent reform administrations.33 When introduced in the Northeast and Midwest, primaries proved ineffective in the face of the machines, which could heavily influence voter turnout and delegate slate making. Once tamed, primaries posed no real threat to machine bosses who, by the 1940s and 1950s, had become their masters.34 While political control of America’s largest cities was roughly split between Republican Party and Democratic Party organizations on the eve of the Great Depression, with the success of Roosevelt’s New Deal the largest political machines across the nation became “an entirely Democratic phenomenon.”35 Though it was once thought that the coming of the New Deal and the strengthening of federal welfare provisioning signaled the “last hurrah” of machine politics, New Deal programs continued to be administered at the local level, making the machines of continuing relevance to Washington.36 Indeed, the New Deal not only “presented no great threat” to local machines, but also actually offered a promising opportunity for local political entrepreneurs to stitch together a wide-ranging political coalition, all of whom had an interest in the expansion of federal urban programs.37 As John Mollenkopf has shown, Democrats discovered that “they could augment and ultimately replace the particularism and uncertainty of the oldfashioned machine with a new kind characterized by bureaucratic certainty and funded by the US Treasury.”38 Political machines and their bosses were thus integrated into the New Deal as its constituent “growth machines” and came to serve as the local representatives of the New Deal’s state-sponsored development agenda.39

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This development was especially impor tant in the large industrial cities that received waves of African American in-migration from the South and rural areas since the first Great Migration during World War I. Frequently lacking any significant resources other than kin networks, black migrants were forced to settle in rundown, overcrowded neighborhoods lacking public infrastructure and social ser vices. In some locales, shrewd political bosses used New Deal resources as a means to integrate these new populations with impressive success. As Nancy Weiss has shown, African Americans in the urban North made a dramatic leap into the Democratic column between 1932 and 1936. Such a transformation was due to the fact that African Americans, as a group that was predominantly working class, overwhelmingly benefited from New Deal relief programs, despite the racially disparate access to New Deal public programs. Republican opposition to FDR’s agenda, especially those agencies that most directly benefited African Americans such as the Works Progress Administration, sharply accelerated blacks’ conversion from the party of Lincoln to the party of Roosevelt.40 In the short run, then, New Deal relief money helped sustain Democratic machines, if in modified form. In the long run, however, the transformation of America’s cities wrought by federal urban policy ultimately weakened local partisan organizations and destabilized the New Deal regime’s urban roots. Depression-era programs and their postwar counterparts helped spur greater geographic mobility on the part of many upwardly mobile populations, including those ethnic constituencies organized by the older vintage of Democratic machines, who began leaving urban centers for the new, federally subsidized suburban developments in growing numbers after World War II.41 Equally disruptive was the displacing effects of urban renewal and slum-clearance programs, which often subsidized the construction of downtown commercial districts while relocating racially segregated public housing to outlying tracts with lower market values.42 The interlocking processes of suburbanization and ghettoization transformed America’s metropolitan spaces and disrupted patronage networks that had developed and sustained Democratic majorities during the New Deal era.43 Southern Party-States In the South, state Democratic parties were integral components of the racialized social order of Jim Crow. Indeed, southern state Democratic parties had been instrumental in coordinating resistance to Reconstruction after

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the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, ultimately overseeing the construction of what Robert Mickey has called “enclaves of authoritarian rule.”44 Over the ensuing three decades, Democrats spearheaded the southern campaign for white supremacy and the defense of states’ rights. Through the disenfranchisement of freedpersons and poor whites, as well as extensive voter fraud, corruption, and vigilante violence, anti-Democratic sources of partisan competition, whether Republican or Populist, were virtually eliminated, leaving nearly all public offices, government appointments, and state resources at the exclusive command of Democratic elites. As one prominent southern judge put it at the time, “The State . . . is the Democratic party. . . . [And] the interests of the party . . . are the interests of the State.”45 On the eve of the New Deal, southern Democratic party-states presided over a reconstituted racialized political economy based on sharecropping and tenancy in agriculture, with a residual low-wage labor market centered on southern industry. Jim Crow and the one-party Democratic South were born together and remained inextricably linked.46 Within each of these authoritarian enclaves, organized political conflict became deinstitutionalized from anything resembling a genuine party system, building little in the way of vote-mobilizing machinery. As V. O. Key argues, the one-party South was really a no-party South.47 In place of a competitive party system stood the all-white primary election. Because nearly all politicians were Democrats, southern politics took on especially intense forms of factional competition for party nominations. Southern elections therefore emphasized candidates’ individual personalities and reputations, and entailed the continual building and rebuilding of personalized campaign organizations, often on the basis of patronage promises and accords with local economic elites.48 In Congress, southern Democrats were the face of the Jim Crow order and sought to defend local arrangements from federal intervention accordingly. While this may seem to suggest an inherent antipathy between Dixie Democrats and the liberal New Dealers, the two groups found grounds on which to cooperate. Indeed, southern Democrats were, with few exceptions, eager New Dealers at the start. The South was in desperate need of federal assistance because it was home to most of those who were “ill-housed, illclad, and ill-nourished.”49 With a regional economy predominantly geared to cash crops, the South was also especially vulnerable to market fluctuations. Southern poverty, as bad as it was prior to the New Deal, had deepened dramatically during the Great Depression. By 1933, state and local

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relief systems as well as charity organizations had been stretched to the breaking point. However, the Roosevelt administration was in desperate need of southern support. New Deal legislation required southern votes if it was to pass successfully through Congress. The continuing influence of Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft in the Republican Party guaranteed a high degree of partisan hostility to Roosevelt in Congress, making the solid Democratic South even more impor tant as a dependable New Deal voting bloc. Thus, as Ira Katznelson and his coauthors have put it, “even at the height of the New Deal, the Democratic party required the acquiescence of southern representatives, who as potential coalition partners for Republicans could, if they chose, block the national program.”50 The Roosevelt administration’s dependence on the southern wing of the party, however, came at a price. As the political representatives of Jim Crow, southern Democrats, whether liberal New Dealers or reactionary racists at heart, made the maintenance of the region’s racialized political economy the key condition for their political support. More than just congressional votes were on the line. The power of the region within the New Deal coalition was the result of specific institutional arrangements that gave disproportionate influence over the shape and content of federal legislation to southern public officials. Within Congress, committee appointments were distributed according to seniority. Southern congressmen, hailing from the safe districts shielded by their authoritarian party-states, accumulated lengths of ser vice that secured their hold over powerful committee chairs. Between 1933 and 1952, they held nearly 50  percent of all such Senate and House positions. From these seats of power they exercised control over the scheduling of hearings, the terms of debate and deliberation, and whether proposed legislation would come to the floor for a vote. This provided them with not just the veto power of obstruction but also the capacity to positively shape the New Deal’s legislative agenda.51 The paramount economic concern motivating southern legislators, however, was to preserve the significant wage differential that existed between the northern and southern regions of the American economy. Southern agriculture and industry were labor-intensive sectors that depended for their viability on a cheap, tractable workforce. Racial segregation and the relative absence of unions, by disciplining black and white workers alike, facilitated the South’s development strategy. As Nelson Lichtenstein has noted, “No set of politicians was more sophisticated in understanding the extent to which the New Deal’s legitimization of the union movement and its orientation

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toward a rationalized, national labor market subverted the power of the old oligarchy and threatened the region’s low-wage advantage.”52 Southern Democrats thus used the variety of institutional tools at their disposal to filter apparent threats to Jim Crow from New Deal legislation. These included securing occupational exemptions for domestic and agricultural workers—the vast bulk of whom were black—from the National Recovery Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, and the Federal Labor Standards Act. Additionally, Federal Economic Relief and Works Progress Administration officials routinely purged southern clients from the relief rolls when harvest season approached, assuring planters a plentiful supply of cheap wage laborers.53 The southern bloc also exercised its power in the Democratic Party at the quadrennial nominating conventions, where the two-thirds supermajority rule in place for nearly a century gave southern states a de facto veto over the party’s national ticket. This had made southern party leaders the key convention powerbrokers in 1920 and 1924 when the region gave the party some 90 percent of its Electoral College votes. Indeed, the 1928 Democratic platform had affirmed the “Rights of the States” when it declared that “the constitutional rights and powers of the states shall be preserved in their full vigor and virtue.”54 However, as we will see below, southern leverage at the convention had been swept away in the Roosevelt landslide of 1932, when the region’s share of the Democratic vote fell to 26 percent.55 Most of the time, Roosevelt’s pragmatism militated against confrontations that would be politically costly. Generally speaking, his administration accepted the prevailing distribution of power and sought to work with it. For instance, a number of bills were introduced in Congress throughout the Depression to address the rise in racial violence across the nation. But antilynching legislation received no direct support from the Oval Office. Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), recounted what Roosevelt was to have said: “If I come out for an anti-lynching bill now, they [southern Democrats] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”56 There were, however, instances when the president did attempt high-profile political interventions in the structure and operation of the party. Roosevelt, while harboring reservations about angering southern Democrats during his first term, privately encouraged the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, James Farley, to organize the repeal of the two-thirds

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supermajority rule. Southern delegations to the 1936 convention were almost unanimously opposed to repeal. However, in their newfound status as a minority in the party, they were unable to block the rule change.57 The 1936 convention was also the first in the party’s history to welcome African American delegates, including the first black Democratic member of Congress, Arthur W. Mitchell. Roosevelt also invited a black minister to deliver the opening ceremonial address, so offending South Carolina senator “Cotton Ed” Smith that he walked out of the convention hall, declaring, “[T]hat ain’t my kind of democracy.”58 The president also convened an advisory “black cabinet” of New Deal staffers, and he established a Colored Division at the DNC to better integrate northern black voters into the party.59 But Roosevelt’s 1938 attempt to purge several southern Democratic opponents from Congress by publicly supporting their primary challengers was dramatically unsuccessful, and it signaled the beginning of sustained congressional opposition to the national party leader from the southern party-states.60 Thereafter, New Deal progressives largely lost faith in transforming the Democratic Party into a vehicle of programmatic reform. The decentralized party structure and the defense of states’ rights put discretionary authority in the hands of southern Democrats to implement federal policies in ways that limited the reach of New Deal liberalism, curtailed unionism, and reinforced the color line. In response, Roosevelt and his allies turned to expanding executive administration instead.61 But, as Thomas J. Sugrue has observed, “when it came to the question of race relations, the United States was still a nation of courts and parties.”62

The Contradictions of the New Deal Order This coalition of strange bedfellows brought to life one of the longest-lasting regimes in American political history. However, its internal contradictions, arising from the frictional stresses between its liberal and conservative factions, as well as its policy effects, would eventually drive the coalition apart by the mid-1960s. At a discursive level, the aggressively interventionist New Deal agenda had renewed hope that the federal government might act boldly on behalf of the poor and insecure—and by extension, African Americans—while the subsequent mobilization for World War II infused that hope with the concept of universal programmatic rights. Wartime rhetoric and government

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propaganda vilified the racist ideologies of European and Japa nese fascism and depicted the worldwide military conflict as the struggle “between human freedom and human slavery.”63 Roosevelt himself defined the goals of Allied victory as the protection of the Four Freedoms—freedom of religion and speech, freedom from fear and want—which were the “rights of men of every creed and every race, wherever they live.”64 By uniting black and white soldiers and members of the public against a common enemy, such a capacious doctrine of individual rights, and the government activism to defend and secure it, had a galvanizing effect on advocates of racial justice.65 Additionally, for all the effort by southern Democrats to preserve Jim Crow, federal New Deal and wartime policies could not help but restructure the southern political economy and consequently destabilize the region’s racial hierarchy. Federal agencies such as the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Agriculture Adjustment Administration made sweeping changes in southern agriculture and industry. Labor-saving innovations came mostly at the expense of unskilled black labor. (Because of the many black southerners displaced, the NRA came to be known as the “Negro Removal Act.”)66 Mobilization for World War II brought even greater federal presence to the region, sharply accelerating the industrial and urban development processes already under way. Almost half of all federal expenditures for military base construction were directed to the South, creating boomtown conditions that drew in the rural population. The rapid installation of military bases and defense-related infrastructure initiated “a sort of agricultural enclosure movement across the South” as “farms and forests became factories and arsenals.”67 The resulting dislocation fed the growing outmigration of African Americans toward large industrial cities in the North. Then, as black Americans arrived in northern cities in greater numbers, the calculus of electoral politics began to shift. Democratic politicians and political machines began to make inroads with a population that, when they were not barred from exercising their right to vote, had been overwhelmingly committed to the party of Lincoln. While the Republicans had turned away from protecting the rights of African American citizens after 1876, GOP platforms continued to draw on the legacy of the Great Emancipator. The national Democratic Party, in contrast, featured no such rhetoric. And while some northern state party platforms began advocating for African Americans’ civil rights, its southern party-states often continued to explicitly endorse the cause of white supremacy and states’ rights. Nonetheless,

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the New Deal’s appeal and the Republicans’ hostile response shifted African Americans’ partisan loyalties to the Democrats, linking the party, as both ally and antagonist, to the nascent civil rights movement.68 Finally, while the labor-liberal alliance had fully committed itself to working within the New Deal Democratic Party, labor-liberals were not content with the party as it was. In fact, labor-liberals viewed the southern wing of the party as the primary obstacle standing in the way of advancing the New Deal agenda, especially after the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act passed over President Truman’s veto with the full support of southern Democrats, establishing an effective firewall against significant unionization below the Mason-Dixon line.69 Formulating a strategy of “realignment,” labor-liberals sought to consolidate a range of liberal forces inside the Democratic Party while simulta neously pushing conservatives into the Republican fold. In a confidential memo to the United Auto Workers (UAW) president, Walter Reuther, after the disastrous 1952 elections, Jack Kroll, head of the CIOPAC and later COPE, characterized the party status quo as “intolerable.”70 Articulating a perspective that would become commonplace among New Politics activists after 1968, Kroll bemoaned the decentralized power structure frustrating labor-liberals inside the party, which, he said, resulted in programmatic incoherence. “The congressional branch of the party could be completely opposed to pro-union legislation, even though the national convention, the democratically-chosen voice of the party, had gone on record as favoring such legislation.”71 If the conservative monopoly over Democratic party-states could be broken, the enemies of the labor movement in Congress could be replaced with union-friendly liberals. However, after the failure of Operation Dixie, the CIO’s major postwar effort at organizing the South, COPE looked to the growing movement of southern blacks, seeing the overthrow of Jim Crow as the surest way to realign southern Democratic parties.72 Thus, the very operation of the New Deal regime seemed to push in multiple, mutually incompatible directions at once. The rhetoric of rights-based liberalism seemed flexible enough to extend to African Americans (and later, many others) the full citizenship status traditionally accorded primarily to white, breadwinning males. The party-states of the South sought simultaneously to modernize their political economy while also retaining the region’s racial order. Meanwhile, black voters began figuring as a larger factor in the electoral setting of large industrial cities, and labor-liberals looked to shift the balance of power in Congress by expelling conservative

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southerners from the party altogether. To be sure, there were policies and perspectives that drew the contradictory coalition together. Regime leaders, especially those in the executive, crafted durable coalitional links around a policy framework of economic growth, liberal internationalism, and Cold War anticommunism.73 Nevertheless, in this context, civil rights for black Americans came to reflect the balance of power in the New Deal party as a whole.

Party Federalism, Civil Rights, and the Limits of New Deal Liberalism The intraparty struggle between New Deal factions produced periodic flashpoints throughout the postwar era. From the 1948 Philadelphia convention to clashes within the national committee to the Mississippi Freedom credentials challenge at the 1964 Atlantic City convention—each of these moments in the course of the New Deal order underscored the central role of party structure in shaping Democratic programmatic and ideological conflict. However, each instance also illustrated the weakness of the national party to employ its nominally supreme authority to resolve these contradictions. Following the Dixiecrat rebellion, the national Democratic leadership opted for the carrot rather than the stick. Intraparty reprisals for defection were tame and eventually abandoned. Truman only temporarily withheld patronage from a few southern congressmen and dismissed several renegades from the DNC for their support of the Dixiecrats.74 The DNC subsequently instituted a loyalty oath for all delegates at the 1952 convention, pledging state delegations to support the party’s nominee. When Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia resisted, the powerful Illinois delegation, hesitant to damage Governor Adlai Stevenson’s prospects, successfully modified the resolution to free delegates from pledges that conflicted with their state laws or party rules. By the 1956 convention the loyalty oath was dropped altogether.75 Meanwhile, the party leadership beat a cautious retreat on civil rights. As the party’s nominee in both 1952 and 1956, Stevenson sought détente with the southern rebels by placating the region as a whole. He publicly distanced himself from the loyalty pledge, saying that “it isn’t in the nature of a party structure that covers a nation to have total discipline and total conformity of views.”76 He also chose Alabama senator John Sparkman, a supporter

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of the Dixiecrats, as his running mate in 1952. The party leader’s reunification through appeasement was complemented by the party’s congressional leadership, which fell to Texans Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson during the 1950s. Taking advantage of the attacks of the Taft wing of the GOP on the “me-too” moderate Republicanism of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, the Rayburn-Johnson leadership sought to co-opt the popularity of the president, throwing their weight behind his agenda and marginalizing those Johnson called the “bomb-throwing liberals” in the Democratic caucus.77 With the Democrats out of power in the executive branch and an accommodationist congressional leadership, labor-liberals intertwined their policy agenda with demands for party reform, specifically regarding the location of policy-making leadership in the absence of a sitting Democratic president. In the wake of Stevenson’s first electoral defeat, a correspondence committee developed among Stevenson supporters, linking together a network of liberal intellectuals and Democratic officeholders with a desire to promote a powerful liberal agenda in the party. The group’s membership overlapped with those in the foremost postwar liberal advocacy organization, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and included newly elected officials of the House and Senate such as Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, journalist Norman Cousins, and political scientists E. E. Schattschneider and James MacGregor Burns. Schattschneider himself had recently chaired a famous study undertaken by the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1950, which had lamented the nonprogrammatic, decentralized structure of the American party system and proposed as an alternative the development of what its authors called “responsible party government” through articulating clear policy positions, enforcing intraparty discipline, and centralizing party power at the national level.78 The Stevenson group found a key ally in the new DNC chair, Paul Butler, who took up with urgency the need for a strong, programmatically coherent Democratic Party. Having been quite taken with the analysis and recommendations laid out in the APSA report, Butler argued that if the Democrats wanted to retake the White House, they would have to engage in institutional reform both inside the party as well as in Congress.79 In his public statements, the DNC chair criticized the “loose organization in the relationship of the state group to the national level,” the “loosely organized national conventions and national committees,” as well as “the lack of mechanics to provide statements of official policy.”80 Butler reserved his major

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criticism, however, for the “total lack of disciplinary authority in implementing the provisions of the party platform.”81 The outcome of the 1956 elections hardened liberals’ resolve and emboldened Butler’s leadership on the party-reform issue. Stevenson’s second failure to capture the presidency was offset by increasing numbers of liberal Democrats in Congress, whose ranks increased yet again in the 1958 midterms. However, despite these gains, legislative agenda-setting power remained concentrated in the hands of conservative southern committee chairs and the pragmatic leadership of Rayburn and Johnson. To counter this, Butler proposed the creation of an alternative policy-making body within the DNC, the Democratic Advisory Council (DAC), composed of liberal members of Congress as well as Democratic mayors and governors, public intellectuals, and honorary party figureheads such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Its function would be “to coordinate and advance” coherent and compelling policy proposals according to what Butler called “Democratic principles.”82 Such a body would serve to keep Democrats apace with what he called “the new politics,” which was “increasing the emphasis on the power of issues, principles, and ideas” in American public life.83 Proposing to relocate agenda-setting power to an issue-oriented party council met with fierce criticism and opposition from congressional leaders, who premised their legislative strategy on minimizing intraparty divisions and supporting the initiatives of the Eisenhower administration. Such bipartisanship necessitated pursuing civil rights at a glacial pace—precisely the approach that Butler and others diagnosed as the main obstacle to Democratic victory. Rayburn’s and Johnson’s objections reflected more than just guarded defense of their own privileges. Indeed, Johnson and Rayburn opposed Butler’s vision of political parties as principled agents of social change. For Johnson, “the biggest danger to American stability is the politics of principle, which brings out the masses in irrational fights for unlimited goals.”84 He attacked the DAC as “open[ing] up a real hornet’s nest” because it was “completely powerless to produce any votes” in Congress and was only capable of “deepening divisions in the Democratic Party.”85 From the perspective of the party’s legislative leaders, any policy-making body outside the House or Senate could have no practical understanding of the actual mechanics of lawmaking—brokering, deal making, compromising— and could only have counterproductive effects on the party and its success. Although the DAC did issue public statements and policy proposals until the 1960 presidential race assumed overpowering attention, the intractable

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opposition of congressional leaders prevented DAC programs from becoming legislative initiatives in the late 1950s. Once Butler was replaced as DNC chair, the DAC was discontinued. Another major effort to challenge Democratic Party structure came not from elite politics in Washington, but from the grassroots politics of the southern civil rights movement. During the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) mounted a credentials challenge against the all-white Mississippi delegation on the grounds of racially discriminatory practices. By launching their own racially integrated rival party organization as part of their Freedom Summer project, MFDP organizers such as Ella Baker, Bob Moses, and Fannie Lou Hamer and their labor-liberal allies challenged the convention to employ its nominally supreme authority to reconcile the discrepancy between its national policy priorities (Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act into law only weeks before) and the racially discriminatory practices of one of its subnational units. As the ADA chair, John Roche, stated in a letter to state Democratic chairs, “Support of the Freedom Democratic Party will be consistent with the principles of the platforms adopted for many years by the Democratic National Conventions . . . [and] make the Party’s position clear.”86 While the Credentials Committee was charged with adjudicating occasional accusations that a state’s delegates were not duly selected according to state law or the state party’s own rules, it was not clear what should be done in cases alleging systematic racial discrimination. In light of this legal vacuum, the MFDP counsel, Joseph Rauh, framed the challenge as a test of the party’s commitment to its own values. “In the final analysis,” he argued during the committee hearing, “the issue is one of principle . . . whether the National Democratic Party takes its place with the oppressed Negroes of Mississippi or their white oppressors.”87 In supportive testimony, Martin Luther King underscored the international implications of liberal hy pocrisy, asking, “Can we preach freedom and democracy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America if we refuse to give voice and vote to the only democratically constituted delegation from Mississippi?”88 Mississippi leaders countered with their own arguments, painting the MFDP as a rump collection of “foreign” activists who engaged in secret meetings that were not representative of registered voters in the state. A Mississippi DNC committee member, E. K. Collins, denounced the Freedom Democrats and issued an ominous threat to the Credentials Committee,

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portending a southern walkout greater than that witnessed in 1948, warning that “you will kill our party if you do not seat the lawful delegation from Mississippi.”89 Eager to avoid an embarrassing walkout at his nomination ceremony or defections in the general election, Johnson used all the resources at his disposal to chart a middle course and resolve the Mississippi challenge. He assigned vice presidential hopeful Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther to offer a White House–approved compromise, which provided two at-large seats for MFDP members, guest status for the remaining Freedom delegates, and the commitment to establish an official commission to eliminate racial discrimination in the delegate selection process by the 1968 convention. The Credentials Committee approved the White House compromise over the objections of the MFDP. Its final report instructed the DNC to include in its official call to the 1968 convention the requirement that state parties select their delegates “regardless of race, color, creed or national origin,” guaranteeing all voters the “opportunity to participate fully in Party affairs.” The resolution went on to request the creation of a special party committee “to aid the State Democratic Parties in fully meeting the responsibilities and assurances required for inclusion.”90 Neither the attempts of race liberals in 1948, the work of Butler in the 1950s, nor the MFDP challenge in 1964 proved able to overthrow the structural power of the states to defy the authority of the national Democratic Party. However, even though the MFDP’s immediate goal of displacing white supremacy from the party was not achieved, the antidiscrimination clause approved by the Atlantic City convention would come to have significant ramifications for party organization and program going forward. As the DNC-created Special Equal Rights Committee, created by the Atlantic City compromise, later reported, the 1968 convention would have the unambiguous capacity to discipline its state affiliates on the issue of civil rights, and that “failure on the part of a State delegation to meet this [nondiscrimination] requirement could lead to the sitting of another delegation.”91 Evidence that others in the national party were inclined to take the issues of party discipline seriously was also manifest in Congress, where, after the 1964 elections, the House Democratic caucus voted to strip two southern members of their seniority for openly supporting Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. Such an assertion of party discipline on unruly members suggested that the independence of party actors to set their own rules and define their own platforms was coming under closer scrutiny.

CHAPTER 2

The Undemocratic Party Antiwar Insurgents and the Party Crisis of 1968

Presumably, all political actors would prefer to refashion the institutional and discursive landscape at their convenience, remolding it to fit perfectly their priorities and preferences. In reality, of course, this is practically unfeasible. Reform never takes place on a clean slate, and reformers—no matter how creative they may be—must always struggle with the opportunities and constraints that past structures, norms, and traditions impose on them. And while reformers always confront an uphill battle, still fewer ever get the opportunity to try. As theorized in the model of party change described in the Introduction, the path to entrepreneurial party transformation begins with a crisis of such severity that incumbent party leaders lose their claims to legitimacy, and proposals for structural change to the mechanisms of leadership selection gain traction. After two decades of intermittent challenges to the limits that Democratic Party structure imposed on the reach of New Deal liberalism, a new generation of political entrepreneurs took advantage of the window of opportunity opened by the 1968 party crisis to transform the party irrevocably. This time, it was not merely the limits of New Deal liberalism that were under scrutiny; it was the very nature of the New Deal order itself. The social, political, and cultural explosions of the 1960s—campus occupations, street demonstrations, urban riots, and rank-and-file worker revolts— helped shatter the ideological core of the New Deal regime and the legitimacy of Democratic Party leadership. The domestic and foreign policy crises of civil rights and Vietnam produced tectonic stresses inside the party, as the mandate of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide was wiped away in the 1966 midterm elections. That same year, the formation of the Black

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Panthers and the National Organization for Women instigated a wave of new social movement organizing pressing back against the civic hierarchies embedded in New Deal social and economic policies. The depth of confusion and chaos engulfing Democratic politics immobilized even the paragons of postwar liberalism. As the United Auto Workers (UAW) president, Walter Reuther, observed, there was a “new breed of workers” fueling an upsurge in industrial militancy, one that combined economic demands of “equal pay for equal work” with broader claims about dignity and autonomy on the job site.1 These insurgent energies created an atmosphere in which the common sense of the New Deal order was susceptible to challenge and reinvention. As the party of the New Deal order, the Democrats faced their most significant crisis since the Civil War. Although previous rounds of party entrepreneurialism failed to yield the substantive changes that reformers sought, they did equip 1968 reformers with new institutional and discursive resources. The 1964 Atlantic City compromise provided the new wave of activists with a tool to challenge the identity and policies of the Democratic Party. Indeed, due to the official requirement that voters in each state be granted “the opportunity to participate fully in party affairs,” irrespective of their “race, color, creed or national origin,” the 1968 Democratic National Convention witnessed the greatest single surge in credentials challenges in the history of the party—seventeen challenges involving fifteen state delegations—a development that exacerbated already-turbulent proceedings. But, crucially, not all of the credentials challenges involved charges of racial discrimination, nor did the bulk of challenges even come out of the South. Anti–Vietnam War activists, entering the party through the insurgent primary campaigns of senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, seized on the “opportunity to participate” embedded in the Atlantic City compromise and expanded it into a farreaching critique of the perceived undemocratic character of the party’s nominating and convention procedures. As this chapter describes, the structure and operation of Democratic Party institutions frustrated the ability of insurgent activists to gain access and exert what they considered to be meaningful influence on party decision making regarding program and candidate selection. As a result of their frustration with trying to work within the system, insurgents launched an attack on the national party to contest its presidential nominating process. That attack was sustained by the chaotic events of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which awarded Vice President Hubert

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Humphrey with the nomination, even though he had not entered any of the primaries. The exclusionary treatment of party insurgents in the nomination battle, as well as their violent repression in Chicago, drew together a coalition of interests that would drive forward the process of party reform in the aftermath of the 1968 convention.

“Dump Johnson” and the Fracturing of Labor-Liberalism The nature and scope of the New Politics reform movement was so profoundly shaped by the 1968 crisis from which it emerged that it is worth retracing the stages of development that culminated in the turbulent Chicago convention. In retrospect, the origins of the 1968 party crisis are evident on the margins of the liberal left in 1967, where the idea of unseating a Democratic president from the leadership of his own party by denying him renomination first appeared. Foremost among those trying to carve out such a possibility were Allard Lowenstein, a leader of the 1964 Freedom Summer project, and Curtis Gans, formerly of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and a new member of the liberal advocacy organization Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Initially, after their idea of running an independent third-party ticket with Martin Luther King and antiwar pediatrician Benjamin Spock had failed to gain traction at a chaotic conference calling for a “new politics” in September, Lowenstein and Gans had sought a base of support in the ADA for their strategy to dump President Johnson.2 Since 1966, members of the ADA had grown increasingly frustrated with Johnson, whom they criticized as being insufficiently committed to his domestic War on Poverty agenda and whose Vietnam foreign policy raised considerable doubts among the more dovish members of the liberal community. Such friction had opened fault lines within the ADA itself, pitting a traditional anticommunist wing against a growing minority that looked upon the antiwar protest movement as an opportunity to pull alienated youth into the political process. In the middle, moderates like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. raised concerns about opposing a president who had, in fact, enacted the kind of liberal program that ADA members had been advocating for twenty years and who had selected the ADA’s own Hubert Humphrey as his running mate in 1964. But as the war escalated and prominent senators such as George McGovern, J. William Fulbright, and Robert Kennedy began voicing their skepticism publicly, ADA moderates and reformers

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positioned the organization to officially go on record as “willing to support a peace candidate from either party if Johnson did not change his [Vietnam] policy.”3 But the ADA’s willingness to break from LBJ was quickly revealed to be a bluff, meant only to apply public pressure for a policy change, not commit themselves to a quixotic adventure. They greeted Lowenstein’s Dump Johnson proposal with a heavy dose of skepticism. Joseph Rauh, exiled from the White House since the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) controversy, rejected the idea on the grounds that “no responsible people inside the Democratic Party will allow their names to be connected with . . . so helpless [sic] a drive.”4 John Kenneth Galbraith insisted that the ADA had to maintain its “longstanding commitment to political realities” and not put itself in a position where it could too easily be lumped together with the radical New Left.5 After the ADA balked, Lowenstein brought his Dump Johnson campaign to university campuses in a speaking tour to drum up support across the country. Drawing on networks formed in the civil rights and antiwar campaigns, as well as their contacts in the National Student Association, Lowenstein and Gans laid the groundwork for an anti-LBJ coalition, patching together an activist network that shared a vision for radical change through the political system. As press coverage began to grow over the summer months, the Dump Johnson movement gained momentum and credibility. The tide seemed to be turning when the state party chair of Michigan—a state organization deeply tied to the UAW— embraced the idea, as did the party’s youth organizations in Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Dump Johnson affiliate organizations cropped up across the country, calling themselves the Coalition for a Democratic Alternative, the Conference for Concerned Democrats, and Concerned Democrats for America. At the end of September, the New Republic ran a front-page editorial endorsing the campaign, writing, “We don’t know whether Lyndon Johnson can be denied. . . . [But] we do know the attempt must be made.”6 Public opinion polls confirmed that an alternative to Johnson had some popular basis, as the president’s approval rating continued its slide from 61 percent in January 1966 to 38 percent by October 1967. However, Lowenstein understood that, without a rival candidate, the campaign to dump Johnson would remain a chimera. His first preference, Robert Kennedy, lent an air of authority and respectability to the growing antiwar movement.

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However, after his demurral, as well as George McGovern’s, Gans and Lowenstein found a figure willing to carry the Dump Johnson banner into battle in Minnesota’s Senator Eugene McCarthy. Dump Johnson partisans viewed McCarthy with a mix of emotions. On the one hand, liberal doves were grateful to find any prominent Democrat willing to risk reputation and patronage by openly challenging an incumbent president and party leader. On the other hand, McCarthy’s politics, which were often opaque, gave some liberals pause. His views on the Great Society programs were, in the words of his biographer, “extremely ambiguous,” simultaneously decrying its lack of funding while portraying it as a bureaucratic imposition from above.7 This ambivalence surrounding McCarthy’s role as the Dump Johnson standard-bearer was reflected by the candidate himself when he announced his candidacy as a vehicle for protest against the war and a means by which to “counter the growing sense of alienation” and to draw the frustrated and the cynical “back into the political process.”8 While hardly the bold declaration of principles that Lowenstein and Gans had been searching for, McCarthy’s announcement was greeted positively by prominent liberal publications like the New York Times, the Nation, and the New Republic, while the White House regarded it as a “joke.”9 By early 1968, McCarthy’s plan to enter the primaries exacerbated the preexisting rifts in labor-liberalism over Vietnam, especially in the ADA, where a groundswell of antiwar sentiment was bubbling up through its campus chapters and pushing for the organization to officially endorse the insurgent candidate. After the Tet offensive, many ADA skeptics got off the fence and agreed that an insurgent gambit was not only the morally right thing to do but also the only way to channel the growing radicalism of the antiwar movement into responsible outlets. Meeting in Washington, D.C., in February, Galbraith affirmed this view before the ADA national board when he said, “If one stands up for an idea one must stand up for the man who espouses it.”10 Having shed his initial skepticism of the Dump Johnson insurgency, Rauh too warned that because the ADA had already come out against the war, failure to support McCarthy would only confirm what the New Left had come to suspect: that liberals were “total and complete captives of any Democratic administration.”11 While very strong, however, support for McCarthy was far from unan i mous in the liberal organ ization. Opposing antiwar liberals at the February board meeting were moderate labor leaders who feared what endorsement might cost them in terms of legislative influence, access to the

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president, and public accusations concerning their patriotism. Rather than sweeping the antiwar movement into the liberal fold, they argued, the ADA’s embrace of the insurgent candidate promised to diminish their influence, splitting the organization down the middle by siding with a fringe movement out of step with the American mainstream. Reuther voiced his concern that “a primary endorsement would almost certainly alienate and offend members,” while his brother Victor threatened that an ADA endorsement would put the UAW’s financial support for the organization in “serious jeopardy.”12 They were joined by Gus Tyler of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), who called the Dump Johnson effort “unproductive,” and Bayard Rustin, who was “profoundly against” endorsing McCarthy because of the single-issue nature of his campaign, which lacked any appeal to people of color. Leon Keyserling, a former economic adviser to President Harry Truman, chided ADA doves for their “overpowering obsession” with Vietnam, having “turned [their] back on progressive economic and social policies on the domestic front.”13 An ADA endorsement, they threatened, would break the liberal-labor alliance, without which “America [could] be swept into a dismal abyss of prolonged reaction.”14 These protestations notwithstanding, the ADA national board approved early endorsement of McCarthy 65 to 47, as three labor leaders—I. W. Abel of the Steelworkers, Joseph Beirne of the Communication Workers, and Louis Stulberg of the ILGWU—resigned in protest, taking their financial contributions with them. A House Democrat from Texas followed, as did Keyserling and a White House staff member, John Roche, who stated that he “was not interested in a trip to political Disneyland.”15 Those who stayed, such as the Reuthers and the ILGWU’s David Dubinsky, issued a statement a week later that expressed that their disagreement over the issue could not be allowed to jeopardize the entire organization or the coalition of forces it represented. The ADA’s decision to endorse, however, was soon vindicated. On March 12, 1967, McCarthy achieved a surprisingly strong second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary. Newsweek called it a “triumph of heroic magnitude” and raised the possibility that Johnson “may be in real danger of being dumped by his own party.”16 New York Times columnist James Reston speculated on the incapacity of machine politicians and labor leaders to block an insurgent challenger, noting that “the idea is getting around that politics is too serious a business to be left to politicians. . . . Even the will of

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an incumbent president can be overcome.”17 Under intensifying criticism from the press and keenly sensitive to the shifting mood of the electorate, Johnson evaded the presidential primaries, sending stand-in candidates when he could or failing to make any appearance at all in states where his own name appeared on the ballot. As one internal White House memo explained, “The presidential primaries are a totally valid testing ground for candidates in the party out of power. [However], an incumbent president who has to rely on being active [in] the presidential primaries for his nomination would be operating from a position of weakness and be risking the antagonism of the American people for involving himself in political campaign activity long before the November election. [This serves as] justification for not entering any primaries.”18 But Robert Kennedy’s belated entry into the race presented a greater threat than the president was prepared to handle. With the president’s poll numbers at a low of 36 percent by late March, Gallup surveys of Democratic voters released around the same time found a greater preference for Kennedy than Johnson or McCarthy as the party’s nominee. Before departing to oversee the president’s write-in campaign for Wisconsin’s April 2 primary, Johnson’s party liaison, Lawrence O’Brien, warned the president of the “ever deepening disenchantment among many segments of the population which have heretofore supported our actions in Vietnam,” including among “our political friends and associates.”19 On March 31, two days before the Wisconsin primary, where he was trailing in the polls, Johnson informed the nation in a primetime television address that he would temporarily halt the bombing of North Vietnam and enter into negotiations with Hanoi. Further, he announced that he would not seek or accept the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in 1968.

Party Insurgents and the Politics of Presidential Nomination Even if the combined pressure of the McCarthy and Kennedy insurgencies, military setbacks abroad, and the social turmoil at home had knocked Johnson out of the race, neither insurgent candidate stood much of a chance at capturing the presidential nomination of a party that was organizationally and ideologically set against their campaigns. While animosity between McCarthyites and Kennedy supporters sharpened in the aftermath of Johnson’s withdrawal, their mutual experiences of party

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re sistance to their participation led to a convergence of forces around the idea of party reform. RFK and the “Pressure of Legitimacy” Only seventeen states held presidential primaries in 1968, apportioning a total of just 38 percent of the national convention’s delegates when a majority was needed to win. Both candidates understood that while primary elections could help their final delegate counts, their real significance was in demonstrating their electoral viability to impor tant party actors so that enough of the remaining 62  percent of delegates—or, more accurately, the party leaders who controlled them—would come over to their side by the time of the convention. As O’Brien, who had become Kennedy’s campaign manager after resigning his post in the Johnson administration, later put it, “Our strategy was to use the primaries to prove Bob was a winner. Conceivably, the convention delegates, seeking a winner or perhaps in a surge of Kennedy emotion, might have moved from Hubert [Humphrey] to Bob in sufficient numbers to give Bob the nomination.”20 As the passage indicates, while Johnson had withdrawn from the presidential contest, Humphrey had taken his place, formally announcing his candidacy a month after Johnson’s withdrawal—a delay calculated to keep the vice president out of the primaries so as to avoid having to defend the increasingly unpopu lar war. While Humphrey’s decision to forgo the primaries risked drawing the charge that he had not tested himself “before the people,” skipping the remaining primaries after Johnson’s exit did not jeopardize his candidacy. In fact, most convention delegates selected through caucus-convention procedures had been selected as early as 1966, well before McCarthy had even announced his candidacy. These delegates, who had been committed to reelecting President Johnson, transferred their allegiance to his heir apparent. Indeed, in the days between Johnson’s surprise withdrawal and Humphrey’s official announcement, calls from state party leaders, big-city mayors, and the top officials of the American Federation of Labor– Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL- CIO) poured into the vice president’s office, pledging their support should he decide to enter the race. Two days after his official entry, the vice president’s campaign staff estimated that 1,200 of the necessary 1,312 delegate votes were already committed to Humphrey or leaning his way.21

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Facing such a disadvantageous terrain in which it was clear that “Humphrey had the edge,” Kennedy’s team planned to demonstrate the extent of his popular, “street-level” appeal by knitting together an alternative Democratic coalition of the disaffected and marginalized.22 This included not only bringing back in those who were becoming increasingly alienated from the political process, but also mobilizing those who had never been fully integrated, such as African Americans, Latinos, and low-income voters.23 It was “essentially an organizational contest,” O’Brien concluded, “not one of public relations or mass media concentration.”24 Meeting such an extraordinary challenge “will require extraordinary strategy, machinery, and risks. . . . It will require broad-based participation in the political process.”25 As the candidate told the journalist David Frost, “I think there has to be a new kind of coalition to keep the Democratic Party going. . . . We have to write off the unions and the South now . . . [and] replace them with Negroes, blue-collar whites, and the kids.”26 Unsurprisingly, the idea of Kennedy’s new coalition did not endear him to the top officials of the trade union establishment. This was no strategic misstep. As a journalist close with the Kennedy campaign explained, “To Kennedy’s eyes, the AFL-CIO leadership was committed politically to Lyndon Johnson, committed emotionally to the Vietnam War, and not committed at all to organizing the new, invisible poor.”27 In fact, his decision to write off the labor barons was a sober assessment of his standing with them. While the labor leadership normally exerted their influence in presidential politics through channels of elite brokerage, in 1968 AFL-CIO officials intervened in the nomination process to a greater extent than ever before, beginning the moment Johnson had announced his exit from the race. As the labor federation president George Meany later said, “[After Johnson’s withdrawal] Lane [Kirkland] and I went over to see Hubert Humphrey and got him to agree he would run.”28 Kirkland also later recalled, “I was involved with others in putting together a committee—a labor committee—for Hubert Humphrey. It was an informal operation. . . . The members of our committee included every general officer of every affiliate of the AFL-CIO. . . . Labor, then, was instrumental in rounding up the delegate votes to get him nominated. We didn’t do that by participating in primary elections. . . . But in the non-primary states, we rounded up most of the votes.”29 While Kennedy’s strategy centered on demonstrating the breadth and depth of his popular support among his new Democratic coalition, his team planned for a direct confrontation at the national party convention. In case

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party leaders remained impassive regarding his primary victories, Kennedy’s team developed a multipronged convention strategy designed to implicate the party’s nominating procedures as unfair, unresponsive, and undemocratic. This included a suggestion to hold “counter primaries” in caucusconvention states as a demonstration of popu lar support.30 While this tactic was ultimately rejected, the Kennedy team did plan to file credentials challenges against southern delegations on the grounds that “any black representation they may have is purely formal tokenism.”31 Kennedy had already been in touch with black Mississippi activists planning to employ the Atlantic City compromise in a second attack on the state party, as they had done in 1964. If successful, these credentials contests would have the effect of “cracking one leg of Humphrey’s support.”32 Kennedy’s team also planned on bringing credentials challenges against delegations from northern state party organizations that “have effectively prevented any expression of popular will.” To be successful, these challenges would require utilizing more “unorthodox means” because these state delegations largely complied with the antidiscrimination mandate spelled out by the Special Equal Rights Committee (SERC).33 To expand the reach of the SERC’s “opportunity to participate,” Kennedy’s people targeted the unit rule, a procedural device used by party leaders to cast a delegation’s votes as a bloc, binding those in the minority to the will of the majority.34 Kennedy had received a large volume of correspondence from supporters during the campaign, reporting the turmoil within state conventions and county caucuses and the crackdown on rank-and-file dissent by the “Democratic Establishment.”35 In the judgment of his adviser, Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy was “not going to get any votes [at the convention] if [the] unit rule is in effect.”36 From his perspective, Kennedy’s level of support was grossly diminished by the unit rule’s distortions, which silenced minority dissent from the precinct level up, giving the false appearance of a pro-Humphrey consensus among delegates at the national level. By bringing what they called “the pressure of legitimacy” to bear on delegate selection processes affected by racial discrimination as well as the unit rule, Kennedy’s convention strategy picked up and substantially expanded the Mississippi challenge in Atlantic City four years earlier.37 No longer an issue confined to allegations of racial prejudice exercised by southern party elites, or even the hy pocrisy of the national party’s tolerance of such practices, Kennedy’s critique of the party implicated the lawful functioning of Democratic procedure on the basis of its undemocratic and unrepresentative

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character.38 The accusations would not be about “vote-stealing,” his aides said, but the more substantive problem of failing to accurately represent popular preferences. The solution, one memo proposed, required nothing less than “democratizing the party.”39 The Miscounted McCarthyites Meanwhile, within the McCarthy campaign, a strategy that pointed toward democratizing the party emerged at the grassroots level as campaign activists experienced systematic exclusion at the hands of the party’s delegate selection procedures and the party regulars overseeing them. Initially having made common cause through Lowenstein’s Dump Johnson movement and its crop of organizational vehicles around the country, Joseph Duffey, a professor at Hartford Seminary, and about a dozen other concerned Connecticut Democrats made the decision to spearhead the McCarthy effort in their home state. The group had set about investigating local party structures and procedures to better orient their strategy, resulting in a document written by Geoffrey Cowan, a Yale law student and McCarthy coordinator for the state, entitled “The System: You Have to Know It to Beat It.”40 The system to beat was formidable indeed. Connecticut was home to a fairly robust Democratic Party machine run by state chairman John Bailey, in place since 1948 (locals called him King John) and who had served as chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) since 1961. As a traditional, loyal Democrat, Bailey cast himself as an instrument in ser vice to the party leader. In early January 1968, in light of McCarthy’s nomination challenge, Bailey had already publicly declared, “The Democratic National Convention is as good as over. . . . It’ll be Lyndon Johnson and that’s that.”41 If local McCarthyites were to succeed in beating the system, they had to confront one of the system’s most powerfully positioned actors, and that power was felt almost immediately. While they encountered relatively few problems participating in party caucuses in small towns around the state, Connecticut McCarthyites confronted more serious obstacles to participation in larger towns and cities, where local committees selected state convention delegates. The only method of challenging them was to propose a rival slate of delegates, endorsed by at least 5 percent of local residents, and payment of a filing fee. The total cost of filing fees for mounting a statewide challenge was $14,000 (over $100,000 in 2018 dollars). Filing as a party-endorsed slate, however, was free of charge.42

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These obstacles notwithstanding, the McCarthy insurgents managed to win approximately 30 percent of the delegates to Connecticut’s state convention in June. But when Bailey summoned Duffey to the negotiating table, the party chair told him, “If you behave responsibly, we might have no objection to giving you one or two seats on the [national convention] delegation.”43 Of the forty-four delegate seats allotted to Connecticut by the DNC, McCarthy forces claimed no fewer than thirteen to reflect a proportionate representation of their strength in the state convention. Failing to come to an agreement, the McCarthy forces walked out of the state convention and filed a credentials challenge with the DNC.44 The experience of the Connecticut McCarthyites, however, was no outlier. In locales across the country, pro-McCarthy and Kennedy activists found themselves subject to the arbitrary power of the local or state Democratic Party officials, who overwhelmingly favored Johnson, and subsequently Humphrey, as the presidential nominee. In Washington State, insurgents protested the “steamroller” and “dictatorial” tactics employed by regular party officials, and charged the state committee with “den[ying] voters the opportunity to participate fully in party affairs” by appointing twelve ex-officio delegates to the national delegation without ratification by the state convention.45 In Minnesota, McCarthy activists denounced a rotten boroughs system that distributed national delegates evenly across the state’s counties, claiming it violated the Supreme Court’s recent doctrine of one-person, one-vote, which favored representation according to population rather than geography. The results, they contended, diluted the strength of McCarthy support, which was strongest in large population centers like Minneapolis–St.  Paul. In New York, insurgents challenged the state committee’s authority to appoint at-large members to the national delegation without having to consider the relative proportions of candidate support in the state primary. In Michigan, district-level caucuses with pro-Humphrey majorities had invoked use of the unit rule to bind the minority to the majority’s decision, but they restricted the use of the same mechanism in districts where caucus majorities favored McCarthy. In Indiana, the caucus chairs had simply violated standard parliamentary procedure, refusing to recognize insurgent participants, removing their names from nomination, denying their motions, and in some cases wrapping up the entire proceedings in only two or three minutes.46 The most egregious instance of abuse came in Pennsylvania, the possessor of 130 delegate votes. There, in its April primary election, held before

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Humphrey had officially announced his candidacy, McCarthy finished with a major victory, bringing in close to 430,000 votes compared to Kennedy’s 65,500 and Johnson’s 73,000. However, following the primary, the state Democratic committee, controlled by the mayors of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and top steelworker officials, appointed an additional fiftytwo members to the state’s delegation, only one of whom was a McCarthy supporter. With more than 70  percent representation in the state primary, McCarthy’s support was subsequently diluted. The Pennsylvania delegation cast 80  percent of their votes for Humphrey on the first ballot in Chicago.47 The Democratic Choice In late June, after having walked out of the Connecticut state convention in protest, McCarthy partisans began organizing their strategy for the upcoming Chicago convention. At the core of their grievances was the perception that their exclusion from the party had been unfair because it was undemocratic.48 This raised questions concerning the rules and practices of the state parties, specifically regarding their delegate selection processes. But such procedures were often opaque, a fact that local party leaders were not often eager to correct. (As the McGovern-Fraser Commission would later reveal, ten state parties did not even possess written rules in 1968.) And even when the organization’s rules and procedures could be discerned in advance, as with Cowan’s pamphlet on how to beat the system, they often revealed the degree to which party affairs were conducted arbitrarily, “at the discretion of the chairman.”49 With only two months left before the national convention, members of the Connecticut McCarthy leadership set about planning to mount a comprehensive challenge to the party’s nominating system and make their case for reform. The main problem facing the McCarthy reformers was that there was little legal basis upon which to mount their challenge. There was, as Cowan put it, “no law to go on.”50 Nor was there any comprehensive record of state parties’ delegate selection procedures. The proposed solution was to put together an informal investigative commission outside the party that could produce a study documenting the processes by which state delegations were composed and how presidential candidates won the nomination. With the Mississippi Freedom Democrats’ experience in mind, the McCarthy insurgents figured this would provide both a basis for contesting what they

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considered to be illegitimate practices and a vehicle for galvanizing support for their credentials challenges in Chicago. By early August, only three weeks before the Chicago convention began, Cowan had put together what became known as the Commission on the Democratic Selection of Presidential Nominees (or the Hughes Commission). Soliciting a modest grant from a McCarthy-supporting publisher in New York, and tapping the civil rights activist Thomas Alder as commission director, Cowan filled out the commission with Eli Segal as a liaison with the McCarthy campaign; the vice chair of the Connecticut McCarthy committee, Anne Wexler; the Iowa governor, Harold Hughes, who agreed to chair the commission; the Minnesota representative Donald Fraser, a Humphrey supporter despite his own opposition to the Vietnam War; a Kennedy confidant, Frederick Dutton; a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist and Georgia state representative, Julian Bond; a Washington Star political columnist, Doris Kimball; as well as Harry Ashmore of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and the Yale law professor Alexander Bickel. Hughes and Wexler announced the creation of the commission in early August, telling a Chicago press conference that the group would “greatly alleviate” the strain of the upcoming convention by providing a “comprehensive, factual, and up-to-date reference work,” which would also offer “some guidelines of a somewhat permanent nature” to improve the party’s convention and delegate selection procedures.51 The quickly improvised team had its first and only formal meeting in mid-August. The product of that meeting and the staff’s research was a report that, for the first time, drew together a comprehensive guide to the delegate selection practices of every state Democratic Party as well as a history of the national convention’s operating procedures. The report, The Democratic Choice, began by underscoring the gravity of the situation: “this convention is on trial.”52 Its authors interpreted the party’s recent electoral trouble not as a mere temporary aberration in Democratic strength but as the manifestation of deeper structural changes in the political order, ranging from the emergence of issue-oriented voters and black militancy to the appearance of new communications technologies. Altogether these factors amounted to nothing less than the “break-up of the New Deal coalition” itself. These underlying processes had produced a crisis for the Democrats because the party organization was incapable of “accommodat[ing] the aspirations of emergent social forces,” giving rise to “widespread cynicism” among the “many millions of voters . . . [who] feel themselves unrepresented

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by either of the . . . major parties in this presidential election.” Abuses, irregularities, and a lack of transparency had diminished popu lar participation in the nomination process, which in turn cast doubt on the representativeness of the national convention. Referencing the Mississippi Freedom Democrats before them, the authors underscored the hy pocrisy of undemocratic practices in the Democratic Party: “State systems for the selecting of delegates to the National Convention and the procedures of the Convention itself display considerably less fidelity to basic democratic principles than a nation which claims to govern itself can safely tolerate.” In response, they concluded, reform could “purify—and hopefully . . . preserve—the power” of the national convention as a representative political institution.

The Party in Crisis: Chicago, 1968 The violent crackdown of Chicago’s riot police as well as the National Guard on the assembled demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention mirrored the disarray among activists, delegates, and party leaders inside the convention itself. Following the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King in April and Robert Kennedy in June, it was as much with the events inside the convention in mind as those outside in the streets that presumptive nominee Hubert Humphrey bleakly observed that “the whole environment of politics had come apart.”53 Never before had a televised party convention, which traditionally functioned as the launching pad for the nominee’s general election campaign, full of pomp and circumstance, been so visibly fractious and disorderly. The turbulent proceedings in Chicago were in part the result of wellplanned, strategically organized activity by an array of insurgent actors who collectively mounted a frontal assault on the institutional foundations of the national party convention. One of the main sites of struggle was the Credentials Committee, the body that had been at the center of the MFDP challenge four years earlier in Atlantic City. The 1968 convention, however, was host to an avalanche of credentials challenges, adding another layer of tension to an already-strained political environment.54 The tidal wave of credentials challenges was itself partly a product of the resolution of the MFDP controversy, when the Atlantic City convention resolved to insert the antidiscrimination provision, including its prerogative to unseat noncompliant

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delegations, into the DNC’s official call to the 1968 Chicago convention. With that precedent set in the annals of party law and the significant increase in black and Latino voter registration since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Chicago convention saw challenges based on racial discrimination lodged from an assortment of organizations against Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.55 But what made the Chicago credentials fights truly unprecedented was the number of briefs filed against nonsouthern state delegations.56 As expected, McCarthy partisans from Connecticut and Pennsylvania followed through with formally filing their grievances against local party abuses and irregularities, as did other insurgents in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin. However, despite the fact that none of the plaintiffs alleged any discrimination on the basis of race, they did invoke the SERC’s antidiscrimination principle, asserting their right “to participate fully in party affairs.” Arguing before the Credentials Committee in marathon-long hearings coordinated by Rauh, the assorted state challengers pointed to the SERC’s concept of the right to participate as well as the Supreme Court’s dictum of one-person, one-vote to make the case that the party’s delegate selection procedures were undemocratic.57 All told, with credentials challenges coming from both North and South, the Credentials Committee was asked to rule on the legitimacy of no less than 40  percent of Chicago’s delegates. Having assiduously cultivated the support of party leaders and trade union officials in dozens of nonprimary states, the Humphrey camp took the set of challenges seriously. In an effort to placate the challengers, a Michigan representative, James O’Hara, one of Humphrey’s top campaign aides, suggested incorporating language into the committee’s final report that would endorse the reformers’ recommendations for dealing with “ future delegate selection methods.”58 “My own feeling is that something of this sort—that looks to the future—would be a useful addition to the Committee Report, but it should be done in such a way that no cloud is cast upon the representative nature of the delegations to this Convention. To permit such an inference would lend credence to the McCarthy claim that he is really the popu lar choice but may not win at the Convention because the delegates do not represent the people.”59 Humphrey found himself on the horns of a dilemma, simultaneously attempting to accept the basis of the challengers’ allegations concerning the

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lack of democratic participation and procedural transparency while also insisting on the legitimacy of the Chicago delegates. Finessing such a dilemma was made all the more difficult by the findings of the Credentials Committee. In all but one case (Mississippi), the committee voted down the challengers. The problem for the insurgents was that no matter how egregious some of the tactics of party exclusion had been, they did not clearly constitute a violation of state law or party rules, especially when they did not concern an evident racial bias. The committee could not find legitimate grounds upon which to unseat the regular delegates. As the veteran political journalist Theodore White observed, what was at issue was “not so much that delegates in some states are clandestinely or mechanically selected. It is that no over-all governing principle determines the frame in which delegates are selected.”60 While the results of the Credentials Committee’s lengthy deliberations shored up Humphrey’s chances for the nomination, a second insurgent front of McCarthy and McGovern supporters (who had stepped in for Kennedy following his assassination) was attacking the unit rule in the convention’s Rules Committee. Anne Wexler had obtained a spot on the committee and had organized support among sympathetic delegates from the inside, distributing copies of The Democratic Choice to all committee members. The ADA submitted a brief holding that no delegate could justifiably be bound by the unit rule because such a majoritarian device was undemocratic. “The rule prevents the minority members of a delegation from casting their votes in the convention in accordance with their preferences. To deprive a minority of its right to expression in this manner—whether the minority is a racial one, a group of liberals in a conservative state, or simply Democrats who disagree with the majority in a state about who should be the presidential nominee—is a patent violation of democratic principles.”61 Like many of the arguments heard from the insurgents’ campaigns, The Democratic Choice, and the Credentials Committee, the ADA drew on the antidiscrimination precedent achieved four years earlier and expanded its reach. By blurring the distinction between racial discrimination and political marginalization, insurgents sought out ground upon which democratic principle could be made the standard by which to assess internal party practices. Expressing incredulity at the insurgents’ expansive interpretation of the Atlantic City compromise, Frank Erwin, a DNC member and spokesperson for the Texas governor John Connally, complained that “there is a lot of loose use of the word ‘minority’ [at this convention].”62

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Internal memos show that top Humphrey staffers took note of “the widespread desire for changes in overall Democratic Party rules” and suggested that “necessity might be turned into opportunity” for the vice president. Under pressure to keep the bulk of his delegates together and retain the support of the South, which already looked upon the liberal vice president with suspicion, Humphrey aides seized on the idea of an official commission to study party organization as a means of defusing the tension tearing through the convention. Such a commission, they argued, if confined only to fact-finding and nonbinding recommendations, “could anticipate all or most of the broad reforms” suggested by the McCarthy campaign or the Hughes Commission and remove major policy disagreements from “the heat of controversy over nominations.” They proposed appointing prominent insurgents such as Wexler and Hughes as commissioners, along with many Humphrey supporters to “extend the hand of unity . . . [and] show that the convention will take McCarthy-McGovern complainers seriously.”63 As Max Kampelman, a chief strategist for the vice president, later reflected, “Our objective was to get a nominee. This [dispute] was unimportant, except as it might have some effect on the nomination. We said to ourselves, if you’re going to study it, you can control it. If you get the nomination, you’ll have control of the DNC. If you have the DNC, then you’ll control any study. A study commission could be a way of harmonizing the issue.”64 At the direction of the Humphrey team, the Rules Committee chairman issued a public statement effectively banning the unit rule. Pointing to the precedent of the 1936 abolition of the two-thirds supermajority threshold for presidential nominations as well as the MFDP compromise in Atlantic City, the statement cast the unit-rule decision as another historic advance in the “democratization of our party.”65 The final reports approved on the convention floor endorsed the need for party reform at future national conventions, and they called for the creation of a special investigative commission to study the delegate selection processes in each state and make recommendations that would ensure “broader citizen participation” and that all Democrats “have meaningful and timely opportunities to participate fully” in the party.66 Hughes greeted the victory as “a step in the direction of the new politics,” which would increase “grass roots participation” in the party to levels “not seen in a hundred years.”67 The report passed narrowly, 1,350 to 1,206. Though few understood it at the time, in the hands of the entrepreneurs who would power the reform commission created in Chicago, the convention

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resolution would be leveraged as a broad mandate for reconstructing the Democratic Party. While many of the interests motivating the reformers bore a clear lineage with the challenges against party structure in the 1940s, 1950s, and in 1964, this time they would have the opportunity, as well as the authority, to rebuild the party in their image. As White later reflected, whether due to “innocence or inattention, [Chicago delegates] had voted for the most fundamental change in the party’s long history.”68 Humphrey’s narrow loss to Richard Nixon in the November election eliminated any remaining uncertainty that the Democratic Party was in crisis and in need of change. While George Wallace’s third-party candidacy had pulled 13  percent of the popular vote and carried the electoral votes of the Deep South, most observers chalked up the vice president’s defeat to the unresolved schism between antiwar Democrats and the incumbent party leadership.69 Johnson’s retirement from politics the following year left Humphrey as the titular party leader. His peculiar predicament—a combination of recent public disgrace and responsibility for the future of the party— disincentivized a “politics as usual” approach. Given the extent of the party crisis, Humphrey was inclined to acquiesce to bold proposals for change.

CHAPTER 3

“Curing the Ills of Democracy” Party Entrepreneurship in the McGovern-Fraser Commission

Political parties must serve as more than just conduits by which people secure public office. They must address themselves seriously to the social problems and major issues of public policy which face our nation. But, as a first step, we must immediately open the door to all those people who are or may be inclined to use political parties to serve the ends they seek. This is what reform of the Democratic Party is all about. —Senator George McGovern (1970)

In the aftermath of the 1968 party crisis, the question for nearly all concerned became not whether to reform the Democratic Party, but on whose terms reform would proceed. The reforms that followed and their astoundingly quick implementation were the product of opportunity and agency as party and movement actors propelled the reform project forward. Using the 1968 convention resolutions empowering the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to create a new reform commission, reformers demanding a new kind of politics decisively shaped the commission’s activities, promulgating a narrative that diagnosed the party crisis in terms of barriers to participation, lack of representation, and the absence of democratic accountability. Acting with the authority of the national party, reformers developed and implemented an agenda to incorporate the social movement forces demanding entry by curtailing state party autonomy, opening delegate selection procedures, and restructuring national convention operations.

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By 1972, the combined effects of reforming the party and the mobilization of new party entrants through the antiwar, feminist, black freedom, and labor movements resulted in a politically transformed national party convention. Contrary to scholarly accounts that focus solely on the reforms made to the presidential nominating process, reformers were equally concerned with transforming the party structure.1 From their perspective, democratizing the party was a project that necessarily intertwined opening the party to greater activist influence through the delegate selection process as well as strengthening the national party’s policy-making capacities and mechanisms of officeholder accountability. Bringing both dimensions of reform into the picture makes clear that the New Politics movement was not about reform “as an end in itself.”2 Rather, New Politics advocates saw orga nizational reform and partisan realignment as interconnected goals that went hand in hand: party reform aimed at realignment, and realignment required reform. While delegate selection reform was prioritized, reformers drew up an ambitious blueprint to radically redesign the party of states’ rights and replace it with a truly national, mass-based, participatory party organization. However, when combined with the antireform backlash developing to the changes already made, the decision to postpone party reconstruction until after the 1972 election fated the structural phase of party reform to encounter a level of resistance it could not surmount.

Diagnosing the Crisis, Defining Reform At first it may appear puzzling why the 1968 party crisis resulted in such major institutional alterations as soon as 1972. After all, as we have seen, in past intraparty disputes, national Democratic officials and party leaders had been loath to meddle in the affairs of state organizations or undertake procedural changes that risked splitting the coalition. The 1968 party crisis proved to be different, however, not only because of the magnitude of the chaos and violence in Chicago viewed by millions of television viewers around the country, but also due to the sustained intervention of an array of party entrepreneurs who saw reform as the means to enhance their influence in the party and achieve their policy goals more broadly. This coalition capitalized on the window of opportunity during which party leaders were

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eager to resolve the crisis, and their opponents, particularly those in the labor leadership, were relatively disorganized. If Humphrey had been late to embrace the insurgents before the 1968 election and had paid the price for it, he pursued the cause of party unity with alacrity thereafter. Having already made the shift toward the dovish side of the internal party dispute over Vietnam, the project of party reform appeared to offer the most reliable means by which to draw the party back together. In the first postelection issue of the party’s official newsletter, Humphrey referenced the steps toward reform taken in 1964 and 1968, and he argued that the path forward required “opening the party to the fullest public participation [possible].”3 While other Democrats made efforts to dismiss the depth of the party crisis and downplay the extent of reform required, this was itself a result of their hands being tied over whether or not there would be an official reform commission at all. In the postelection atmosphere of defeat, the convention mandate was widely interpreted as a watershed from which there was no turning back. The DNC chair, Lawrence O’Brien, chosen by Humphrey for his ability to bridge the intraparty divide, pushed a unity-through-reform agenda without much delay, waiting only several weeks after the election before announcing his plans to create two reform commissions to jointly undertake a “far-reaching orga nizational program . . . with prime emphasis on grass roots activities.”4 However, if some party leaders viewed reform as a mostly cosmetic operation, O’Brien, saddled with the responsibility to rebuild a competitive national party, saw the need for more than surfacelevel changes. As he later put it: “If a significant number of young people, women, minorities, and others alienated by traditional political institutions are actively involved in the nominating process, a revitalized and recharged Democratic Party almost surely will emerge in the general election campaign. I have no doubt that these votes—when combined with more traditional sources of Democratic strength—could spell the difference between victory and defeat in November 1972.”5 Reform, O’Brien envisioned, could be an integrative process, not only healing the wounds left over from 1968, but even extending the party’s strength to new constituent groups. After O’Brien resigned from the DNC in January of 1969, his replacement, Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, navigated a resolution through the DNC establishing the Commission on Rules to study and recommend reforms for national convention procedures as well as the Commission on

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Party Structure and Delegate Selection, which would devote itself to problems of representation and transparency in the presidential nominating process. He appointed Michigan representative James O’Hara, a Humphrey confidant very close to organized labor, to chair the Rules Commission (known as the O’Hara Commission), as well as South Dakota senator George McGovern to head up the Party Structure and Delegate Selection Commission (known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission for its two successive chairmen). While the party crisis had made the Democratic leadership receptive to the idea of reform as a means of intraparty reconciliation, insurgents also saw reform as the most promising tool to prevent any recurrence of their experience in Chicago: marginalization at the hands of a corrupt, undemocratic party. The shared experiences of those who had been drawn into the Dump Johnson movement and the McCarthy-Kennedy campaigns had forged a distinct political consciousness among party insurgents. Despite having successfully maneuvered their calls for reform through the Chicago convention, deep-seated distrust of party officials motivated the insurgents to organize a pressure campaign for meaningful implementation of the convention mandate. Accordingly, the period of 1968–1972 witnessed a mushrooming of proreform groups and organizations alongside the official party commissions, which often had overlapping memberships and interlocking networks of movement leaders and mid-level operatives. Critical to the scope and direction of the reform movement was the formation of the New Democratic Coalition (NDC) out of the existing McCarthy and Kennedy campaign infrastructure. Gathering together prominent Dump Johnson insurgents such as Allard Lowenstein and Curtis Gans, labor-oriented reformers like Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and Michael Harrington of the Young People’s Socialist League, civil rights leaders such as Julian Bond and John Conyers, feminist activist Bella Abzug of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and Wisconsin Democratic leader Donald  O. Peterson, the NDC centralized and gave coherence to the multiple and crisscrossing currents demanding a new kind of politics in the late 1960s. In the wake of Kennedy’s assassination and the routing of McCarthyites in Chicago, Schrade had written to the UAW president, Walter Reuther, that the NDC offered some “hope for the desperately needed reform of the Party.”6 In its “Statement of Political Purpose,” the NDC announced its intention to navigate a path between subordination within the Democratic

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Party and the impossibility of launching a successful third party. Instead they sought “to transform the Democratic Party into a means of basic change” in society.7 While it never developed sufficient capacities for fundraising or outreach, and would eventually become little more than a letterhead organization, the NDC did provide “a meeting place for dissent within the party” and made a decisive, if short-lived, intervention in the shaping of the reform movement.8 The freshly minted NDC was joined in its push for reform by more traditional liberal advocacy organizations such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which, since its alignment with the insurgent McCarthy campaign, had been host to an internal split that mirrored the widening divisions within “vital center” liberalism as a whole.9 In the wake of Humphrey’s defeat in November 1968, the ADA’s national board members studied The Democratic Choice produced by the Hughes Commission and concluded that “the job at hand is to take the sentiment for political and electoral reforms that has grown throughout the country and mold it into positive, constructive proposals that will afford greater access to our political system.” The moment had arrived, they argued, “for liberals in each state across the country to formulate their objectives, project their viewpoints, and mount the attack for reform.”10 The prospect for far-reaching reform was also shaped by the core cadre of party insurgents responsible for producing The Democratic Choice and extracting an official commitment to party reform from the convention, who continued their organizing efforts after the events in Chicago. Beginning as early as September  1968, Thomas Alder, Geoffrey Cowan, Anne Wexler, Eli Segal, and others patched together a lobbying campaign to pressure then-DNC chair O’Brien to announce plans to create an official reform commission, no matter the outcome of the election in November. The party leadership’s convergence on a unity-through-reform consensus following Humphrey’s narrow loss increased the reformers’ leverage to lobby for representation on the two announced commissions themselves. Harris, arriving at the DNC in January  1969, eventually approved commissioner or staff positions for Wexler and Segal, as well as for Hughes Commission members Donald Fraser, Alexander Bickel, Frederick Dutton, and Harold Hughes. Aaron Henry, leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, was appointed, as were professors Richard Wade, Austin Ranney, and Samuel Beer after expressing their scholarly and partisan interests in the process of Democratic Party reform.11

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Lastly, newly developing organized groups and movement networks, appearing midway through the reform process, also devoted themselves to promoting party reform, constituting something like a para-party network. Common Cause, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Center for Political Reform, and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC)—all formed between 1970 and 1971—made crucial interventions in the reform process, often by creating their own party-reform task forces to perform watchdog operations monitoring state and local compliance measures and then communicating valuable information back to the official reform commission staff. Access to and use of media outlets such as the Nation and the New Republic was supplemented with the New Democrat, the reform coalition’s own monthly magazine launched by Stephen Schlesinger, son of the ADA’s Arthur Schlesinger, which dedicated itself to providing activists with “a platform to enunciate ideas, with an arena to voice discontents, and with a bullhorn to attack old politics.”12 If a vague consensus on reform congealed within the upper ranks of the official party leadership, providing a window of opportunity for reformers pushing from below, a sharply contrasting perspective took shape among key figures of the trade union leadership, who sought to close that window and return to the old ways. Those at the top of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), especially Committee on Political Education (COPE) director Alexander Barkan, saw a need for change in the party, but in the direction of restricting the access of insurgent groups. Several impor tant factors conditioned COPE’s hostility to the New Politics reform movement. By the late 1960s organized labor had never been a more significant force in the Democratic Party. The AFL-CIO leadership had been more directly involved in the presidential nominating campaign of 1968 than ever before, urging Humphrey to enter the race after Johnson’s withdrawal, and even establishing a nationwide labor committee to round up pro-Humphrey delegates in the nonprimary states. Such an unprecedented effort on the part of labor had been a necessary response to the Democratic Party’s own organizational atrophy.13 While the results of such an undertaking had been disappointed by Nixon’s election, Barkan called it “the best political effort by labor since the founding of COPE” in 1955.14 Not only had the AFL-CIO improved its technical capacity to mobilize, it had equally demonstrated its centrality to Democratic presidential prospects. As the AFL-CIO president, George Meany, put it, “after the shambles of the

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Democratic convention, we were all Humphrey had.”15 While the scope of party reform was not yet clear at the outset of 1969, when it came to the prospects of reforming the party, most of the trade union leadership saw little reason for an overhaul and had never had more at stake in the outcome of such a process. As it became clear that meaningful change was not only desired but also within reach for the reformers, Barkan and other labor operatives moved to undermine the legitimacy of the reform project. In seeking to reunify the party, DNC chairs O’Brien and Harris eagerly solicited labor’s participation in the reform process. However, when provided with a list of proposed reform commission members and staff, Barkan protested that it “was so overloaded with ‘new politics’ people” he dismissed the entire project as “stacked” and “hopeless.”16 After conferring with both Meany and Steelworkers president I. W. Abel, who had been named to the McGovern-Fraser Commission, the AFL-CIO leaders agreed to withdraw from the reform proceedings altogether in hopes of depriving its findings of labor’s implicit stamp of approval.17 O’Hara, chair of the Commission on Rules and a close ally of Barkan, tried in vain to pull him back into the reform process, if only to mitigate the public relations problems that could develop if labor was viewed as attacking the reform process after having sat it out. As O’Hara recorded in his diary, he told Barkan that “the time to move in on the McGovern-Fraser Commission was before it made its recommendations rather than trying to operate on these recommendations after they were made.” Barkan, however, demurred, insisting on a “hands off” approach.18 Abel did not contribute to future commission meetings. It is impor tant to stress that labor was not monolithic on the issue of party reform. In fact, the reform of the Democratic Party exposed and exacerbated tectonic fractures already present within the trade union movement by the late 1960s. This friction was apparent not only between conservative craft union leaders and their more liberal industrial counterparts, but also between established union leaders—often white, middleaged men—and their rank-and-file members, whose demographic shift toward young people, people of color, and women was stressing unions’ representative structures to the breaking point. Any simplistic rendering of this political dynamic as a conflict between white-collar reformers and blue-collar unionists fails to capture how party reform became “complexly entangled” with the struggles within the labor union hierarchy.19 While COPE’s Barkan was intractably opposed to the New Politics, the UAW, who

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disaffiliated with the AFL-CIO in 1968 due to irreconcilable political visions for American unionism, was supportive of the reform movement from the start, becoming one of its principal supporters, promoters, and drivers through the early 1970s. In an autopsy on the 1968 elections, an internal UAW document reported the existence of “a great big new political constituency out there waiting for political parties to understand, to organize, and to weave into the organizational fabric.”20 Bill Dodds, political director of the UAW and an active participant of the McGovern-Fraser Commission, wasted no time in congratulating DNC chair O’Brien for his “practical organizing steps” in establishing the commissions so soon after the 1968 election, ensuring that something substantive would come of the convention resolutions “rather than just talk.”21 The UAW went further when Sam Fishman, director of the union’s Community Action Program, publicly testified the following year that the auto workers “have a deep interest in and a desire to see the Democratic Party make meaningful changes that would democratize the political process and political relationships in this country.”22 Nor was the UAW the lone union to get behind the New Politics movement. Many ex- CIO unions within the AFL- CIO, such as the Communication Workers, the Machinists, the Clothing and Textile Workers, Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers, the United Farm Workers, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and others outside the federation, such as the Electrical Workers and the National Education Association, would come to support it through the controversial presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972.23

Envisioning a Party of a Diferent Type Defining the ambitious scope of the New Politics reform project took shape within the activities of the reform commission itself, as many of the most central actors became convinced that resolving the Democrats’ legitimacy crisis required not only opening the party to new entrants but also rethinking the role of political parties in mediating state-society relations generally. McGovern himself underscored this connection between procedure and substance when he told his fellow commissioners that “the heart and soul of the political party is its philosophy, its policies, and its approach that it takes to the great issues of our domestic society. . . . No procedural reform can

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ever serve as a substitute for these essential matters. . . . [But] responsive, effective political procedure is the handmaiden of responsive policy formation.”24 Reformers not only wanted to open the party for the newly mobilized social movements, but also sought to exclude others, such as conservative southern Democrats. This goal of the reform agenda is understandable in light of the long-perceived shortcomings of an ideologically bifurcated, structurally decentralized national party organization, which simultaneously contained race liberals, southern conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and liberal doves in the same coalition. The New Politics movement thus sought to overcome the constraints of the New Deal order by augmenting its coalition via reconstructing the party organization. The reformers wasted no time in getting to work in drawing up an ambitious agenda. With all twenty-seven commission members and a small staff finalized by March 1969, the commission initiated a series of seventeen regional hearings by the end of April, lasting through mid-summer, to “elicit grass roots sentiment” from over five hundred officeholders, interest-group representatives, and members of the public who provided testimony on the issue of party reform.25 That the commission hearings were more likely to provide a venue for the airing of grievances rather than endorsement of the status quo was established by DNC chair Harris himself, when he gaveled to order the initial session in Washington, D.C., with the declaration that “undemocratic processes are obvious and glaring” and must be resolved through the “all-out reform of our party.”26 While the commission’s regional hearings solicited unsurprising attacks on the mechanics of the presidential nominating process as well as the marginalization of dissent in Chicago and the party leadership’s belated reversal on the Vietnam War, the hearings went deeper. By posing the question of what barriers, “ legal or other wise,” prevented “meaningful participation” in the Democratic Party, the McGovern-Fraser Commission churned up penetrating critiques of the nature of American party politics in general, the parties’ relationship to society, and the functions parties perform in the formulation of public policy.27 Beyond dismantling procedural barriers to participation like the ones the 1968 insurgents encountered, recurrent themes in the hearings included augmenting the New Deal coalition by realigning the party away from its conservative base in the South, reframing electoral politics around distinct policy issues, and transforming the party organization to promote greater grassroots participation and officeholder accountability.

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Senator Hughes broached reform’s potential for facilitating partisan realignment when he testified that incorporating the “practical idealists of the New Politics” into the party would require more than procedural openness. It would also require “losing some of the allegiances” of the past.28 Others pointed to the same problem of re-composing the coalition, including civil rights leader Channing Phillips, who said that Democrats “must discard the old mold of alliances that have proven themselves ineffective and dysfunctional.”29 Schrade put a finer point on it: “A policy of inclusion of the party’s major constituencies is in order, but there must be exclusions, too. . . . [T]he old Democrats of the South must go. We must find a way to exclude people whose interests are contrary to the Party’s.”30 Georgia state representative Julian Bond echoed the same point, attesting that “there will always be diversity” among Democrats, but those with “diametrically opposed” positions should not “be able to find shelter under the same umbrella.”31 The lack of a coherent ideological perspective or policy consensus in the party was itself connected to the absence of any institutional infrastructure for building that consensus or enforcing programmatic cohesion among its elected officeholders. Veteran Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen dismissed the national party platform as a mere “hodgepodge of platitudes.”32 The NDC’s Al Fishman argued that the platform’s nonbinding authority “further discourages participation in the party” because “after overcoming all of these obstacles and fighting through for the adoption of platforms and promises . . . large numbers of elected public and party officials [tend] to go their own way” once in office.33 This concern went beyond activists or voters merely getting what they want from officeholders. Key reform figures connected the need to constrain officeholders, especially the president, with the good of the republic itself. As Fraser put it, “The President is becoming more and more powerful. . . . The only way that I know to put a check on this is through the development of strong political parties. And I think the continuation of weak parties is the greatest danger of all.”34 In light of such penetrating critiques and the connections they made between procedure, program, and party policy, Florida Democrat and commission member Leroy Collins’s prediction just prior to the first hearing proved prescient: “It seems obvious to me that we must consider all legitimate questions concerning the structure of our Party. No area should be sacrosanct. . . . It may well be that a new kind of structure is required to meet the needs of our time and the years beyond.”35

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But what kind of new party organization did the reformers and their allies envision? Many reformers agreed that while procedural openness was important, it was insufficient in itself to develop a new kind of politics. As one internal commission report put it, “These hearings [have] revealed that reform goes much further than simply reforming internal structures. Making the party ‘open’ is only a first step . . . for even if the doors of the party are opened wider to the grass roots, it is not at all certain that the grass roots will rush in to seize the opportunity. . . . It is not enough to ‘democratize’ party procedures if large numbers of people are not interested in participation.”36 An NDC activist echoed the sentiment, cautioning that “opening the doors to the party may not be enough. . . . [W]e may have to pull people inside.”37 Eugene O’Grady, chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, voiced the need to develop “something in the way of an educational system . . . of getting people specifically involved in politics.”38 This would require rethinking the roles typically assigned to political parties in the United States. Joseph Duffey, who penned The Democratic Choice, told the commission, “We don’t feel that the prime purpose of political parties in today’s system can be to have the ability under all circumstances to win elections. . . . [T]he political party best functions as lobbyist for the people who are its members.”39 While short on specifics, the members of the NDC, who testified at nearly every hearing, articulated a bold reimagining of the role of parties in American politics and society. What was needed, they asserted, was “a new kind of political ser vice organization,” one that took an “activist” approach to organizing its constituents.40 “The party must serve the people between election years,” they said. “The party, as opposed to the candidate or the officeholder, should be involved in issues which are vital to the people of the state. . . . The state central committee must lead the way” by becoming “concerned, in a democratic way, with issues” and “act to support the principles it claims.”41 A key element of this new “activist” organization was not simply more participation but a qualitatively different form of participation, going beyond “just ratifying someone else’s choice of a candidate.”42 To engage citizens “in a democratic way” required “carry[ing] on an intensive effort of political education and community organizing[,] . . . go[ing] to the poor communities . . . to offer our help, not thrust it upon them, but offer our help in bringing about community organization among . . . those who are alienated and discontented.”43 It was recommended that this party activity be institutionalized by altering the party organization to include “antipoverty boards, representatives from the grassroots poor, the black, and the

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brown,” integrating these constituents both as voters and as participants “in the highest levels of decision making.”44 The commission’s regional hearings served as a galvanizing space where a shared vision of a reformed Democratic Party began to take shape. That vision, while necessarily vague in its institutional design, depicted a party that was both more open to the mobilized social forces of the late 1960s but also less ideologically eclectic and structurally decentralized. New Politics testimonials promulgated a reinvigorated role for party organization in public life, one that was active in educating and mobilizing its constituents rather than functioning as a vehicle for ambitious officeholders. The Mandate for Reform After several months of analysis, debate, and deliberation, the McGovernFraser Commission approved a list of eighteen binding guidelines for state parties’ delegate selection systems in November 1969, and it distributed the final product to all state parties at the end of the year. When the commission published its findings in April 1970 as Mandate for Reform, it framed its intervention as a response to a crisis of internal party democracy and representation: “meaningful participation of Democratic voters in the choice of their presidential nominee was often difficult or costly, sometimes completely illusory, and, in not a few instances, impossible.” The uses of “secret caucuses, closed slate-making, widespread proxy voting—and a host of other procedural irregularities—were all too common,” it reported. The official document made positive reference to the pioneering work of the Hughes Commission and endorsed a phrase appearing in The Democratic Choice (originally attributed to 1928 Democratic nominee Al Smith): “The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” Mandate for Reform concluded with a dire warning should the party resist the changes therein. “We believe that popular control of the Democratic Party is necessary for its survival.”45 The binding guidelines that followed did not specify what form delegate selection had to take, but they did outline a set of “reasonable standards” meant to guarantee all rank-and-file Democrats a “full, meaningful, and timely opportunity to participate,” which ruled out many widely used methods and practices.46 The new standards included some relatively uncontroversial modernizing reforms such as selecting all delegates in the same calendar year as the convention and requiring state parties to provide written rules for party procedures and to provide adequate public notice of party

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meetings with uniform dates and times. The guidelines also banned proxy voting and stripped Democratic Party officials and officeholders of their automatic delegate status, and curtailed the authority of state party committees to fill delegate seats through committee appointment, limiting its extent to no more than 10  percent of a state delegation. This was complemented with the commission’s extension of the right to run as a delegate to anyone, effectively ending the monopoly of state and local party committees on slate-making processes. Party committees were still free to make and endorse a slate of delegates—whether they identified with a candidate or as uncommitted—but could no longer deny ballot or caucus access to other rival slates or charge them onerous filing fees. Most controversial, however, both in terms of internal commission deliberations as well as their long-term implications, were the affirmative action guidelines. In making their case that the party was facing a crisis of representation, the authors of Mandate for Reform had observed that “the delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention . . . were predominately white, male, middle-aged, and at least middle class.” In response, they sought to “overcome the effects of past discrimination” by encouraging state parties to take “affirmative steps” to represent “minority groups, young people, and women in reasonable relationship to their presence in the population of the State.”47 The combined impact of the reform package contained in Mandate for Reform effectively eliminated two of the most frequently used delegate selection methods—closed caucuses and delegate primaries—while placing significant limitations on a third: committee appointments. This, when added to the prohibition of automatic delegates, amounted to a dramatic weakening of the capacity of state party officials to control the nomination process. Stipulations for affirmative action for the three most-mobilized social groups of the era provided a mechanism to aid activists outside the party to enter. These new party rules reflected the intention of the reformers to prevent a recurrence of their experience in 1968. As commission consultant Anne Wexler later reflected, “We knew all the time what this meant. We knew that we were going to change the face of American politics.”48

Implementing Reform from Above and Below When the McGovern-Fraser Commission finalized, published, and disseminated twenty-five thousand copies of its guidelines for delegate selection in

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the spring of 1970 (with important financial assistance from the UAW), its staff sent notice to the DNC that it was “clearly evident” that all fifty state Democratic parties were “substantially out of compliance” with the new rules.49 However, by the date of their final report, just prior to the 1972 Democratic convention, the commission could claim that the vast majority of the state organizations were in “full compliance,” while the few remainders satisfied “substantial compliance.”50 In the two years between the reports, the reform package contained in Mandate for Reform had become party law and been implemented by all state parties. Indeed, in twenty-two instances, state law had needed to be altered to satisfy the reform guidelines. As radical as the guidelines produced by the commission reformers were, what is more remarkable is the success they had in enforcing them— an undertaking, according to one prominent party scholar, “unparalleled in the history of American party politics.”51 This was the result of a confluence of forces, acting from above and below, that converged on the assertion of national party authority over its state-level affiliates. While it is in one sense true that the reformers were attacking the power of state party officials to dominate party governance, it was equally the case that reformers were attempting to empower what had always formally been the highest authority in the party: the national convention. At the center of the implementation process was the McGovern-Fraser Commission itself, particularly its leaders and staff, who began issuing individually tailored reports of compliance status to state party chairs in February 1970. Through the spring and summer, the reformers engaged in continual communication with state and local party officials, local reformers, and activist organizations, as well as the national party chair. The commission acted as a coordination hub for a network of interested actors operating at multiple levels of the party. The promotion of Minnesota representative Donald Fraser to the commission chair in January 1971 to replace McGovern, who resigned to pursue an early bid for the presidency, reinforced this dynamic. Fraser’s own background in the unique DemocraticFarmer-Labor Party of his home state gave him a long-abiding interest in party reform, especially in building a strong, progressive national structure that was more than just a “pawn” of the presidential nominee.52 In addition to the actions of the commission itself, the implementation and enforcement of the reform guidelines occurred at three levels, all of which interacted with and complemented the sustained activity of the McGovern-Fraser reformers. At the national level, in the DNC, O’Brien

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returned to serve as party chair, filling the vacancy left by Harris, who also departed in February  1970 to plan an ultimately ill-fated bid for the 1972 presidential nomination. As one of the original architects of the unitythrough-reform consensus, O’Brien had not changed his tune during his short absence. In fact, on his return to the chairmanship he found the intraparty divisions to have grown “even more serious” in the interim. “The problem encompassed far more than our loss of the 1968 election. We had lost in 1952 and 1956 and remained reasonably united. But in 1970 the bitter divisions of 1968 still existed—hawk versus dove, liberal versus conservative, reformer versus regular—and no reconciliation was in sight.”53 In response, O’Brien doubled down on this original unity strategy, viewing a smooth, uncontroversial reform process as the most viable means of rebuilding a competitive party for 1972 and beyond. Given the imminent publication of Mandate for Reform, O’Brien’s pragmatism led him to embrace the reform movement, becoming one of its most vocal spokespersons, and gave an air of inevitability to the reforms, whittling away the ground upon which the rule changes might be challenged. The DNC chairman’s authoritative endorsement of the findings of the McGovern-Fraser Commission legitimized their activities and created additional space for reformers inside and outside the party to make subsequent interventions. It also foreclosed any chance that the party chair might act as leader and coordinator of an antireform movement inside the party. Ironically, the decentralized structure of the Democratic Party, which had been at the core of New Deal liberals’ frustrations since the 1940s, now worked against the anti–New Politics forces within the party. A states’ rights party structure militated against the formation of any cohesive, organized re sistance movement in the face of the New Politics reforms. The undemocratic operation of the DNC—something the reformers were preparing to change—presented an unmovable obstacle for those state party chairs upset by the imposition of the new commission guidelines from above. As O’Brien proudly announced to the DNC, “We have taken the ’68 mandate and implemented it. . . . There will be no turning back.”54 Once the chair was on board with the reforms, antireformers had no readymade vehicle through which to mobilize.55 At the state level, implementation of reform was overseen by “ little McGovern Commissions” set up within each state party, which tailored each guideline to local conditions while coordinating their activity with the “big” commission’s chair and staff.56 By early 1971, more than one thousand party

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members and officials were at work in these state reform commissions nationwide.57 The critical turning point in the reform process came with the 1970 midterm elections, which swept seventeen new Democrats, many of them self-styled reformers, into governors’ mansions across the country. Whether for principled or pragmatic reasons, the new crop of reform Democrats elected to office had the interest and the means to spur state and local officials to comply with the new delegate selection regulations.58 Additionally, an array of proreform groups, networks, and organizations constituted a para-party network, assisting the implementation process as promoters, data collectors, watchdog monitors, lobbyists, courtroom plaintiffs, and outside agitators. In February  1971, Common Cause launched a special task force to advance the twin goals of party reform and participation, appointing New Politics reformer Anne Wexler to head it. Meanwhile, the ADA announced the formation of its own special convention task force to “oversee the delegate selection and Convention processes,” offering to “assist in legal tests of those procedures” if necessary.59 Others, such as the NWPC, became involved in not only enforcing the guidelines but also interpreting them as well. Establishing themselves as the political arm of the women’s movement in July  1971, NWPC founders Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Arvonne Fraser, Mildred Jeffrey, Shirley Chisholm, and Fannie Lou Hamer outlined a national strategy to “channel” the new feminism into “a political movement” that could secure “women’s participation in political power.”60 They made it their first priority to “get into existing decision making positions within the parties” to influence the 1972 nominating conventions.61 Accordingly, the NWPC’s delegate selection task force pressured the Democratic Party to comply with the reform guidelines, especially its affirmative action mandate for women’s representation on state delegations, telling their activists that they “should be prepared within each district to raise money . . . to go to the political conventions and challenge the seating of a delegation if they are not proportionally representative of women.”62 The NWPC leadership not only laid the groundwork for the mobilization of women into the party, but also pressed the party chair and the reform commission to strengthen the affirmative action mandate itself. After a meeting between chairman Fraser and members of the NWPC in November 1971, the DNC issued notice to all party chairs that “whenever the proportion of women, minorities, and young people in a delegation . . . is less than the proportion of these groups in the total [state] population, and the

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delegation is challenged on [these] grounds . . . such a challenge will constitute a prima facie showing of violation of the guidelines.”63 The strengthening of the affirmative action mandate would have enormous ramifications for the 1972 convention and the ongoing course of party reform. Not only would the number of formal credentials challenges skyrocket past the historic precedent set in 1968, but the successful use of demographic representational mechanisms by new party entrants, when combined with the 1972 election outcome, would also prove to be a potent weapon in the hands of counter-reformers, who would later weaponize the “quota system” to attack the reforms as undemocratic and unrepresentative amid an atmosphere of political backlash. However, the interaction between the NWPC, the commission, and the DNC was itself indicative of the general dynamic of the New Politics movement, one that flowed through and connected multiple levels of activity to produce the most dramatic assertion of national party power in American history. These interactive movement-party dynamics made the 1968– 1972 reform initiatives vastly more successful than previous efforts to challenge the structure and operation of the Democratic Party. Moreover, the alliance linking together reform Democrats, interest groups, social justice entrepreneurs, and rank-and-file movement activists helped prevent the rise of any coordinated resistance. Had the formal party apparatus, whether through the commission or the DNC, attempted to wrangle recalcitrant state party officials alone, without the aid of a para-party network, the implementation of reform would likely have been far less effective and transformative. Instead, the transformation of the party proceeded surprisingly smoothly for most of the initial reform years, sometimes spurring sporadic acts of defiance, but never creating a national atmosphere of crisis, which could have encouraged a more widespread insurrection. As Fraser told his commission upon being installed as chair midway through the implementation phase, “There is a quiet revolution going on in the Democratic Party.”64

Building a New Type of Party: The Democratic Party Charter As the McGovern-Fraser Commission continued to monitor and confirm state-level compliance with the new delegate selection guidelines, leading reformers turned their attention to items set aside in the making of Mandate for Reform. By early 1971, with delegate selection reform well under way, the

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commission used its remaining time before the body’s scheduled expiration at the 1972 convention to revamp Democratic Party structure. After a letter to O’Brien in March in which Fraser communicated “we are prepared to move ahead with consideration of structural changes which we might recommend to the 1972 convention,” the DNC chair readily agreed: “we have an opportunity unique in the history of this party to bring about significant changes.”65 A detailed proposal for a reorganized national Democratic Party emerged from a joint meeting of the McGovern-Fraser Commission and its companion Rules Commission in Washington, D.C., in November  1971.66 Chairman O’Brien addressed the members of the joint session, giving them his blessing to “define the next reform goals,” which, he said, might lead to the “historic and fundamental reshaping of the Democratic Party.”67 The commissions heard testimony from expert witnesses, many drawn from the two reform commissions themselves, such as Anne Wexler, Bill Dodds, Austin Ranney, Samuel Beer, James MacGregor Burns, and Neil Staebler. The subsequent discussions addressed tough questions about the nature of political parties in American society, their internal structures, their role in policy making, and the accountability of officeholders to party members. The product, a proposed “Charter for the Democratic Party of the United States,” was to be the party’s first constitution in its over-a-century-and-ahalf existence. It sought to answer the question of “how a national party—or a national ‘in-between-conventions-organization’—should be structured and what its responsibilities ought to be.”68 The seventeen-page draft charter circulated throughout the party at the end of March 1972 to solicit commentary and suggestions before its scheduled consideration at the 1972 national convention in Miami Beach. The charter’s stated aim was to reorganize the national party “to permit more direct participation by members in national party policy-making” by “adding a new dimension of grassroots interest to complement that of state organizations and elected officials,” thereby “bringing new vitality to the party as a whole.”69 Rather than just opening the floodgates to hordes of movement activists, the reconstructed Democratic Party would temper insurgent passion by combining it with the coolheadedness of experienced party leaders. This was to be accomplished by introducing a number of significant institutional innovations that were meant to carve out greater autonomy for the party as an organization and a collective agent in American politics.

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Party’s highest authority; meets every four years to nominate candidates and adopt platform

National Policy Conference Meets during even-numbered, nonpresidential years to set party policy

Authority flows from the National Convention, the party’s highest authority, and the midterm Policy Conference to the National Committee, Executive Committee, and the National Chair. Two additional organizations would be set up to handle finance and education projects.

Democratic National Committee Overall authority except for the convention and policy conference; meets when necessary

National Executive Committee Continuing operational responsibility; meets at least eight times per year

Education and Training Unit Executes programs of education and training for party members and candidates; run by Executive Committee–appointed board of directors

National Chair and Headquarters Staff

Membership and Finance Council

Chief executive officer; full-time, paid and elected by policy conference for four-year term

Sets state money quotas and raises money; fifty state Reps. appointed by chair and state chairs; twenty at-large Reps. appointed by chair

Source: Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Draft Charter, O’Hara Collection.

Figure 4. Charter Proposal for National Party Structure. Source: Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Draft Charter, O’Hara Collection.

First, at the apex of the party, as depicted in Figure 4, the sovereign authority of the quadrennial national convention would be complemented by a midterm national policy conference, where popularly elected delegates, state party officials, and national party officeholders could formulate official party policy on national issues without the added pressure of selecting a presidential nominee. This “mini-convention,” as imagined by one of its leading proponents, James MacGregor Burns, would function as “a transmission belt between movement politics and party politics . . . [providing] a way that movement people . . . could register themselves in the Democratic Party in an organized, relatively coherent and legitimate way.”70 This would keep the national party “active, vital, and visible” between presidential elections, thus advancing the “continuing interests of the party” besides those of competing for office.71

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Second, a National Committee, expanded to reflect states proportionately rather than equally, would exercise sovereign authority between national meetings, while delegating day-to-day operations to a smaller Executive Committee, which would meet approximately every six weeks. Its chief officer, the DNC chair, would be elected by the national policy conference to serve a four-year, full-time, and paid term of office rather than being a de facto appointee and agent of the party’s presidential nominee. The Executive Committee would also include the ranking party leaders from the House and Senate, as well as the regional committee chairs (see below), to facilitate better coordination between the party organization and the party in government. Additionally, members of the Executive Committee would appoint a board of directors to oversee a national Education and Training Unit to recruit and groom candidates for office at all levels of government. It would also undertake independent research and development for improving candidate ser vice provisioning and campaign technology. Third, the added expenses associated with such an active national party organization would be partially offset by a national dues-based membership program, housed in a new Membership and Finance Council, which would alleviate fundraising reliance on those whom Fraser referred to as “fat cat contributors.”72 Moreover, Staebler argued that “meaningful membership” would “give individuals a chance to relate to the national party” at a historical juncture where “a large and growing percentage of people disclaim any party connection” whatsoever.73 For an annual enrollment fee of $3, rankand-file party members would be eligible to vote for delegates to the regional and national policy conferences or run as delegates themselves. Half of all dues would go to the Education and Training Unit. Finally, as shown in Figure  5, the charter also proposed a new set of seven regional committee organizations, which would be constructed to help interface between the state and national layers of the party. Each regional committee would be composed of state party leaders, local members of the Membership and Finance Council, and their representatives from the DNC. The regional committees would in turn sponsor their own regional conferences to be held in odd-numbered years. Their “primary obligation” would be to “promote party organization, education and training” within their respective geographic areas, while also developing policy recommendations to be forwarded for consideration at the next national meeting.74 In sum, the authors of the charter proposal held that it would “discard the frustrating weaknesses of the present system,” such as those voiced in

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Regional Conference Delegates elected by national party members within region; delegates from state democratic parties within region; Democratic public officials and nominees within region

ns

atio

nd me

om

Rec

National Policy Conference

Recom

menda

tions

Delegates’ election by national party members; delegates from state Democratic parties; Democratic public officials and nominees

Democratic National Committee

Regional Committee State chairmen and chairwomen; delegates elected by state caucus; state members of the National Membership and Finance Council; regional chairmen; regional members of National Executive Committee

Delegates elected by primaries and state conventions (unchanged)

All members of regional committees; members of National Executive Committee

embers

All M

Tw

The regional conference would make recommendations to the National Policy Conference and the National Convention. The entire membership of the regional committees would compose the DNC and each region would have two representatives on the National Executive Committee.

oM

em

ber

s

National Executive Committee National chair; congressional leaders; regional chairs; national at-large members regional at-large members

Source: Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Draft Charter, O’Hara Collection

Figure 5. Proposed Relationship between Regional and National Organizations. Source: Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Draft Charter, O’Hara Collection.

the McGovern-Fraser hearings, “and usher in a new and vastly strengthened structure, based on broad grassroots support.”75 Clearly seeing the limits of purely participatory democracy, reformers advanced an ambitious plan in the waning months of the McGovern-Fraser Commission that sought to remake party politics altogether. The new Democratic Party, they asserted, would be “an institution open to all people, greatly influenced by its incumbent officeholders and leaders but bigger than they [are], and not just their creation.”76 Instead, it would function as “an active and creative force in American politics . . . which can respond intelligently to the problems and needs of modern America.”77 Thus, reformers attempted to marry and balance the twin concerns of providing greater opportunity for grassroots par-

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ticipation as well as producing the organizational infrastructure necessary for cultivating a broad, diverse social base. The charter sought to combine the old and the new politics into a fresh admixture, one that could both temper insurgents and revitalize the party establishment. However, despite their efforts to frame the charter as a logical next step in the modernization of the Democratic Party, the ambitious ideas contained in the O’Hara-Fraser proposal met with stiff and, after a protracted struggle, ultimately insurmountable opposition. Its delayed formulation and rollout during an election year did it no favors; nor did the disastrous outcome of the 1972 election. Still, the charter’s aim to dismantle the decentralized power structure of the party helped galvanize a formidable antireform backlash, concentrated first against McGovern’s presidential candidacy and subsequently in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. The reforms to delegate selection had asserted national party authority over the states as never before, but they had left the states in place as the constituent units of the national party. The charter threatened the power of the state parties and their leaders in a way that delegate selection restructuring did not, and both aspects of reform would come under intense attack after 1972.

CHAPTER 4

The Party Turned Upside Down The McGovern Nomination and the Backlash Against Reform

Uprooting old, entrenched customs of the past and replacing them with new and different procedures is not easy. Shifting . . . to open participation by party rank-andfile members constitutes a virtual political revolution. Including large numbers of women, young people, and minorities in National Convention delegations means turning years of tradition around. — Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection (1972) There is too much hair and not enough cigars at this convention. —Unidentified AFL-CIO official (1972)

During the initial phase of reform between 1969 and 1972, as binding changes to state parties’ delegate selection procedures were implemented and enforced from above and below, the reformers’ actions seemed to spur surprisingly little organized resistance on the part of actors with vested interests in the old ways of Democratic Party governance: state party officials, elected officeholders, and labor leaders. Due to the absence of a coordinating body, such as the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, to help foment an antireform movement, as well as the incredulity of many state chairs regarding the prospects of radical institutional change, such resistance as was offered was tepid, sporadic, and ultimately ineffective.

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However, a nascent antireform coalition took shape during the Stop McGovern movement at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, when the political effects of party reform could no longer be ignored or dismissed. Senator George McGovern’s capture of the presidential nomination was made possible by the reforms and the groups mobilized behind them. His role as a spokesperson for the New Politics movement helped galvanize the diffuse backlash against reform into a formidable intraparty force against his candidacy. This was nowhere as apparent as within the leadership of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). The labor leadership’s unprecedented decision to remain neutral in the 1972 presidential contest anticipated and partly contributed to the landslide electoral defeat of McGovern in November. That decision was justified as an action in defense of traditional “blue-collar” Democrats against the “New Class” of white-collar reformers—a framework that has influenced most secondary accounts. Their claims, however, are belied by the conflicts within labor caused by the neutrality decision—splits that did not align along a white-collar/blue-collar axis, but rather reflected distinct interests within the labor leadership over its traditional mode of party influence and the future of American unionism. As I will show, the political cleavages opened up by McGovern’s candidacy came to define the fault lines of the second phase of the reform struggle and foreshadowed its ultimate outcome. The practical necessity to unroll delegate selection reform prior to party reconstruction amounted to a pivotal political gamble. Many reformers harbored reservations about opening the party without also supplying the requisite organizational infrastructure to fashion a well-integrated Democratic Party. Counter-reformers’ ability to torpedo the latter, but not the former, set the Democrats on the path to the advocacy party.

“Come Home, America”: McGovern for President When McGovern resigned from his chairmanship of the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection in January 1971 to make a run for the Democratic nomination, he was judged by a well-known Las Vegas oddsmaker to have no better than a 200-to-1 shot at succeeding.1 His time as the commission chair had not done much to raise his public profile outside circles

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of concerned Democrats, party activists, or state party officials who were compelled to acknowledge the commission’s existence. Moreover, he faced tough competition from Eugene McCarthy, who still commanded loyal partisans from 1968; Edmund Muskie, who had been Hubert Humphrey’s vice presidential running mate; Washington State’s senator Henry Jackson; New York congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to run for the Democratic nomination; as well as Alabama governor George Wallace, who had been persuaded by the Nixon administration to run as a Democrat rather than as an Independent as he had in 1968.2 Before long, Humphrey would also join the race, becoming one of McGovern’s fiercest critics.3 By the time he won the nomination in the summer of 1972, McGovern and his team wore the long-shot appellation with pride.4 McGovern’s victory in the presidential nominating race was facilitated by the party reforms that his commission had designed and implemented for the delegate selection system. While they did not privilege him personally, the new rules did make possible an insurgent campaign that other wise would have been shut out, as in 1968. By disempowering the mid-level party actors who had marginalized or excluded party insurgents from influencing the nomination process in 1968, the McGovern-Fraser reforms had paved the way for new entrants to flood into the party. Thus, McGovern’s nomination was a product of not only reform, but also the New Politics movement, drawing on the networks and consciousness already in formation through a process stretching back to the Mississippi Freedom Democrats and the insurgencies of McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. It was this combination of procedural reform, group mobilization, and political insurgency that more than doubled the number of participants in the Democratic nominating process from 8.4 million in 1968 to 17.5 million in 1972.5 McGovern’s campaign recruited many former Kennedy and McCarthy people, as well as some staff members of the reform commission. Many midlevel staffers were under thirty-five years old. Richard Sterns, who had interned for the commission, saw in the public opinion polls the opportunity to cultivate an activist base around “hostility to the war in Vietnam.” “This constituency,” he said, “could very well be a vehicle to give McGovern the early victories [he needs] to eventually consolidate a leading position” in the primaries.6 Sterns’s strategy was put to use in the early states of New Hampshire and Wisconsin, where nearly a year of quiet, face-to-face canvassing by armies of local grassroots organizers paid off in a surprise second-place finish and an outright victory, respectively, launching the senator’s profile as

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an early antiwar insurgent into the national spotlight. His frequently intoned invitation—“Come Home, America”—appeared to gain traction. The McGovern campaign ran what they called a “left-center strategy,” one that was designed to “co-opt the left, precluding the possibility of other liberal candidates, and, at the same time, make the campaign open and acceptable to party regulars.”7 While McGovern’s long association with the antiwar movement risked casting him as a single-issue candidate, his campaign slogan, “Right from the Start,” was meant to underscore the belated transformation of his most formidable liberal rival, Hubert Humphrey, from a Lyndon Johnson loyalist to a critic of the Nixon administration’s Vietnam policy. The McGovern campaign also developed a much wider liberal platform, including qualified support for the controversial practice of busing to achieve racial integration in public education, an ultimately illfated proposal for universal basic income, as well as massive cuts to the defense budget and the conversion of defense-related industries to environmental and infrastructure spending.8 With Wallace taking the votes of most racially conservative Democrats, and Humphrey, Muskie, and Jackson splitting the center, McGovern’s courting of the party left to win the nomination was challenged only by Chisholm, who, while drawing significant support from her own National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), failed to line up support from major civil rights blocs such as Black Power organizations or the newly formed Congressional Black Caucus.9 The reforms had also reshaped the institutional terrain of the nominating contest itself. Many state parties, frustrated with adjusting their caucus and convention procedures to comply with McGovern-Fraser, opted to switch to state-run presidential primaries.10 From seventeen primaries, selecting only a minority of convention delegates in 1968, twenty-three states held primaries in 1972, which not only elected over 50 percent of convention delegates but also, with the exception of California, bound them to cast their convention ballots proportionally according to the outcome of those contests. The greater number of primaries was not the exclusive source of the groundswell in participation witnessed that year. While the total amount of primary voters more than doubled between 1968 and 1972, caucusgoers rose by over 250 percent in the same period.11 In fact, McGovern performed best in nonprimary states, where his enthusiastic supporters had the superior grassroots organization to outmobilize his rivals in the caucuses. Ironically, however, McGovern’s victory ultimately came down to the final contest in California, whose traditional winner-take-all primary had

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been a source of such contention in the McGovern-Fraser proceedings that the final decision regarding its status had been deferred to the 1972 convention. The outcome of that primary—44  percent for McGovern, 39  percent for Humphrey—gave all 271 California delegates to McGovern, putting him over the threshold for the nomination. Had proportional representation been in effect as the commission guidelines had required in all other states, neither McGovern nor Humphrey would have arrived at the 1972 convention as the presumptive nominee. But while McGovernites celebrated their victory, Humphrey stayed in the race, determined to bring his fight for the nomination into the convention. As we will see, the California credentials challenge became a focal issue in the Stop McGovern movement.

The Old Politics in the New Party While McGovern’s campaign followed a familiar path to that of McCarthy and Kennedy in 1968, the effects were dramatically different. With new delegate selection rules in place, early commanding victories in state primaries were no longer meant to simply demonstrate the candidate’s electability to party powerbrokers. With proportional representation of candidate strength (except in California) and pledged delegates, presidential aspirants accumulated convention support through primaries and caucuses where party voters cast their ballots for their preferred candidates. State and local party organizations had no choice but to facilitate this process, which they could no longer control. That the new system held important ramifications for traditional methods of party governance and coalition building was not lost on party stakeholders. While the top officials of the AFL-CIO preferred to respond to this changed environment by informally boycotting the reform process itself, the DNC chair, Lawrence O’Brien, did not let the issue rest. As DNC records demonstrate, O’Brien and his staff were at pains to pull labor into the reformed nominating system, repeatedly soliciting their input and participation to help them adapt to the new rules. As one internal report to the chair read, “The extent of the understanding of the impact of these facts [delegate selection reforms] and the timetable is quite limited. . . . Most of the labor movement has ignored the process and with notable exceptions has not participated in the decision steps. This is a luxury that neither the labor movement nor the Democratic Party can afford. If substantial involvement

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by state labor leadership, working down into the lower levels of the party, and . . . union leadership at the national level is not evident in the weeks immediately ahead, there is a serious question as to the ability of the labor movement to influence and affect the selection of the party’s nominee in 1972.”12 For O’Brien and others at the DNC, the belief that reform would restore unity to the Democratic Party was at risk of faltering on account of labor’s unwillingness to embrace the reforms and get involved in delegate selection early. They recognized that “trade unions are the most stable elements” in the party coalition. “It is essential that the leadership of the trade union movement understand and be involved in such critical activities as implementation of party delegate selection reform, selection of delegates to the convention, and avoiding the kind of self-defeating episodes we had at the Chicago Convention.”13 However, the DNC’s warnings to labor that the rules of the political game were changing were met with more than just silence: they were accompanied by vitriolic attacks on the reformers and pressure to roll back the clock on the reform project altogether. In one such meeting with George Meany, O’Brien told the AFL-CIO president, “The rules have been adopted. . . . It’s too late to debate whether they’re good or bad. You have your people well orga nized all over the country. You should study the new rules and use them to your advantage, just like everyone else.”14 But for all of O’Brien’s pleading with the labor leadership to adapt to the new institutional conditions produced by the reform movement, it is likely that no amount of foresight by AFL-CIO officials could have overcome the historic limitations of the trade union movement in such a short time span. The nature of labor’s integration into the national Democratic Party’s system of elite brokerage since the New Deal placed its greatest source of leverage in the smoke-filled backrooms of the convention hall, where presidential nominees had to meet the approval of top union officials in order for labor’s organizational muscle to be put to work on the party’s behalf during the election. This institutional arrangement only reinforced American labor’s incapacity to effectively engage its mass membership in political education. While they could perform valuable ser vices in terms of voter registration and turnout—and not only for union members—unions had little ability to affect workers’ hearts and minds. Yet this was precisely the imperative the newly reformed nominating system imposed on them. With their powerbroker role effectively abolished, labor would have to mobilize its members

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not only to participate in primaries and caucuses but also to cast their ballots for the leadership’s preferred candidate. As the surprising surge in union members’ support for George Wallace’s racial populism had painfully reminded AFL-CIO and United Auto Workers (UAW) officials in 1964, 1968, and again in 1972, this was not a degree of influence labor officials were adept at exerting. The new system also meant taking the risk of publicly supporting a candidate, as the Committee on Political Education (COPE) did in 1972 with Henry Jackson, who failed to survive the primaries. This put labor in a strategic conundrum: either they could transfer their support from the loser to the winner after the fact, which could relegate them to the bottom of the candidate’s coalition, or labor could remain uninvolved during the primary process until a nominee emerged. However, the latter option left open the possibility that the nominee could be indifferent or even hostile to labor’s interests, and, even in the best-case scenario, would implicitly confirm that labor was irrelevant for capturing the Democratic nomination. Due primarily to its own actions and inactions over the course of its history of political involvement, labor found itself in an impossible position. With its veto power over the Democratic candidate removed by the reformers, its influence in the Democratic Party appeared to evaporate after seeming, four short years ago, to have reached new heights.

The Labor-Left and the New Politics But if labor’s role in Democratic Party politics had been forcibly altered by the reform movement, this was a development not everyone in the labor leadership greeted with hostility. Indeed, some large industrial, ser vice, and public-sector unions viewed the new participatory nominating system as their own window of opportunity to gain greater influence in party affairs. Historically subordinated to the dominance of Meany’s conservative exAFL wing of the federation, which also held authority over COPE and the AFL-CIO’s legislative activity, was the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); the Machinists; the Clothing and Textile Workers; the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers; the Communication Workers (CWA); and the United Farm Workers—all of whom not only held less of a stake in the old brokerage relationship with the Democratic Party leadership but also had larger, more diverse memberships that

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more closely resembled the New Politics demographically than did the memberships of the craft unions. When combined with those industrial and public-service unions outside the AFL-CIO, such as the UAW, the National Education Association, and the United Electrical Workers, it seemed the New Politics reform movement had a potentially powerful ally in very important parts of the labor movement.15 In fact, the hostile actions taken by Meany in response to the New Politics movement threatened to transform labor’s nascent fissures into profound splits. At the AFL- CIO president’s invitation, Senator Jackson delivered his anti–New Politics stump speech before the federation’s executive council in August 1970. From the podium, Jackson—whose adviser Ben Wattenberg would lead the antireform Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) after the election—denounced “the intellectual elite” and the “silk stocking liberals” who were “trying to use ‘party reform’ as a device to take over the party.”16 An AFL-CIO executive council member and president of AFSCME, Jerry Wurf, who, following the death of the UAW’s Walter Reuther in May 1970, had assumed the leadership of the labor-left, communicated to O’Brien his “concern with the comments on ‘extremists’ in the Democratic Party” being spread through labor’s highest councils. “Meany is so hung up on the war,” Wurf reported, “that he would, if he could, try and seal a Nixon endorsement in 1972.” Top Democratic officials concluded among themselves that “there is very real resentment” against Meany and his political style within the house of labor.17 However, the tensions potentially cleaving the trade union leadership were not about the Vietnam War as such or even the reform of the Democratic Party. Fueling the resentments of Wurf and other liberal labor leaders in the AFL-CIO was its undemocratic—almost autocratic—system of governance. Unwavering commitment to the war in Vietnam, even under a Republican administration, indicated a pattern of decision making that since 1955 had vested almost total authority in the now seventy-seven-year-old Meany and his top lieutenants. “Unilateral positions [are] taken without consultation,” Wurf later told the New Republic.18 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, as union density began falling from its postwar high, many, especially those on the margins of the trade union hierarchy, had come to see such unilateralism as a liability for the fate of American unionism. It had been Meany’s failure to launch what the late Walter Reuther had described as “a comprehensive program to modernize and revitalize the AFL-CIO and make it into an effective instrument for creative and constructive social

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change” that had motivated the UAW president to disaffiliate from the labor federation in 1968.19 Reuther’s protest, however, had fallen on deaf ears. When Meany was asked during a 1972 interview about the state of the labor movement, he answered, “I don’t know. I don’t care.” When asked whether the AFL-CIO should organize the unorganized, Meany asked, “Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not appear to want to be organized?”20 Party reform, therefore, represented to some unions more than a chance to break the old Cold War political mold or embrace a more open Democratic Party as a matter of principle. Reform presented an opportunity to refashion the labor-liberal alliance and shift the balance of power within the union hierarchy itself.

The Convention Turned Upside Down The impact of the delegate selection reforms was visibly on display at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, convened in Miami Beach in July. Due to the strengthened affirmative action guidelines pushed by the NWPC as well as the use of such rules by the mobilized groups entering the party’s nominating process through the McGovern candidacy, “the complexion of Democratic politics had changed.”21 As shown in Figure 6, when compared with the 1968 convention in Chicago, women had increased their proportion of delegate seats from 13 to 40  percent; African Americans had increased from 5 to 15 percent; and people under the age of thirty had increased from 3 to 22 percent. Additionally, those with annual incomes of $10,000 or less (70 percent of the country, according to the 1970 census) increased from 13 to 27  percent. An unprecedented 83  percent of convention participants were attending their first convention. As two political scientists subsequently concluded, “Compared to the total population, the 1972 convention was in most respects more representative than was the 1968 convention.”22 Moreover, the proportion of delegate seats for union members increased dramatically from 4 to 16  percent between 1968 and 1972, belying charges that the reforms disenfranchised the party’s union base. According to the available estimates, including from COPE, labor had somewhere between 300 and 488 delegates in Miami Beach.23 The number of union officials— 145—had increased since 1968 as well.24 While there were many new faces populating the Miami Beach convention, there were conspicuous absences as well. Despite the increase in the

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45 40 35 30 25

1968

20

1972

15 10 5 0

Women

African Americans

Under 30

Figure 6. Women, African Americans, and Youth as Percentage of Democratic National Convention Delegates, 1968 and 1972. Source: CBS News Report, “The Delegates of ’72,” Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party: Coalition for a Democratic Majority, October 1973-November 1974, James O’Hara Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

aggregate number of Democrats in the House, the Senate, and in governors’ mansions across the country, the proportion of these attending the national convention fell dramatically. As shown in Table  1, the number of Democratic governors attending conventions across this period declined significantly, falling from a high attendance rate of 88.5  percent in 1968 to 53.3 percent in 1972, a drop of over one-third. Senators’ fall in the rate of attendance was even more pronounced, from 63  percent in 1968 to less than 28  percent in 1972. And members of the House Democratic Caucus, while never attending national conventions in high proportions, also dropped significantly from 31.6 percent in 1968 to a mere 12.2 percent in 1972. McGovern-Fraser’s abolition of automatic delegate status for party officials and public officeholders required those who used to enjoy the prerogative of being an uncommitted voting delegate at the national convention, and very often a leading figure within their state delegation, to declare their preferred candidate (or at least declare themselves “uncommitted”), compete for a delegate seat in their state’s primary or convention, and vote accordingly if selected to be that candidate’s supporter at the convention. Whether due to the embarrassment of having to compete against candidate activists for a position

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Table 1. Democratic Officeholders Attending Democratic National Conventions, 1968 and 1972 Percentage In Office Chicago Attendance In Office Miami Attendance Change, 1968 1968 Rate (%) 1972 1972 Rate (%) 1968-1972 Governors Senators Representatives

26 62 247

23 39 78

88.5 63 31.6

30 54 255

16 15 31

53.3 27.8 12.2

−39.8 −55.9 −61.4

Sources: CBS News Report, “The Delegates of ’72,” Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party: Coalition for a Democratic Majority, October 1973–November 1974, James O’Hara Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; William Crotty, Party Reform (New York: Longman, 1983), 136.

many felt they were entitled to by right of office or, as happened in several cases, having lost in such a competition, top Democratic officials attended the 1972 convention in much smaller numbers than ever before.25

The Credentials Committee and the California Challenge With new party rules in place as well as the mobilization of so many new entrants, it is perhaps no surprise that party governance was especially contentious in Miami Beach. This was especially true for the Credential Committee, which saw an astounding 118 challenges launched against 31 state delegations. Just as the 1964 Atlantic City compromise had provided the ground on which antiwar insurgents launched a more far-reaching set of challenges in 1968, so had the McGovern-Fraser guidelines, especially those concerning affirmative action, paved the way for activists to mount yet more challenges. While many were withdrawn or settled without significant dispute in the weeks before the official commencement of the committee hearings in June, several of the remaining twenty-eight cases constituted a showdown between the reformers and their opponents over the most controversial changes to the party. Of the remaining challenges, 80  percent dealt with the affirmative action guidelines.26 In contrast to Chicago, most were decided in favor of the reformers, often by topping up state delegations with more women, minorities, or youth activists.27 The

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California case, however, became the staging ground for the nascent Stop McGovern coalition. Inside the Credentials Committee hearings, the Stop McGovern forces— led by AFL-CIO operatives, but including Humphrey, Jackson, Muskie, and Wallace supporters—focused the bulk of their energies on the controversial case of California. Ironically, the Stop McGovern coalition positioned itself as being more consistent with the reforms than the reformers, filing a credentials challenge alleging the use of the banned unit rule, binding all delegates to cast their votes with the majority in the state’s winner-take-all primary. Since McGovern-Fraser had come to a stalemate on the question of California’s primary and had explicitly deferred how to resolve it until the 1972 convention, the results were in line with party and state law. However, new convention rules required that delegates whose credentials were in question could not vote on their own case. With the ten California representatives having recused themselves, the Stop McGovern forces held the balance of power on the committee, and the majority ruled to overturn the California results 72–66, redistributing the delegates proportionally among the candidates. The decision temporarily threw McGovern’s nomination into doubt. Without all 271 California delegates, McGovern would not reach the majority threshold necessary on the first ballot, potentially unbinding his delegates to shift their support to Humphrey. McGovernites on the committee retaliated the next day by organizing a majority of 71 to 61 to invalidate the credentials of Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s Illinois delegation for failing both to comply with the guidelines against closed slate making as well as to ensure adequate representation for women, minorities, and youth. Daley’s fifty-eight delegates were replaced by a rival delegation led by Chicago alderman William Singer and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. In the case of California, McGovern filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Court of Appeals, which reinstated the results of the winner-take-all primary. Subsequently, however, in an emergency session, the Supreme Court struck down the appellate court decision 6–3 only days before the convention began in July, on the grounds that the federal judiciary cannot intervene in the internal affairs of party governance and that the final authority rested in the convention. On the opening day of the proceedings in Miami Beach, the McGovern team sent a minority report to the convention floor and, with a difficult behind-the-scenes agreement to forfeit their support for an NWPC-sponsored challenge against South Carolina, won approval upholding the California results.28

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While McGovern’s success in the California challenge won him the Democratic nomination, the symbolic effect of his supporters unceremoniously unseating the former powerbroker of the old politics, Richard Daley, did much to hurt his chances of winning the presidency. Daley rejected a compromise position offered by the McGovern team to seat both Illinois delegations and dilute their votes accordingly. As New Politics reformer and McGovern operative Eli Segal later reflected, “Humiliating Daley with Jesse Jackson and all that he was identified with was very bad.”29 Moreover, it sent a shockwave through the party that persuaded many outside observers that the reformers were going too far. Anticipating the rhetoric of the counter-reform movement to come, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko put his objections in an open letter to the Illinois credentials challengers: “I just don’t see where your delegation is representative of Chicago’s Democrats. . . . About half of your delegates are women. About a third of your delegates are black. Many of them are young people. You even have a few Latin Americans. But as I looked over the names of your delegates, I saw something peculiar. . . . There’s only one Italian there. . . . And only three of your 59 [delegates] have Polish names. . . . Your reforms have disenfranchised Chicago’s white ethnic Democrats, which is a strange reform. . . . Anybody who would reform Chicago’s Democratic Party by dropping the white ethnic would probably begin a diet by shooting himself in the stomach.”30 Indeed, the “white ethnic strategy” would be weaponized across a number of venues in the 1970s, including by counter-reformers in the Democratic Party, and would prove to be an effective wedge issue in splitting the New Politics coalition and undermining their legitimacy through sustained attacks on the alleged inequities of the McGovernFraser quota system.31

The Platform Committee and the Extension of Programmatic Rights Another venue of contention was the Platform Committee. Its expansion to 150 members, the early beginning of its deliberations, and its twelve-city regional hearings soliciting public testimony were all changes designed to “open up” the process in response to the turmoil of 1968 and a means of reunifying the party. As Harvard University professor Richard Neustadt,

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chair of the committee, said, “The old image of a small group sequestering itself to hurriedly produce a platform following one week’s hearings just before the convention no longer reflects the needs of the party.”32 The open process facilitated the input of many interest groups and movement actors. These included elements of the old coalition such as the AFLCIO leadership, who, while refusing to sit on the committee, did forward a list of proposals for consideration, as well as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). More recently mobilized groups such as the United Farm Workers, Common Cause, the Gay Activist Alliance, the NWPC, the New Democratic Coalition, and a range of others also provided testimony throughout the hearings and drafting sessions. One set of analysts observed that “it was the first time in memory that a national party platform had been written through participatory democracy.”33 For some, such an open, participatory process raised concerns about the likely outcome. Considering that McGovern held a plurality of convention delegates elected to the Platform Committee, many expected the platform to be radical in content and inflammatory in tone. As Ben Wattenberg, sitting on the committee as a representative for Senator Jackson, said, “There won’t be any riots in Miami because the people who rioted in Chicago are [now] on the Platform Committee.”34 But contrary to these predictions, and much to the chagrin of some pro-McGovern forces, the final platform was far from a sharp break with past Democratic platforms.35 In fact, the platform reproduced much of what the New Deal Democratic mainstream had taken for granted in previous years, yet explicitly extended these programmatic rights to newly mobilized groups and into new policy areas. The most radical revision of Democratic Party practice was, of course, the section on foreign policy, which promised, “as the first order of business, an immediate and complete withdrawal of all US forces in Indochina.”36 However, in domestic policy, the platform rehashed standard Democratic proposals for tax reform, increasing Social Security transfers, expanding benefits for Medicare and access to quality housing, and repealing section  14b of the TaftHartley Act, which prohibited the closed union shop. Indeed, as one set of scholarly observers put it, “The platform satisfied all of labor’s traditional bread-and-butter demands.”37 Reflecting the new social groups inside the party, the platform also endorsed lowering the age of adulthood to eighteen, extending full citizenship to Native Americans (especially regarding land rights), and making the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution a “priority effort.”

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Most interest ing, however, was the first plank that appeared in the 1972 Democratic platform, which defined “full employment—a guaranteed job for all” as “the primary economic objective of the Democratic Party.” While full employment had been a staple of the national Democratic Party platform since 1944, the more ambitious phrase, emphasizing a guaranteed right to work, had subsequently been dropped from the party’s statement of principles as early as 1948. Echoing President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address, where he outlined his proposed Second Bill of Rights, the 1972 platform dedicated the party to make “economic security a matter of right,” meaning “a job with decent pay and good working conditions for everyone willing and able to work.” The means to achieve such a “right to work” included not only job retraining for those dislocated through automation and deindustrialization but also the creation of “millions of jobs” through the expansion of publicsector employment, “mak[ing] the government the employer of last resort.” The platform pointed to America’s desperate need for public works and infrastructure spending, defense reconversion, and environmental cleanup, as well as for the need for affirmative action in all dimensions of public and private life to correct entrenched civic hierarchies produced by racial and gender discrimination and segmented labor markets. As the New York Times recognized, such a vision was less a radical break from the past than it was “a return to the initial thrust of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.”38

The Rules Committee and the Party Charter The Rules Committee also served as an impor tant site of the New Politics’ transformation of the party in 1972. This was less so because of what transpired inside its proceedings than what the proceedings indicated about the second phase of the reform struggle to come. As we have seen, the belated turn of the McGovern-Fraser and O’Hara commissions to the issue of party reconstruction resulted in an ambitious proposal to create what chairs O’Hara and Fraser called an “in-between-conventions-organization.”39 Unsurprisingly, the charter’s promise to “discard the frustrating weaknesses of the present system and usher in a new and vastly strengthened structure, based on broad grassroots support,” quickly ran into severe opposition from party stakeholders.40

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Unlike the relative absence of coordinated resistance during the implementation of nomination reform, the charter proposal hit a wall of orga nized opposition almost immediately. This was partly a matter of timing. State party officials who had willfully ignored or simply neglected the proceedings of McGovern-Fraser over its three years of operation had little opportunity to resist by the time they found themselves bound to comply with its set of directives. By early 1972, however, when the effects of those changes were palpable, resistance to a new front in the reform struggle was readily at hand. Opposition to the charter was also a matter of substance. For all the novel features of the McGovern-Fraser guidelines, their standards for procedural fairness and due process were very difficult to oppose in principle. The mess of unwritten rules, local customs, and transactional politics that had governed internal party affairs for well over a century found very few defenders as such.41 Nearly all stakeholders had agreed that some kind of party modernization project was called for in the wake of the 1968 crisis. The same, however, was not true regarding national party organization, whose decentralized, confederal structure had been a point of praise in many academic texts and a source of power for state party actors. To propose what O’Hara and Fraser themselves described as a “sharp break with the past” was sure to galvanize greater opposition than delegate selection reform.42 In late June, as the Rules Committee was considering what to do with the charter proposal, Democratic members of the House of Representatives, many of whom were frustrated with having their automatic delegate privileges rescinded, engaged in a vocal display of protest over the charter, voting 105–50 to denounce the proposal as “not in the best interests of the Democratic Party.” Led by an Illinois representative closely associated with Daley, and in defiance of the House leadership, caucus members announced their opposition to what they saw as another vehicle for “activists and militants to take over the party.”43 By stripping away automatic delegate status, Ohio representative Wayne Hays said, “The McGovern-O’Hara-Fraser commissions reformed us out of the presidency, and now they’re trying to reform us out of a party.”44 In addition to attacking quotas for women, racial minorities, and young people, House Democrats focused their criticisms on the charter’s proposed midterm policy conferences, alleging that such gatherings would be unrepresentative and unreflective of the party mainstream, objecting that “you can’t have a 3,000-member committee setting policy for the party. That’s the job of Congress and elected officials.”45

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Other party members and affiliated group representatives also organized in opposition to the charter. Laying the basis for what would become the foremost counter-reform group, the CDM, labor-oriented Cold Warrior Josh Muravchik raised the alarm among his associates, warning that the proposed charter, if adopted in Miami Beach, would result in a “sweeping restructuring of the party.” Encouraging his colleagues to act quickly, Muravchik emphasized the high stakes that the charter proposal represented in the context of intraparty politics: “The decisions that the convention will make in this area will determine the framework within [which] the postNovember battles for control over the party will be fought.”46 Accordingly, the nascent coalition hastily put together a partially successful lobbying effort directed at the convention’s Rules Committee. In a circular, the group asserted that the charter’s party-membership provision would amount to a de facto “second voter registration” system likely to depress participation; its delegate selection provisions would “institutionalize” the McGovernFraser reforms before their effects could be fully reviewed; and the charter would “virtually eliminate the role that public officeholders and state party officials play in party affairs.”47 The greatest source of opposition to the substance of the proposed party charter, however, came from the newly formed Association of State Democratic Chairs (ASDC), an organization whose formation was a direct reaction to the McGovern-Fraser reforms. Sensing acutely the loss of their former autonomy in the face of the unprecedented assertion of national party authority, state party leaders joined together against a national committee they criticized as disconnected and insufficiently concerned with the day-to-day mechanics of running state organizations. As for the charter, by planning to introduce a new regional layer of organization to better integrate state and national party levels, state chairs had the most at stake in the fate of the proposal. Adding a middle tier of committee organizations and participatory policy conferences would only restrict further the capacity of state parties to govern their own affairs and, they feared, win elections. Accordingly, the ASDC took note of the plan for structural reform even before the draft charter proposal was circulated.48 South Carolina chair Donald Fowler attacked the charter’s dues-based membership scheme as “the most reprehensible and dangerous” innovation yet suggested by the reformers. It “plays into the hands of . . . those who are highly motivated because of special interests or extreme ideological commitments” and would

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have the consequence of effectively disenfranchising average Democratic voters.49 There were notable exceptions to this chorus of opposition, however. Communications Workers president Joseph Beirne forwarded a note of appreciation to Fraser, identifying the expansion of the “right” to “help make party policy” as “the most impor tant and far-reaching” change in Democratic Party reform.50 Still, there were significant defections within the New Politics coalition regarding the charter. Despite their generally supportive role in pushing for party reform since 1968, the ADA’s Charter Study Committee balked at O’Hara and Fraser’s proposal for a regional substructure for the Democratic Party. The regional organization, the committee chair reported to the DNC, “serves no functional purpose,” and “the effort and energy expended in organizing regional conferences would be better spent in statewide conventions and conferences which will actually affect the activities and programs of the state parties.”51 Many other reform groups and organizations, consumed with the presidential race and convention planning, simply failed to rally behind the charter proposal. In response to the volume of opposition against the charter and the relative absence of pressure for its passage, Fraser and O’Hara heavily revised their proposal to restructure the Democratic Party, resubmitting to the convention’s Rules Committee a version without regional organizations or a dues-paying membership, and agreeing to the inclusion of all state chairs (plus the highest-ranking state party member of the opposite sex) into an expanded, more representative DNC.52 However, while the Rules Committee agreed to approve the immediate reform of the DNC, so far-reaching were the remaining charter proposals, especially mandatory midterm policy conferences and the election of the party chair, that it recommended the full convention approve a new party reform commission to study the O’HaraFraser draft and plan a midterm party conference to consider the approval of the party’s first constitution in 1974.

A “New Class” Struggle? With the California credentials dispute settled on the first day of the convention, the Stop McGovern effort appeared to lose momentum as the coalition fractured under the inevitability of the New Politics nominee. McGovern’s main challengers, Muskie and Humphrey, formally withdrew

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from the race after their failure in the California contest. Only Henry Jackson, a hawkish Cold War liberal, made a last stand in the face of McGovern’s imminent victory. While seconding Georgia governor Jimmy Carter’s nomination of Jackson for president, Steelworkers president I.  W. Abel set the tone of the postconvention conflict to come. Echoing the rhetoric that Jackson and his adviser Ben Wattenberg had been crafting throughout the campaign, Abel depicted the struggle over the shape of the Democratic Party as a conflict between liberal, white-collar elites and the blue-collar “common man.” Abel denounced the “self-styled liberals, the anti-labor snobs,” and all those “who call themselves advocates of new politics.”53 Abel’s attack on New Politics reformers, however, was not the final shot in the battle for a lost cause. On the contrary, it proved to be the opening salvo in a months-long battle of antireform Cold Warriors against McGovern’s candidacy. The Democratic nominee’s advisers, who naively expected labor leaders such as George Meany to eventually accept the McGovern candidacy by way of rank-and-file pressure, had little in the way of defense.54 The centerpiece of the postconvention revolt against the Democratic nominee was a discourse of class struggle—a framework that became the basis for much of the subsequent academic scholarship.55 During the months between the July convention and the November election, labor leaders and liberal commentators within the Stop McGovern camp engaged in a vigorous publicity campaign against the New Politics movement responsible for McGovern’s nomination. Writing in the Washington Post, John Roche, a former Johnson aide and former national chair of the ADA, depicted the controversy over McGovern’s candidacy as pitting the labor movement against “the intelligentsia, the ‘limousine liberals,’ the upper-class ladies in sandals who live in the city but send their children to private schools and spend their spare time condemning the ‘racism’ of the ethnics who resent busing.”56 The AFL-CIO’s Al Barkan echoed the same inflammatory rhetoric when he vowed that “we aren’t going to let these Harvards-BerkeleysCamelots take over our party.”57 Meany, in an address before the Steelworkers biennial gathering in September, construed the Miami Beach convention as “a classy convention of the elite.” And while he acknowledged that there had been hundreds of new labor delegates in attendance, he bemoaned the presence of “gay liberation activists and people who want to liberalize abortion.”58 As Meany’s words indicated, while the class struggle between McGovern liberals and the working class was the dominant theme uniting the Stop

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McGovern movement, an additional irony was its appropriation of the reformers’ rhetoric of exclusion at the hands of the party elite. In language reminiscent of 1968 and the McGovern-Fraser Commission hearings thereafter, Meany’s marginalization indicated that the reformers’ newfound power in the party was itself undemocratic and unrepresentative. Another former LBJ aide and future member of the CDM, Peter Rosenblatt, underscored this parallel explicitly, writing in the New York Times that “like the dissenters in Chicago, I feel that I have been shut out and that my views were substantially under-represented” in Miami Beach. “The loudly trumpeted reform of party institutions achieved by the 1968 protesters,” he said, “produced a convention this year which was no less unrepresentative,” although “the identity of the victims and the means used to achieve the result did change.”59 After Miami Beach, Meany called a special meeting of the AFL-CIO executive council to extract a unanimous vote announcing the federation’s neutrality in the 1972 presidential election. (The actual vote was 27 to 3, with 5 abstentions.) “We don’t think this man is good for labor,” Meany said of McGovern in a press conference.60 Barkan put it more bluntly: “You socalled responsible leaders of this party seem to think the kids and the kooks and the Bella Abzugs can win you some elections. Well, we’re going to let them try to do it for you this year.”61 Meany rationalized the unprecedented move by reviving the founding philosophy of nonpartisanship characteristic of the AFL under its founder, Samuel Gompers. When asked about labor’s apparently strained relationship with the Democratic Party, Meany told the audience of Face the Nation, “I have nothing to do with the internal workings of the Democratic Party. . . . My party is the trade union movement.”62 However, according to the UAW’s Paul Schrade, the claim of nonpartisanship was “strange coming from the President of the AFL-CIO who sits in his hotel room at Democratic conventions trying to dictate on candidates, platform, and credentials.”63 Even Meany’s long-time lieutenant Lane Kirkland later observed that “anybody who knew George Meany knew he was up to his ears in partisan politics.”64 While some accounts have explained Meany’s opposition to the McGovern candidacy as a result of his affront to the counterculture or due to McGovern’s softness on communism, his fundamental objection was most likely to his own loss of powerbroker status in the reformed Democratic Party.65 According to AFSCME’s Jerry Wurf, “The Executive Council vote has more to do with how McGovern won the nomination than with his

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record before or during the campaign.” “The real concern,” he argued, “was participation and access.”66 The loss of veto power over the Democratic nomination portended a new relationship between groups and the party, one in which the channel of influence ran through participatory primaries and caucuses and issue-oriented politics rather than the networks of elite brokerage. In the aftermath of Meany’s neutrality vote, the decision to effectively boycott the presidential election, and the heavy-handed way in which that decision was reached, triggered an explosion within the labor movement. In August  1972, following a meeting of African American representatives of the UAW, the Meat Cutters, the American Federation of Teachers, Hotel Workers, AFSCME, the CWA, and others, a group of black labor-liberals (formally the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists) wrote an open letter to Meany, disavowing the neutrality position, which, they argued, “in no way” reflected their views and “ran counter to the interests of Blacks, other minorities, and workers in general.”67 As the Washington Post observed, “Mr.  Meany has created the conditions that invite defiance from within labor’s ranks of his authority and judgment.”68 Many of the union officials that had backed him subsequently joined the revolt by endorsing the Democratic nominee. AFSCME, the International Union of Electricians, and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers had all originally voted against the neutrality decision, but the CWA, the Machinists (IAM), the Retail Clerks, and the Graphic Arts International Union soon joined them with McGovern endorsements. By the end of August, over forty international unions, including the unaffiliated UAW, had openly defied the stated preference of the president of the union federation. Even those union leaders, such as the Steelworkers’ Abel, who backed Meany by approving neutrality policies within their own executive councils, soon faced defiant union locals endorsing McGovern.69 These splits within the trade union movement belie the surface-level plausibility of the Stop McGovern coalition’s claims regarding the elitist class dynamics of the New Politics movement and its reform of the Democratic Party. The delegate selection reforms engineered by the New Politics party entrepreneurs brought into the convention more women, racial minorities, young people, and union members than ever before, while also increasing the representation of those earning below the median income level. The Miami Beach convention produced a party platform that returned to and extended the reach of New Deal liberalism by prioritizing affirmative

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action, equal citizenship, and guaranteed full employment. It was, however, a decidedly New Politics rendition of the postwar order, shorn of its Cold War foreign policy and its compromising coalition with southern conservatives. However, despite the continuities linking the new politics with the old, groups with vested interests in the old ways of party governance, as well as its policies and career privileges, turned against the new Democratic Party. Finding common cause at the Miami Beach convention, the Stop McGovern movement hardened into an anti–New Politics coalition committed to retaking the party from the reformers. But before the nascent counter-reformers could act, reformers—now in effective control of the party leadership— would have to pass the electoral test.

CHAPTER 5

Bringing the Counter-Reformers Back In The Coalition for a Democratic Majority and the Making of the Advocacy Party

Why shouldn’t those of us who want to replace the de facto quota system enacted in 1971 with a truly democratic and open process of electing delegates now be entitled to be considered the “reformers”? — Coalition for a Democratic Majority (1974)

Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern went down to a historic landslide defeat in November 1972 by a margin of 60.7 to 37.5 percent of the popular vote, losing every state to Richard Nixon except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in a lopsided Electoral College vote of 520 to 17. The American National Election Studies estimated that nearly 40 percent of self-identified Democrats cast their ballots for the Republican president.1 The day after the election, the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) president, George Meany, issued a press release praising the American people for “overwhelmingly repudiating neoisolationism as the basis for foreign policy.” He went on: “under these circumstances, we believe that the AFL-CIO truly reflected the feelings of our rank-and-file when we declined to endorse either candidate. That decision has been vindicated by events.”2 The McGovern disaster marked a turning point for the New Politics reform project in the Democratic Party. While such a decisive rebuke at the polls did not spell the end of reform in itself, its dispiriting effect on reform advocates was palpable, as was its encouraging effect on their opponents.

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Most importantly for the latter, it provided antireformers with a persuasive counterargument where no rationale had been available before. This intellectual void had been displayed in Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg’s best-selling book, The Real Majority, which offered a lackluster defense of the pre-reformed nomination process just as the McGovern-Fraser Commission was formulating its guidelines: “What can be said about the delegate selection system is this: Somehow it works. All the delegates are elected or, if not, are selected by people who were elected popularly or, in some cases, selected by people who were selected by people who were elected popularly at one time or another. There is, then, a democratic process, if far removed, behind each delegate.”3 Such defenses of highly attenuated systems of representation galvanized little in the way of popu lar support or public endorsement when issued in 1970. The party crisis of 1968 had temporarily discredited such systems and their rationales. McGovern’s devastating loss at the polls, however, quickly altered the circumstances. As labor-oriented civil rights leader and counter-reformer Bayard Rustin put it, “The problem lay not with McGovern, but with his supporters and the changes they made in the Democratic Party.”4 However, as the struggle between reformers and counter-reformers played out in the aftermath of 1972, the anti–New Politics front, with few exceptions, did not seek to return the party to the status quo ante. Rather than uprooting the reform project as a whole, which would have risked reenergizing the fatiguing reform coalition and perpetuating intraparty conflict, opponents of the New Politics project organized their attack on the terrain of reform itself, using the language of democratic fairness to diagnose the new party crisis and leveraging the new party bodies and institutional authority of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to coordinate their campaign. By exploiting the window of opportunity opened by McGovern’s defeat, counter-reformers successfully forestalled the structural phase of party reconstruction, constitutionalizing the existing system of party federalism in the new Democratic Party charter. No agent was more important in subverting reform than the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM). Composed of moderate and conservative Democrats, academic intellectuals, and labor leaders—many of whom had been active in the Stop McGovern movement—the CDM emerged from the ashes of the 1972 defeat with a self-declared mission to root out the New Politics from the Democratic Party. While often supported by other organized groups, such as the Association of State Democratic Chairs (ASDC), the

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Democratic Governors Conference, and top officials in the AFL-CIO, the CDM was in the vanguard of the counter-reform movement. From 1972 to 1974, the CDM elaborated the “New Class” arguments lodged against McGovernites by focusing its attacks on what it considered to be the undemocratic quota system mandated by the McGovern-Fraser guidelines, which it held responsible for producing an unrepresentative convention and an unpopular presidential nominee. By concentrating its efforts on the two new reform commissions produced by the 1972 convention—the Commission on Delegate Selection and Party Structure (or the Mikulski Commission) and the Charter Commission (also known as the Sanford Commission)—the relatively small-sized CDM was able to capitalize on the McGovern defeat and prevent the realization of the reformers’ most ambitious agenda: building a nationally integrated, programmatically liberal Democratic Party. The outcome of this factional struggle had lasting effects on the Democratic Party and American political development more generally. The combination of failure and success to prevent presidential nomination reform on the one hand and thwart party reconstruction on the other resulted in a hybrid party organization, one that layered new participatory arrangements over a loose, confederal party structure devoid of any aggregative organizations or procedures capable of channeling grassroots energy into responsible mass partisanship. The combination of reform and counter-reform produced a hollow party organization that provided greater entrance and voice for well-organized advocates, but lacked the institutional capacity to cultivate a robust party politics or constrain the autonomy of powerful officeholders, especially the president, to govern as an agent of the party organization and its members. Consequently, the party’s increased dependence on advocacy groups, and, in turn, groups’ increased dependence on presidential policy making, would come to define the emergent advocacy party.

“Come Home, Democrats”: Launching the CDM In early December 1972, one month after McGovern’s defeat, full-page ads appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post inviting “commonsense liberals” to reject the “blare of the New Politics.” Under the large headline “Come Home, Democrats”—a play on McGovern’s campaign theme “Come Home, America”—its authors announced that “the ‘New Politics’ has failed.” In the short manifesto that followed, the newly formed CDM

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denounced the new, “unrepresentative” social groups that had come to exert “undue influence” within the Democratic Party, “driving [the labor movement] from its traditional place in the vanguard of the Democratic coalition.” The task at hand, the manifesto concluded, was the formation of an “action group” that could take advantage of this “historic opportunity” to shift the “climate of opinion” regarding the future of the Democratic Party.5 Founded by former LBJ speechwriter Ben Wattenberg and AFL-CIO associate Penn Kemble, the early CDM’s active members and supporters included several prominent Democratic officeholders, such as Senator Henry Jackson (WA), Representative Thomas Foley (WA), and erstwhile reformer Representative James O’Hara (MI); a handful of academic and public intellectuals, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Austin Ranney, Nelson Polsby, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter; several key labor leaders and officials, such as Al Barkan, Bayard Rustin, and Albert Shanker (the CDM’s primary source of funding came from AFL-CIO-affiliated unions); and an array of Democratic Party officials and strategists, including Hubert Humphrey aide Max Kampleman, Joshua Muravchik, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Richard Perle.6 CDM members’ views and motives were diverse, ranging from a pragmatic interest in recapturing the presidency to restoring union leadership’s privileged role in nominations to disillusionment with the reform project itself. Others, many of whom would later become prominent neoconservatives and Reagan administration officials, expressed ideological hostility toward dovish foreign policy and domestic countercultural mores, which they saw as part of a single phenomenon they labeled “McGovernism.” Group leaders frequently framed their project in grand terms as an effort to “redefine liberalism for the 1970s” by cleansing it of its McGovernite elements.7 As they put it in their newsletter, CDM Notes, We now face a need to draw some distinctions between the two major strands of what used to be called liberalism. One strand, with which CDM is aligned, holds that the Democratic Party must rebuild a broad coalition to win back the blue-collar, Southern moderate, Catholic, and “middle-American” voters who deserted the Democratic ticket in 1972. . . . The second strand seeks to strengthen the forces which came to dominate the party between 1968 and 1972—an alliance of women, blacks, and youth, led by dissident elements of the affluent, educated middle class.8

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The CDM, they asserted, was “not looking for unity,” but rather was content “to draw bright, clear lines” between the strands to better transform liberalism’s internal splits “into a chasm.” “Compromise,” Wattenberg asserted, “would come later.”9 Surprisingly, the CDM’s sponsorship list also included several erstwhile party reformers. Austin Ranney, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, had been a very active member of the McGovernFraser Commission throughout the body’s lifetime, but he evidently turned against its guidelines by December 1972.10 In addition to Ranney was James O’Hara, a Michigan representative who had chaired the sibling Commission on Rules from 1969 to 1972 and had coauthored the original draft of the party charter with Donald Fraser. However, as a leading member of the CDM, O’Hara became a sharp critic of the reform movement, denouncing the 1972 convention as the “most unrepresentative” in the last century of the Democratic Party, one that he claimed was dominated by a “militant minority.”11 When Congress reconvened in January 1973 in the wake of McGovern’s defeat, O’Hara distributed copies of “Come Home, Democrats” to all his Democratic colleagues in the House.12 For CDM members, McGovernism was a threat pregnant with “the dangers in the broader current of political ideas” that had emerged from the 1960s New Left, including a “conception of democratic participation,” which they claimed privileged “the demands of the political activist” over the “needs of the ordinary citizen.”13 Midge Decter went so far as to describe “grass roots politics” as “an upper middle class sport.”14 Seeing themselves as engaged in a battle to defend traditional Cold War liberalism from the New Politics, members of the CDM defined their project as restoring “the disaffected and disenfranchised elements of the Democratic Party to influence.”15 By employing the New Class discourse heard from those in the Stop McGovern movement who denounced the New Politics as elitist, the CDM effectively turned the political entrepreneurialism of their opponents against them, casting themselves as the embattled insurgents fighting for influence in an undemocratic party.

Retaking the Party Chair CDM members were keenly aware that the “cooperation of party professionals,” especially DNC chairman Lawrence O’Brien, had been a “decisive”

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factor in the reformers’ success between 1968 and 1972.16 Accordingly, the first front in their battle to retake the party from the reformers developed around the pivotal institution of the party chair. By installing Utah DNC member Jean Westwood as chair, Democratic nominee McGovern had not only appointed one of his own supporters from the ranks of the newly created National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), but also appointed the party’s first woman to the top of the leadership.17 As McGovern’s chair of the DNC and a symbol of the New Politics, Westwood presented an ideal target for the counter-reform movement to signal their commitment to restoring party professionals to power. But while moderate state party chairs put their names forward to run the DNC ahead of its first postelection meeting in December 1972, the CDM made a show of force by consolidating their influence behind Texas Democrat and DNC treasurer Robert Strauss. A protégé of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, Strauss was the prototypical party official of the old politics. While he promised committee members to move on from the electoral debacle in the spirit of pragmatism, seeking middle-of-the-road compromises to mend fences, privately Strauss harbored personal hostility for the reform wing of the party. On his return from the Miami Beach convention he told his wife, “I’m going to get control of the Democratic Party, throw these bastards out, and put this party back together and elect a president.” Having spent several years trying to revolutionize the fundraising apparatus of the party, Strauss reported he was “angry” and wanted to become chair “to get even” with the McGovernites who were jeopardizing the fruits of his labor.18 In the weeks between the November election and the DNC meeting, CDM members worked out of Henry Jackson’s Senate office, lining up the votes to replace Westwood with Strauss. After an intensive lobbying campaign at the Democratic Governors Conference meeting in early December, Strauss and AFL-CIO forces extracted eighteen out of thirty-one governors’ endorsements to unseat Westwood.19 The atmosphere of electoral defeat had robbed Westwood of the most significant sources of intraparty support, including from McGovern. As McGovern later reflected, “Since we lost so overwhelmingly . . . I didn’t want any Democrat to think we were going to cling to my appointment with Jean Westwood. It wasn’t that I was unhappy with her—I just didn’t think we ought to get into a battle to keep her on after my defeat.”20 Despite a last-ditch effort by the ADA to block Strauss, the DNC met on December  9, two days after the CDM’s “Come Home,

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Democrats” ad, and Westwood was deposed, replaced with Strauss by fourand-a-half votes.21 With the vote against Westwood and the installation of a decidedly regular member of the party establishment in the leadership, the antireform forces represented by the CDM signaled to all observers that a new path was being charted for the party. Some reformers, such as Westwood’s aide Alan Baron, attempted to sustain the reform movement by setting up a shadow DNC staff operation called the Democratic Planning Group to monitor what many suspected to be Strauss’s secret plan to scuttle the reforms. Such watchdog efforts did prove valuable to those reformers who still sought to extract a national party charter from the new reform commission mandated by the 1972 convention and appointed by Westwood before her departure. But the CDM’s victory in the battle for the party chair was “just the first skirmish” in their war against the New Politics.22 And the sudden shift in momentum away from the reformers portended further contests over the direction of the party.

Reforming the Reforms: Weakening Affirmative Action The coup at the DNC had been the first front in the CDM’s struggle to retake the party from the New Politics. The second skirmish took place in the Mikulski Commission (named after the commission chairwoman, Baltimore city councilor Barbara Mikulski). Unlike the appointment of the McGovernFraser Commission in the aftermath of the 1968 party crisis, the creation of the new Commission on Delegate Selection and Party Structure drew the keen attention of all party actors who saw the balance of power inside the commission as a matter of great importance in determining the future of the party. Following Westwood’s ouster, and under pressure from Al Barkan, the director of the Committee on Political Education (COPE), Strauss appointed an additional twenty-five members to the already fifty-member commission, including eight recommended by Barkan himself, diluting the strength of the New Politics bloc. Over the course of 1973, the Mikulski Commission reexamined the delegate selection reforms and heard testimony from expert witnesses, party officials, and interest-group representatives. The CDM influenced the Mikulski Commission through the lobbying efforts of its Task Force on Democratic Rules and Structure. In late April, just after the Mikulski Commission’s deliberations got under way, the CDM task force released a comprehensive

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report evaluating and critiquing the McGovern-Fraser guidelines. Towards Fairness and Unity for ’76 argued that the McGovern-Fraser reforms were themselves a violation of basic principles of democratic process and equitable representation. The root of the problem lay in the reformers’ “bias toward ‘participatory’ over ‘representative’ democracy,” which resulted in the “overrepresentation” of well-educated and relatively affluent activists of the “socalled grassroots.”23 Further, the affirmative action guidelines, with their “reasonable relationship” language, benefited only the “new class” of whitecollar elites. “Quota representation and other forms of administered ‘democracy’ ultimately lead to greater influence for quota-makers, and not for the groups in whose interests they purport to speak.” Democracy inside the party, they asserted, can only mean “open and fair” processes, not a “guaranteed outcome” according to “rather arbitrary biological categories” of race, gender, and age. “Democracy by demography” itself not only is “absurdly unworkable,” they concluded, but also would “gravely undermine the democratic process itself.”24 To prevent a recurrence of a McGovern-scale defeat in 1976, they argued, the party should abolish aspects of McGovern-Fraser and design new processes to “assure inclusion” for “large numbers of elected officials and leaders of major constituent organizations” who “represent significant blocs of rank-and-file voters.”25 From their perspective, the disempowerment of party leaders, especially those at the state and local level, as well as group liaisons such as labor leaders, had resulted in an unrepresentative and unpopular presidential nominee. The function of the Democratic Party, beyond its usefulness as a mechanism to be periodically employed in political campaigns, is that of brokerage of the various interests which in successful times have made up the Democratic electorate. The party leaders, men with experience and a serious stake in winning elections, try to see that candidates and positions are put forward which are appealing to all elements. This process of compromise takes place at meetings of party bodies at which more or less sophisticated leaders of all blocs are present, and at which they are able to engage in give-and-take. Certain types of reformers are morally offended at this process, yet a case can be made that the smoke-filled rooms in which these crucial compromises have been hammered out can be [considered] among the most vital of America’s democratic institutions.26

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To bring the party professionals back in, the report recommended abolishing the “reasonable relationship” affirmative action guidelines, along with the ban on automatic delegate status for Democratic officeholders, and the prohibition of closed slate making by raising the limit on party committee appointment from 10 to 30  percent of state delegations. The goal, they wrote, must be to “reconstitute” the “broad coalition” of “all Americans with an interest in progressive social change,” including the “newly awakened blacks and browns, the women, the young, and the intellectuals,” but also the blue-collar workers, the southern moderates, the white ethnics, the business community, farmers, and many others. Such a “complex alliance” required “skilled and experienced leaders” who “know what it takes to bring the various groups together” and possess the “web of relationships which enables them to do so.” In the end, they concluded, “our proposals will restore the democratically chosen leaders to their proper place” in the Democratic Party.27 The CDM distributed copies of Towards Fairness and Unity to all members of the Mikulski Commission and orchestrated supportive testimony from more than forty CDM-affiliated experts at eight of the commission’s regional hearings.28 O’Hara also circulated the report among members of the House Democratic Caucus, many of whom responded with enthusiasm. But it was the CDM’s use of quotas as a wedge issue that was most effective. Their broadsides against the party’s affirmative action guidelines for women, racial minorities, and people under thirty reflected in microcosm the wider conservative reaction to the race- and gender-conscious policy making and jurisprudence of the 1960s and 1970s, which they felt violated principles of equal opportunity and meritocratic achievement at the core of American political culture.29 The new party quotas, Towards Fairness and Unity argued, were themselves a violation of basic principles of democratic process and equitable representation. While the authors were careful to stress that they were not opposed to increasing the participation of women, people of color, or youth, they believed that “under-represented groups [will] win real victories only when they have organized themselves to win elections.”30 Indeed, quotas as such found virtually no public defenders. New Politics enthusiast Jack Newfield, for instance, accepted the logic of the CDM’s argument, writing in the Village Voice that “the McGovern reform guidelines created quotas for women, youths, and blacks but none for poor people, senior citizens or ethnic minorities—Irish, Italian, Polish.”31 Even McGovern,

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in an opening address to the sibling Charter Commission in April 1973, appeared to accept the arguments of the CDM when he said, “I believe delegates should represent people—not types of people.”32 Reformers responded by defending the guidelines in question as “affirmative action” policies rather than “quotas.” In testimony before the Mikulski Commission, Fraser said that the CDM’s “use of the word ‘quota’ is a deliberate attempt to mislead.”33 While the McGovern-Fraser guidelines had shifted the burden of proof to accused delegations that failed to “reasonably reflect” the proportion of women, youth, and racial minorities in the state population, Fraser pointed out that all state delegations had to do was to show that meaningful, good-faith efforts to recruit these groups had been made. In a sharp rebuke to McGovern’s retreat, the NWPC chair, Frances Farenthold, warned, “It is crucial that the Democratic Party not overreact to the defeat of its national ticket” by “retreat[ing] and abandon[ing] the substantial gains made in 1972. . . . Fairness dictates that we be represented in proportion to our numbers in the population.”34 Bill Dodds of the United Auto Workers (UAW) echoed a similar sentiment in a letter to the UAW president, Leonard Woodcock, which conveyed his worry that “the party would be committing a grave error in the hysteria of the moment to throw out the baby with the bath water. . . . [I]t is crucial at this point for the focus of discussion to turn to making the guidelines work better. The danger in merely attacking the existence of so-called ‘quotas’ is that while in reality only a myth is being destroyed, the clear impression is that reform is being rejected.”35 While some reformers pointed to what many New Politics advocates considered to be the hy pocrisy of the CDM in calling for the “abolition of so-called quotas for some Democratic groups” only to replace them with “quotas for other Democratic groups,” namely party officials and officeholders, others recognized their disadvantage in the context of the shifting political and discursive landscape.36 As New Politics reformer Lanny Davis wrote to a sympathetic Mikulski commissioner, “We’ve been given a bum rap on the quota issue. We’ve let the CDM and Mr. Strauss shift the debate from the legitimate issue—the responsibility of state Party organizations to open up . . . to the issue of a numerical quota.”37 While Democrats would later implement “equal division” of gender for convention delegates in 1980, CDM cofounder, Penn Kemble, concluded that “we have clearly won the philosophical battle against quotas.”38 At the end of 1973, after nearly a year of meetings, testimony, and deliberation, the Mikulski Commission issued its final report, Democrats All,

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which outlined new delegate selection guidelines binding on all state parties for the 1976 national convention. On balance, its findings affirmed the general thrust of the McGovern-Fraser reforms.39 The overall framework and assumptions that McGovern-Fraser had installed as a system for regulating the national convention and delegate selection were not open for debate; “the questions debated were on the content of the rules, not their existence.”40 But the CDM’s strategy in this arena and the reason for its effectiveness was precisely in not challenging the existence of the rules but in modifying their content and impact. Thus, while the commission retained affirmative action guidelines in name, it acquiesced to the CDM’s objections by specifying that representational goals “shall not be accomplished either directly or indirectly by the Party’s imposition of mandatory quotas.”41 It further shifted the burden of proof to plaintiffs in antidiscrimination credentials challenges and removed the prima facie clause from the guidelines. Additionally, Democrats All increased state committee appointments from 10 to 25  percent, reinstated automatic delegate status but not voting rights for Democratic officeholders, and reinstated closed proceedings for slate making. The new rules dramatically reduced the number of credentials contests at the 1976 convention, bringing the number of challenges down from 118  in 1972 to only 50, but that also coincided with slight declines in the proportion of women, black, and youth delegates at the national convention before later rebounding (see Figure 7).42 Altogether, these amounted to subtle yet substantial shifts in the details of delegate selection, which weakened the reformers’ legitimacy in defining the standards for fair representation in the party’s governing bodies. By influencing the proceedings of the Mikulski Commission, the CDM employed the newfound authority of the national party to codify new rules that rolled back some of the most far-reaching changes made by the McGovern-Fraser Commission.

Constitutionalizing Party Federalism Operating concurrently with the Mikulski Commission on Delegate Selection and Party Structure was the Charter Commission, chaired by former North Carolina governor Terry Sanford. As mandated by the 1972 convention, the Charter Commission was tasked with working out in detail a constitution for the Democratic Party that codified its governing structures,

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60 50 40

1968 1972

30

1976 20

1980

10 0 Women

Blacks

Under 30

Figure 7. Women, African American, and Youth Percentages of Democratic National Convention Delegates, 1968-1980. Source: William Crotty, Party Reform (New York: Longman, 1983), 136.

authority relations, and operating procedures, as well as planning a 1974 midterm National Conference on Democratic Party Organization and Policy at which the charter would be presented for approval. The charter offered reformers the chance to dismantle what political scientist and reform enthusiast James MacGregor Burns called the “old personalismo politics” that party decentralization gave rise to at local and state levels. The national party charter was the Democrats’ “opportunity of a lifetime” to build “a more coherent, unified, issue-minded, representative national party.”43 Unsurprisingly, as the most ambitious element within the New Politics reform project, the proposal for a wholly reconstructed party organization aroused a significant amount of hostility from stakeholders with vested interests in the loose structure of party federalism. As a part of the compromise within the 1972 convention’s Rules Committee, the charter had already been stripped of its proposals for a national dues-paying membership and the regional substructure to better integrate national and state party governance. Still, the draft with which the Charter Commission began its deliberations in the spring of 1973 had in it a number of proposals deemed quite controversial, including the following: holding regular midterm policy conferences between presidential nominating conventions; extending affirmative action programs to “all party affairs,” including in state and local party

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organizations; establishing a nine-member intraparty judicial council to monitor state-level compliance with party law; and instating four-year terms of ser vice for the DNC chair, to be elected by the party membership at midterm conferences rather than appointed by the presidential nominee. Upon inheriting the Charter Commission from the deposed Westwood, Strauss appointed an additional 55 members to the already-large 105-member body, as he had done with the Mikulski Commission, to better balance its composition and dilute the strength of the reformers. Much to the chagrin of the counter-reformers who backed his nomination for chair, Strauss’s priority within the Charter Commission was to avoid any messy confrontation that could harm the party’s public image going into the 1974 midterm elections. In an attempt to placate the rivaling party factions, Strauss created the Democratic Advisory Council of Elected Officials (DACEO), tasking it with developing some issue positions on foreign and domestic policy for public consumption. Strauss closed the body to “outside” influence, however, naming eleven senators, twenty-one House members, ten governors, nine mayors, and twenty state, county, or local party officials to the body.44 By insisting that “only the Democratic Advisory Council is authorized to make official policy declarations,” Strauss sought to reassure those who feared that it might become a vehicle for New Politics liberals and an electoral liability.45 In this atmosphere, the CDM spearheaded the charge to outflank the New Politics reformers in crafting the content of the charter. Under the direction of Muravchik, the CDM developed a second special task force, the Charter Conference Clearing House, to mobilize support for a modified party constitution that could “redirect and realign our party” away from the New Politics.46 From the perspective of those on the task force, the mandated 1974 midterm party conference presented a potentially “constructive” opportunity, depending on whether the “responsible forces” in the party could properly “influence the Charter debate.”47 Prior to the content of the charter becoming the central matter of dispute, reformers were dealt a major setback in defining the policy conference’s agenda and its very purpose. At the second Charter Commission meeting in Fort Collins, Colorado, in July 1973, a CDM member, Representative Thomas Foley, led a bloc of southern Democrats, AFL-CIO operatives, and traditional party leaders in narrowly passing a resolution limiting the midterm policy conference to considering “only the recommendations for restructuring the Democratic Party,” prohibiting discussion of party program or policy.48 New Politics reformers protested in vain. New York state

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Democratic chair Joseph Crangle told the Fort Collins attendees that they were “putting blinders on” the party by preventing it from speaking with a unified voice about national issues at a time of major public concern (e.g., the Watergate scandal).49 Patricia Derian, a DNC representative from Mississippi, emphasized the detrimental effects that programmatic incoherence was having on partisan identification: “Our party is balkanized; each elected official stands on his own plank, works in his own area of interest. Our bill of complaints falls on the populace like handfuls of confetti. . . . What does it mean to anyone anymore to be a Democrat? If it only signifies that one is not a Republican, that is not enough. . . . A clear statement of intentions is needed.”50 As for the timing of the conference, upon arrival as the DNC chair, Strauss signaled his desire for the conference to be scheduled at the latest possible date within the convention mandate, providing additional time for the commission to conduct its business, but also placing the event after the 1974 midterm elections. For Strauss this was a commonsense measure taken to insulate the Democrats’ performance at the polls from any possible Chicago-style blowup that might occur at the party conference. Such a schedule, however, was likely to overshadow the charter in significance, leaving it as an afterthought squeezed between what was looking to be a victorious Democratic sweep of the elections and the vacation holidays that followed. It was, of course, the preference of the state parties, who were the pivotal actors in those elections, to retain their autonomy to tailor their campaign messages as they saw fit, without the added interference of a novel party policy vehicle. As Robert Vance, president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs (ASDC), reported the sentiment of his organization to Strauss, “the overwhelming preference [regarding the charter conference] is for late November or December. Nearly all reject a summer conference.”51 State party officials, however, were not alone in preferring a late midterm meeting. The Machinists’ union, for instance, while strong advocates of the party charter, expressed their fear that a pre-election conference “would take away from our general election efforts” as “many elements within the Party may be devoting more time to electing delegates to this conference . . . rather than electing Democrats to public office.”52 The Sanford Commission complied, voting to hold the midterm party conference in early December 1974. Although reformers were dealt setbacks in setting the terms of the charter conference’s agenda and timing, when it came to the actual content of

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the charter, however, they initially appeared to have the advantage. Strauss’s tactic of padding the Charter Commission with a large number of additional appointments fell short when, as the commission’s proceedings went on through 1973 and into 1974, the rate of absenteeism among party professionals with other pressing business increased. By the time the full commission convened its March meeting in Washington, D.C., New Politics reformers constituted a dominant voting bloc. As the commission finalized its first revised draft charter for circulation, reform advocates narrowly scored major upset victories, codifying in the proposal mandatory midterm party conferences, an independent judicial council, and affirmative action programs “in all party affairs.”53 Reformers were jubilant. The tide of the party meeting, reported one reformer, had turned “against Strauss and [back] toward reform.”54 While reformers were encouraged, the March meeting was not a decisive victory. The commission met again in August to review the charter proposal before a final vote at the December party conference. In the interim, fearing the balance of power was slipping back toward the reformers, the Clearing House, under the direction of Muravchik, sought to “orchestrate a scare” among complacent Democrats and labor leaders.55 CDM members reached out to state Democratic officeholders to alert them to the threat they believed the charter conference to be. As Barkan wrote to Pennsylvania governor Milton Shapp, “The essential thrust of this draft charter is to diminish the independence and political authority of the state and local Democratic Party structures, and to centralize authority in a National Party structure which . . . would be more responsive to the ideological measures of militants and activists.”56 Subsequently, the March draft of the charter received a stark rebuke from the Democratic Governors Conference meeting in June. By unanimous decision, the governors voiced their opposition to establishing national party supremacy and demanded that, due to “changing needs” as well as “the inability to mandate four years in advance,” mandatory midterm conferences be dropped. The governors’ resolution also bristled at the proposal for an independent judicial council to resolve intraparty disputes, instead preferring such power to be “vested in the DNC.”57 A similar item-by-item attack on the March version of the charter was also issued by over 150 members of the House Democratic Caucus in July.58 Also in July, the CDM’s Charter Conference Clearing House circulated its official critique of the proposed party constitution, entitled Unity Out of

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Diversity.59 The report attacked the reformers’ efforts to “centralize, ideologize, and ‘Europeanize’ the party in ways that run against the grain of American political tradition and the unique coalitional character of the Democratic Party.”60 Midterm conferences, it alleged, would “probably be unrepresentative and divisive, and could harm the party’s electoral appeal.”61 Further, codifying affirmative action guidelines “in all party affairs” would “cast the current set of delegate selection rules into the iron of the charter,” making the rules rigid and inflexible, and “conscript local officials into an all-consuming national affirmative action crusade, eclipsing the role they should play in electing their candidates, raising money, and building party structure.”62 Lastly, the CDM attacked the New Politics reformers’ overarching goal of building a more liberal programmatic party: “It is unrealistic to talk of the desirability—even the possibility—of a united, liberal ‘national’ party driving out the impure and arousing new converts by trumpeting a sweeping national program. . . . We should continue to build along the lines of a federative, pluralistic party, in keeping with the character of American politics. . . . [The charter] should not be seen as a blueprint for the creation of a wholly new party.”63 The Charter Commission’s August meeting exploded in acrimony. During a two-day session in Kansas City, Missouri, the CDM’s well-orchestrated whip operation resulted in decisive defeats for reformers: mandatory midterm conferences were revised as optional; delegate selection was removed from the purview of the judicial council, rendering the body largely irrelevant; and the authority to select the DNC chair was retained by the party’s presidential nominee. Further attempts to limit the reach of affirmative action guidelines resulted in a walkout of the reform bloc. Mississippi’s Hodding Carter III criticized CDM forces for “making what’s left of this Charter a sham.”64 When Strauss gaveled to order the Democrats’ first-ever midterm conference to ratify the party’s first official constitution four months after the Kansas City blow-up, he told the thousands of delegates and officeholders that “tonight we see a party of pragmatic change that has learned a lesson from 1968 and 1972 . . . that division leads to defeat. . . . [T]he reformer and the regular, each attempting to exclude the other from the decision-making process, in the end exclude the Democratic Party from victory.”65 While Strauss indulged in some self-congratulations on achieving this seemingly harmonious outcome, it was the CDM, of all the intraparty forces, that could take the most satisfaction from the document before them.

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In the interim since the August meeting, the CDM had been very active in recruiting delegates to attend the December conference, also meeting in Kansas City. The CDM had promoted its case against the party charter through its newsletter, labor contacts, as well as its representatives on the Hill and within the DNC, framed not as a desire to return to the pre-1968 party structure, but as a desire to return to the coalition of the party’s golden age by codifying what Wattenberg called “the peculiarly limited roles and duties of an American-style national political party.”66 CDM Notes reported that “our view has prevailed. . . . The proposal for a party based on individual membership enrollment, at the heart of the concept of a disciplined, homogenous party, has all but vanished, and is not likely to even reach the floor at Kansas City. The corollary proposal for mandatory midterm conferences to write party policy has been overwhelmingly rejected. . . . Proposals for a number of novel and largely autonomous national party bodies, each adding its own layer of sweeping national authority over the affairs of state and local parties, have been rejected. In short, the proposals to be set before the charter convention now no longer embody the Europeanization of the Democratic Party, but rather the institutionalization of our party’s uniquely American character.”67 Having won the decisive battles before the December conference convened in Kansas City, the CDM felt assured of a moderate outcome for the party charter. By their own estimates, the balance of power among delegates attending the conference favored the charter as they had refashioned it.68 They had been assisted by Strauss’s efforts to boost attendance of party officeholders, who were invited as automatic delegates but not permitted to send alternates.69 Over the protestations of reformers such as Fraser, Strauss had also imposed strict rules limiting floor amendments and requiring the entire charter to be approved, item by item, in a single session, with no allowance for any motions to adjourn. Feeling assured of a relatively benign party conclave, Strauss allowed DACEO to sponsor a number of issue seminars at the event to “assist in identifying issues of concern to the Democratic Party.” But it was made clear to conference delegates that “no action shall be taken at these panels.”70

Conclusion In the aftermath of the charter conference, reformers did their best to salvage what they could from the hollow victory many of them felt it to be.

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Letters of thanks and congratulations among some of the most prominent reformers acknowledged that the charter was not “all that we wanted,” but held out hope that it would provide “a more durable base” on which to build in the future.71 Those who were observers rather than participants were more blunt in their assessments: “The result in Kansas City is a piece of paper that, in effect, codifies the existing system—a loose coalition of state parties and interest groups . . . that unite when it suits their interests and divide when it doesn’t.”72 When compared to the original Fraser-O’Hara proposal introduced to the 1972 convention, the final version of the charter stood as “testimony to the anti-party power in national politics—to the primacy of candidates over structure, to the centrifugal strength of state and local chairmen.”73 However, while reformers and counter-reformers agreed that the Democrats’ new constitution effectively codified a particularly limited role for the national party, both sides failed to appreciate how the interactive effect between the post-1968 changes to the nominating process and the post-1972 nonchanges to the party structure would transform the dynamics of Democratic Party governance in the future. Despite the dilution of the initially stringent affirmative action guidelines, the presidential nominating process was irrevocably transformed, as evidenced by the proliferation of participatory primaries since the 1970s. While initially prominent interest-group leaders like George Meany protested the loss of traditional mechanisms of elite brokerage, most groups and movements eventually adapted to the new procedures, mobilizing their resources to influence the now-open nominating process.74 But the new party that resulted from the contentious politics of the 1960s and 1970s was not more or less equivalent to what came before.75 The loss of the smoke-filled rooms after 1968 and the defeat of proposals for regular midterm policy conferences after 1974 left party-affiliated groups without any institutional mechanisms to hold officeholders accountable for their campaign promises. Consequently, although groups have come to exert considerably more influence over office seekers in times of nomination or election, they are also more dependent than ever before on officeholders to choose to act on those promises once the nomination is over and their leverage has receded. Officeholders’ preferences for autonomy in politics and policy making can rely on the dynamics of group capture to keep their patrons in the coalition while leaving them free to pay only lip ser vice in return for electorally relevant resources. Groups, in turn, determined to have

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their demands heeded, opt for pressure tactics to compel party compliance, whether in the form of lobbying, street demonstrations, or disruptive protests. These relations of contention between officeholders and groups have been elevated to new heights in the advocacy party. What is more, the political pattern they entrain reinforces several of the most problematic developments in modern American governance: executive aggrandizement and presidential unilateralism, asymmetric polarization, and rising inequality. The making of the advocacy party was the outcome of intense bouts of contentious party entrepreneurialism, with neither side fully determining the result. That outcome constituted the new institutional terrain of the Democrats’ intraparty politics thereafter.

CHAPTER 6

The Limits of Group Influence Jimmy Carter and the Demand for Full Employment Policy

The advocacy party that emerged from the tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s institutionalized a more open, participatory process of presidential nomination, one in which aspirants for the highest office in the land must accumulate widespread support among primary voters rather than state party leaders and their interest-group liaisons. The dramatic loss of elite control over the process was never more clearly illustrated than in 1976, when a little-known former governor of Georgia capitalized on the momentum of media attention and public disaffection with Washington to capture the Democratic nomination and then the presidency. Jimmy Car ter’s minimal profile in national politics would have rendered him ineligible for such an esteemed position under the old Democratic Party of smoke-filled rooms and elite brokerage. But in the era of the Democrats’ advocacy party—novel though it was at the time—Carter demonstrated that a relatively unknown quantity could use face-to-face retail politics to circumvent the old powerbrokers and catapult himself into the White House. Previous accounts have interpreted the Car ter nomination as evidence of the candidate-centered nature of the reformed nominating process.1 Others have bracketed it off from what came before and what came after, categorizing it as an “aty pical” occurrence during a brief interregnum before groups in the party network regained control.2 However, as I argue, Carter’s nomination and subsequent presidential administration illustrate the limits of group influence within the advocacy party. Rather than acting as an agent of the party, working to implement its platform in office, Carter demonstrated the dependence of party-oriented groups on the independent action of the presidency, and their strategic dilemma when officeholders resist

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group demands or attempt to fulfill campaign promises with mere lip service. I do so by focusing on the internal party struggle over full employment policy—namely, the Humphrey-Hawkins Act—during the late 1970s. At the time, circumstances seemed to predict that full employment policy demanders had the advantage. First, Democrats held unified control of Congress and the presidency, including a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, at a time of major economic crisis and policy confusion. Second, the demand for full employment policy “unit[ed] the major organizational supporters of the Democratic Party,” stretching from labor unions to civil rights groups to women’s organizations, religious networks, environmentalists, and others.3 Finally, the 1978 midterm policy conference, an institutional remnant of the New Politics reform movement mandated by the 1976 convention, gave policy demanders additional leverage over the president beyond the nominating process. But as the following sections detail, despite the conditions apparently favoring group influence, the history of the Democratic Party’s internal battle over full employment policy reveals a much more complex picture of party politics—one that belies the claim that groups control parties.4 Interest groups and activists did indeed attempt to leverage the party platform and the midterm policy conference to pressure the Democratic leadership to give in to their demands. And as internal White House memos and congressional correspondence reveal, such threats were a major source of consternation for Democratic officials. However, rather than capitulate to group demands, President Carter and a contingent of congressional Democrats responded by using the president’s authority over the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to threaten groups with reprisals, co-opt the midterm policy conference, and hollow out the Humphrey-Hawkins Act into a symbolic statute that only paid lip service to the aspiration of a full employment economy.

“The Party Is the Issue”: Program, Platform, and Accountability In November 1975, almost a year after the 1974 midterm conference where reformers had seen their vision for a new type of political party dashed, a coalition of New Politics veterans, Democratic officeholders, and interestgroup leaders gathered in Louisville, Kentucky, for the first national Democratic Issues Convention. Convened as a “public examination of the

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direction of the Democratic Party,” the informal party conclave attracted seven of the ten expected presidential candidates for 1976. And while the agenda included debating the major policy issues of the day, such as stagflation and post-Vietnam foreign policy, its promotional material underscored that “the party is the issue.”5 The core idea animating the event was the recognition that the basic institutional relationships underpinning the postwar political framework had ruptured and that political parties needed to change in response. Indeed, the gathering’s statement of purpose stressed the need “to go beyond the New Deal and the Cold War.”6 And while the convention’s immediate purpose was to “offer new and relevant ideas” in the context of such a profound crisis, the vehicle through which these ideas would be channeled into politics and policy making was identified as the 1976 Democratic Party platform.7 Former members of the New Politics movement were not the only ones who saw a pressing need to revive parties as vehicles for programmatic politics and policy reform. Senator Walter Mondale, in anticipation of his own run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, published a book addressing the crisis of confidence in America’s public institutions in the wake of the Vietnam and Watergate crises. One of the future vice president’s recommendations for restoring the accountability of those in power in Washington was a “strong and consistent party voice” in national affairs. Mondale bemoaned the absence of “institutional mechanisms” with which a party could register its dissatisfaction with or even restrain the presidential agenda. He wrote that “the responsiveness of our Presidents to their parties . . . cannot be reestablished unless the parties are themselves given new institutional life.” This included midterm party policy conferences such as the one held in Kansas City in 1974, but with even “more clout” over officeholders.8 While the organizers of the Democratic Issues Convention saw themselves as responding to the continuing crisis of public confidence in America’s political institutions, they also recognized that the crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s extended beyond politics to the entire postwar political economy. The downward trend in the unemployment rate seen through most of the 1960s began a sharp climb upward between 1970 and 1971, before spiking to a postwar high of 9  percent in 1975. As much as the growth of unemployment created cause for concern for politicians and policy makers, it was the simultaneous appearance of increasing unemployment and rising

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price inflation, coined “stagflation,” which overturned the core assumptions underpinning the postwar policy framework of the Keynesian welfare state. As Hubert Humphrey put it in an address to the Senate in 1975, “the old economic rules no longer apply.”9

Going Beyond the New Deal by Returning to Full Employment Policy Ironically, going beyond the New Deal meant returning to one of its early, ill-fated aspirations. In the early postwar period, full employment policy had stood at the center of the liberal vision for the postwar political economy. As Franklin Roosevelt articulated in his 1944 State of the Union, outlining a Second Bill of Rights, the “right to a useful and remunerative job” was to figure as a foundational pillar of the liberal state and the postwar political order.10 However, by 1946, opposition from a revived business community and the bipartisan congressional conservative coalition gutted the Full Employment bill, passing into law only a symbolic commitment to “maximum employment” and the creation of a purely consultative body in the executive office, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).11 In place of a policy regime marrying robust forms of economic planning to social welfare initiatives, the liberal state reconciled itself to automatic fiscal stabilizers and, when necessary, tax cuts to boost consumption. Why resurrect full employment policy three decades later? Several important developments conditioned the return to full employment policy in the 1970s. First, as mentioned above, 1968 delivered the most severe economic crisis the world economy had seen since the Great Depression. Due to a chronic balance-of-payments deficit in the United States since the 1950s, as well as the inflationary pressures aggravated by the Vietnam War and the resurgence of the European and Japanese economies, the postwar international monetary system broke down. By 1970 the U.S. economy entered recession. Amid a second international monetary crisis in 1971, Nixon abruptly ended dollar-gold convertibility, and the subsequent conjunction of rising inflation and deepening economic stagnation presented U.S. policy makers with a conundrum that traditional Keynesian policy instruments were powerless to resolve.12 Second, as the economic foundations of the postwar order fell apart, the civil rights victories of the mid-1960s and the rising visibility of African American officeholders shifted public attention to the persistent pockets of

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racialized unemployment that had endured for decades despite robust economic growth. President Lyndon Johnson’s panoply of War on Poverty programs had helped many escape some of the worst economic conditions. But for others, such as Representative Augustus Hawkins, whose district included the downtown Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, which erupted during the summer of 1965, progress on racial equality required more than antipoverty initiatives. In the tradition of A. Philip Randolph and the 1963 March on Washington movement, which had stressed the dual demands for jobs and freedom, African American civil rights organizations and their congressional allies sought to connect civil rights to employment policy. For Hawkins, the two issues were inextricably linked: “it wouldn’t make any sense to be able to eat in a public restaurant . . . if one didn’t have the money.”13 For others, such as the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists’ Cleveland Robinson, full employment was “the basic ingredient to successful affirmative action.”14 Indeed, other advocates saw full employment as “the precondition for practically every other progressive program.”15 As we saw in Chapter 4, at the height of their influence in the party, New Politics activists and reformers had framed their programmatic agenda around a guaranteed right to a job. As the first economic plank in the 1972 Democratic Party platform, government commitment to a full employment economy dovetailed with the race- and gender-conscious entitlements that New Politics liberals sought to extend to newly mobilized groups. With the diminution of the intraparty struggles over party reform after 1974, the policy content of the New Politics project took center stage for many party activists. Amid these large-scale social and economic shifts, a coalition of full employment policy demanders took shape in the early 1970s due to a combination of midlevel organizing and top-down political entrepreneurship. In the fall of 1974, the Initiative Committee for Economic Planning (ICEP) was born from a series of high-level meetings between senior staff of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and prominent liberal economists, including Challenge publisher M.  E. Sharpe, John Kenneth Galbraith, Leon Keyserling, Wassily Leontief, and Robert Heilbroner. The group’s stated purpose was to create “an instrument to channel, exploit and take advantage of [the] steady, ill-defined move to the left” that it detected in the American public. Full employment policy, the ICEP surmised, could give shape and direction to the frenetic activism of the 1970s during a temporary window of opportunity presented by the economic crisis. The group sought to “make respectable the

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idea of planning in a democracy” and “establish the machinery by which effective democratic planning is made real.”16 ICEP members reached out to many other progressive union leaders for support in their effort to put full employment policy on the national agenda, especially those who had supported George McGovern in 1972, such as the Machinists, the Electrical Workers, the Communication Workers (CWA), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers. Working with Senator Hubert Humphrey and Representative Hawkins, then the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, the ICEP produced draft legislation that sought to revive the promise of full employment that had been lost three decades earlier. The Humphrey-Hawkins bill was introduced into Congress as an amendment to the anemic 1946 Employment Act. The details defined full employment as an unemployment rate of 3  percent or less, a target to be achieved within eighteen months of enactment. The president would be required to impose a system of wage and price controls and release an annual production and employment program to Congress’s Joint Economic Committee for review, revision, and approval. Local planning councils would undertake public and private investment projects designed to respond to community needs, such as childcare, transportation, housing, education, and recreation. While not displacing the private sector as the primary engine of job creation, the bill did mandate an expanded role for the federal government in creating a Job Guarantee Office to fund local projects as well as a Standby Jobs Corps for the placement of temporary workers in public-sector jobs when the private sector failed to absorb labor-market surpluses. Generating considerable controversy in the national press and in Congress was Humphrey-Hawkins’s provision for a legally enforceable right to a job—that is, the right of chronically jobless citizens to sue the federal government for public-sector employment.17 As the Humphrey-Hawkins bill was being introduced into the House and Senate in the spring of 1975, the ICEP launched a national campaign “to promote public support for planning . . . and to lobby for passage” of the new legislation.18 The group gathered lists of potential congressional sponsors, disseminated articles through the print media and specialized journals, and provided testimony on the Hill before the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Humphrey himself—all of which generated an impressive amount of media attention.19 The ICEP was also joined in this effort by the Full Employment Action Council (FEAC), chaired by Murray Finley (president of

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the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union) and Coretta Scott King (president of the Martin Luther King Center for Social Change). Drawing its staff from a variety of civil rights and church organizations, as well as the bulk of its funding from the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the FEAC complemented ICEP’s media blitz with sustained organizing efforts at the grassroots level.20 The group was also assisted in these efforts by other, more established D.C.-based advocacy organizations, including Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the National Organization of Women (NOW). At the same time, while the organizing activity of the full employment policy demanders was impressive, this should not overshadow the critical role played by officeholders, especially Hawkins, in linking the groups together, shaping their legislative strategy, and liaising between groups, Congress, and the White House. As archival data show, Hawkins invested enormous resources in group outreach, policy promotion, publicity, and vote counting.21 Indeed, while Hawkins undertook a very sophisticated whipping operation inside the House, he also undertook a similar form of whipping operation outside the halls of Congress, fostering awareness of and support for full employment policy among a vast range of interest groups and movement organizations he deemed to be potential stakeholders in a full employment economy. As a policy and political entrepreneur, Hawkins and his congressional allies played as central a role in creating the full employment coalition as did the policy-demanding groups themselves. Finally, as Humphrey, Hawkins, ICEP, FEAC, and many progressive union staffers did much to promote full employment in the national spotlight and through their grassroots networks, the newly formed Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) coordinated the coalition to target its efforts on inserting a full employment plank into the 1976 Democratic national platform. Led by Michael Harrington, author of the famous antipoverty exposé The Other America, DSOC members viewed the platform as a vital arena for activist influence on the party.22 At the end of 1975, DSOC launched Democracy 76, a project that aimed to “have a programmatic impact on the Democratic Party and on public opinion generally.”23 Through its network of some three thousand activists, DSOC orchestrated a campaign to insert the demand for full employment into the platform, irrespective of the ultimate nominee. They ran their own members for delegates, lobbied delegates named to the Platform Committee, and provided testimony before the Platform Committee’s regional hearings.24

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By 1976, full employment had become what the economist Milton Friedman called the new “litmus test” for Democratic presidential candidates.25 Even Carter, the most reluctant of the candidates to endorse HumphreyHawkins, was compelled to identify unemployment as “the greatest problem facing the American people today,” affirming that “every person has a right to a decent job.”26 In recognition of the status of the full employment coalition in the nomination process, Carter aide Stuart Eizenstat wrote, “I do not see that [taking] such a position in any way would jeopardize your standing with others in your constituency, while opposition to the [full employment] bill per se would be critically costly.”27 However, within the Platform Committee hearings, the wording of Car ter’s economic policy planks foreshadowed his resistance to full employment policy as president, packaging both the “achievement of full employment” and the achievement of “price stability” as co-equal parts of a new Democratic administration’s “first priorities.” While he insisted that economic policy be expansionary “in the near future,” he also believed that a balanced budget could be achieved “within the context of full employment” by 1979—a view that many held to be contradictory.28 In contrast to Carter’s ambivalence about a robust commitment to full employment, other prominent party actors jumped aboard. Speaking for the House Democratic leadership, Tip O’Neill testified before the Platform Committee on the need to achieve a “3  percent unemployment [rate] . . . by the end of 1981,” saying that Humphrey-Hawkins should be “the centerpiece” of the 1976 platform.29 The AFL-CIO also endorsed full employment policy, specifying that Humphrey-Hawkins had “the full support” of the labor federation.30 Additionally, nine of the unions that had come to the assistance of McGovern’s campaign in 1972 coordinated their activity to elect convention delegates to the 1976 Democratic convention. Calling themselves the Labor Coalition Clearinghouse, they dedicated themselves to not only “achieving a 1976 Democratic Party Platform and presidential nominee acceptable to the nation’s working men and women,” but also making sure that “the Party’s nominee . . . is committed to that platform.”31 In the end, the campaign to promote full employment in public opinion and get it written into the 1976 Democratic platform was remarkably successful. By the 1976 election, as the Democrats recaptured power in Washington, full employment had been pushed toward the top of the national agenda. The coalition of full employment policy demanders stretched across the party’s extended network of interest groups and activists and had

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power ful supporters in Congress. The national platform, entitled Contract with the People, dedicated the party to “support . . . legislation that will make every responsible effort to reduce adult unemployment to 3 per cent within 4 years.”32 Harrington walked away from the national convention confident that the platform “was probably the most liberal in the history of the Democratic Party.”33 As added insurance, policy demanders and party-reform advocates also facilitated passage of a convention resolution to hold a national policy conference in 1978 “for the purpose of addressing issues embraced in the 1976 Democratic Party Platform and other national issues and for the purpose of discussing the state of the Democratic Party and its future.”34 The resolution, passed by the highest body of the party, effectively bound top officeholders and officials to attend the conference and account for their performance in office. While conference delegates lacked any formal disciplinary mechanisms, the new Democratic leadership in Washington had little choice but to come face to face with policy demanders who expected good-faith efforts to implement the platform.

Facing Down the Policy Demanders The midterm policy conference, scheduled for December 1978 in Memphis, Tennessee, loomed over the Car ter administration during its first two years in office, especially as the administration grappled with the full employment coalition over its terms for supporting Humphrey-Hawkins after its introduction in the new Congress. Inside the White House, with the exception of Vice President Walter Mondale and Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall, few officials in the Car ter administration had much interest in supporting full employment legislation, no matter its terms.35 Some, such as the CEA chairman, Charles Schultze, sought to prioritize the fight against inflation instead.36 The White House was eager to avoid committing to numerical targets and specific timetables, such as achieving 3 percent unemployment within four years, preferring to retain flexibility in circumstances in which the twin goals of price stability and full employment were deemed to be in conflict. Michael Blumenthal, chair of Car ter’s Economic Policy Group, viewed Humphrey-Hawkins’s proposed planning mechanisms as “extensive and costly” and reported that in the eyes of the business community “these provisions seem to threaten a significant enlargement of governmental

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interference in the private economy.”37 Car ter’s team also voiced objections to the bill’s concept of a guaranteed right to a job, which they saw as “not . . . practically feasible” and having “enormous potential effects on the budget and inflation.”38 They insisted on either watering down the provision or including a “carefully worded statement . . . indicating that establishing a right to work does not mean a legally binding commitment for the Federal government to provide a job.”39 Taken together, they acknowledged that “these disagreements go right to the heart of the Humphrey-Hawkins bill.”40 These objections placed the administration and its congressional allies in increasingly tense relations with the full employment coalition. The tension was not lost on Carter’s top policy advisers, who warned that “this is a very sensitive issue, much broader than [just] the legislation. It involves the leadership of major organizations throughout the country who suddenly feel cut off from this administration, an administration which they feel shows little concern about domestic issues. We are treading on very unstable grounds politically and socially.”41 Carter’s domestic policy adviser, Stuart Eizenstat, agreed, cautioning his deputy that “we are sitting on a time bomb here[,] which will explode unless we move quickly.”42 As these memos reflect, the president and his advisers were keenly aware of the pressure coming from party-aligned groups, who perceived the White House to be unconcerned with their policy demands. Moreover, White House deliberations also reveal an acute anxiety about the new institutional mechanism in the hands of the policy demanders. As one White House memo warned the president, “We believe it is important for the administration to do every thing we can to secure consideration and passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins bill. If we are not seen as doing every thing we can, criticism from the Black Caucus and others may escalate, and, we are afraid, spill over into the midterm [policy] convention.”43 The White House senior staff were not off base in fearing that the president’s failure to support aggressive action on full employment could become a liability at the upcoming Memphis conference. As members of DSOC watched negotiations over Humphrey-Hawkins stretch on during 1977, the organization issued a call to the Democracy 76 network “to reconstitute itself so that it could build a movement that would call upon President Car ter to live up to the Democratic Party Platform.”44 The reactivated network, now calling itself the Democratic Agenda, coordinated its actions among the various groups that had initially pressed for the inclusion of the full

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employment plank in the party platform at the 1976 convention: party reformers, the FEAC, ADA, and the leadership of the progressive labor unions such as the UAW, the Machinists, the CWA, AFSCME, and others. The Democratic Agenda focused its efforts on the opportunity to have what was called an “accountability session” with the Car ter administration at the Memphis conference.45 The coalition defined its intention as more than “just decry[ing] the inadequacies of the Car ter program,” but as “present[ing] alternatives” that the administration could be compelled to accept.46 To build momentum and public support for their campaign, the Democratic Agenda sponsored a range of educational and mobilization activities under the banner of Full Employment Week in the fall of 1977, culminating in a Full Employment conference in Washington and a “mass lobby for jobs” outside the DNC headquarters.47 Harrington addressed the crowd: “All of us voted for Jimmy Car ter and some of us were involved in the platform process. It says right on the cover of that platform that it’s a contract with the people. . . . Well, we are here to collect on that contract.”48 By the middle of 1978, the upcoming midterm party conference threatened to become a showdown. Many members of the press framed the intraparty dispute as a personal rivalry for the 1980 Democratic nomination between President Car ter and Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, then being prodded by liberals to enter the primaries.49 But as White House press secretary Jody Powell told the Boston Globe, “The dispute which appears to be on the horizon in Memphis is not between the President and Senator Kennedy . . . but between the Administration and the Democratic Agenda.”50 Rather than capitulating to their demands, the Democratic Party leadership sought to face down the policy demanders. The Carter White House pursued a multipronged strategy to foreclose the potential of a public relations disaster in Memphis. First, Carter and his team moved to co-opt the full employment issue by reworking Humphrey-Hawkins into an innocuous bill that the president could sign into law without exacerbating the economic crisis or directly repudiating the policy demanders. In negotiations with the bill’s sponsors, White House officials and the president pressed for additional anti-inflation measures, including an explicit commitment to not sacrifice price stability for lower unemployment, as well as a balanced budget amendment. After repeated revisions, the White House agreed to support the bill, signing it into law in October  1978. Humphrey’s death from

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cancer earlier that year cast the bill’s passage as a tribute to one of America’s leading labor-liberals. While the bill’s final form established for the first time a formal procedure for coordinating government action to achieve full employment, it did not guarantee anyone a right to a job, and it did not initiate any job-creating programs. It was, in the words of Margaret Weir, “a shell of the original bill, neither enhancing planning capabilities nor guaranteeing full employment.”51 Second, having co-opted the coalition’s key policy demand, Carter also pursued an institutional strategy designed to subdue policy demanders at the Memphis conference. Even with Humphrey-Hawkins no longer pending in Congress, the prospect of meeting policy demanders face to face and being held to account was an enormous source of concern for the administration. Looking at it as the president’s “first speech as Party leader,” Carter’s speechwriters emphasized that “this is one of the most impor tant political speeches of your presidency. To the press you are Daniel going into the lion’s den to confront the left wing of the party. How you emerge will greatly influence next year’s coverage of Democratic Party politics.”52 As Daniel Galvin has documented, “Car ter and his team worked hard to limit discussion and quiet dissent [in Memphis] by manipulating rules, altering procedures, and asserting control over the agenda. . . . [H]e and his team spent enormous amounts of time and energy trying to control party proceedings and reduce their political impact.”53 As numerous White House memos reveal, any opportunity for activists to participate meaningfully in debate and discussion with the president or cabinet members was constrained or eliminated. Car ter’s control of the DNC, which was charged with planning the conference, enabled his team to “control all proceedings[,] . . . screen all proposals[,] . . . and screen any resolutions proposed for a vote.”54 Of the 150 resolutions proposed by the Democratic Agenda and other groups to the DNC Arrangements Committee, only twenty-four were approved for debate and a vote in Memphis, and their discussion was scheduled for the final hours of the final day of the conference. As the DNC chairman, John White, explained, “Of course we have a broad range of opinions on some issues within our party. But if we get foolish, if we go beyond proper political division and look quarrelsome, there are things that could hurt the Democratic Party and the Democratic president.”55 To ensure that the proceedings went smoothly, the White House created a “pro-Administration whip system” to control votes on the floor should a delegate revolt arise.56

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While the passage of the compromised Humphrey-Hawkins Act robbed the Democratic Agenda of the main impetus for an accountability session with the president, the administration’s new federal budget proposal, calling for cuts to social spending and increased spending on defense, provided many conference delegates with a new focal point on which to concentrate their frustrations. Indeed, following the disappointing results of the full employment fight, Hawkins later reflected, “The only thing you can do is [try] to hold the president accountable.”57 Accordingly, he sent a letter to all delegates urging them to “take a firm stand” and push the party leadership to “reaffirm” the Democrats’ commitment to full employment in Memphis.58 Lastly, White House officials and the party leadership leveraged access to the president as both a carrot and a stick to fracture the full employment coalition.59 Ahead of the conference, the UAW’s newly elected president, Douglas Fraser, put out a call to the Democratic Agenda for a strategy meeting in Detroit in October. “It is legitimate to ask,” he wrote in his callout, “why, with the Democrats in control of more than two-thirds of the Congress and in the Executive Branch, has so little progress been made toward adoption of the Democratic platform the party worked so hard to develop.”60 However, as the showdown in Memphis approached, solidarity among policy demanders began to weaken. While most unionists were strongly dissatisfied with the Carter administration and its turn to fiscal austerity, the coalition splintered under the risks of crossing the president—an act of defiance that could jeopardize access to the highest and most powerful political office. DNC officials sought to leverage this institutional dependence to exacerbate divisions within the coalition. As one DNC memo reported, CWA members, which had been one of the most active unions in the full employment campaign, were “not interested in taking on the W[hite] H[ouse]” in Memphis because “the Telecommunications Act, the one piece of legislation they care deeply about, is coming up in the next Congress.”61 With no other party to which to turn, and loath to risk White House support for their own policy priorities, the CWA, like other captured groups, found itself on the horns of a dilemma and withdrew from the UAW-organized strategy meeting ahead of the Memphis conference. Nor was the CWA’s case of cold feet exceptional. Many leaders of progressive unions expressed hesitation about confronting the president in Memphis. If they did challenge the president, they worried, they might not have the necessary numbers to win in a floor fight. And, even if they did

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have sufficient numbers, “an outright political defeat [for the president] at the Conference might then seriously threaten any hopes that we still have for the passage of other items on the liberal agenda.”62 Many unions were therefore disinclined to “push strongly for voting at the Conference,” nor were they willing “to be individually identified” with specific positions for fear of White House reprisals.63 As the coalition of policy demanders came to terms with their dependence on the Democratic Party, some moved to limit the extent of the damage any such confrontation could entail for the president and, they feared, the party as a whole. Despite the growing personal animosity between the AFL-CIO president, George Meany, and President Car ter over the president’s failure to support labor law reform, the labor federation’s Committee on Political Education vowed that it would “protect” the president from any “sharp criticism” at the Memphis conference.64 Detroit mayor Coleman Young, chair of the DNC’s Memphis Arrangements Committee, scolded the Democratic Agenda and others seeking to hold Carter to account. “We have a platform,” he said. “That’s enough. We don’t need a [midterm] convention. We must be sure that nothing we come up with repudiates the President. Are we here to give the President a mark?” 65 While the activists of the Democratic Agenda were aware of the difficult odds going into the conference, those odds worsened further as an eleventhhour rules change engineered by White to restrict floor resolutions redefined the meaning of “majority” from half of those present and voting to half of all 1,633 delegates. As a large number of Democratic officeholders decided to shun the midterm meeting and bad winter storms prevented many from the Midwest and West from attending, White’s last-minute maneuver effectively prevented any serious challenge from emerging on the floor, which required a petition of two hundred signatures to even be added to the agenda, let alone win majority support.66 Despite the odds, the Democratic Agenda did manage to get one resolution critical of Car ter’s austerity budget on the floor for debate and a vote. Their budget resolution attacked Car ter’s proposed spending cuts and charged that the resulting increase in unemployment would be “in direct violation of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act.”67 While the Democratic Agenda won about 40  percent support for their budget resolution, it failed to gain the support of the majority. White House deputy press secretary Rex Granum spun the failed resolution as evidence of “strong support” for Carter’s austerity agenda, and reported that the president left

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Memphis “with an even firmer determination to lend his strength to the fight against inflation.”68

Conclusion In the end, the Democratic Agenda’s attempt to press the Democratic Party toward a programmatic, accountable party organization at the Memphis midterm policy conference amounted to little. Groups’ attempts to make meaningful the party principles and policy alternatives enshrined in the platform ran up against the limited degree to which the New Politics reformers had been able to institutionalize the mechanisms for officeholder accountability they had envisioned and proposed after 1968. The previous struggle over the party charter had resulted in a hollow national party structure that provided greater access and voice for movement actors and interest groups, but little effective machinery for influencing party policy after election season. The connections that would have ostensibly tied together platform, program, and policy making were left unrealized, connected tenuously by the willingness of presidential agency. When it came time to put the midterm party conference to its intended use—to assess the party leadership’s record in office—the mechanisms of accountability proved too weak in the face of officeholder resistance. Without a sympathetic president in the Oval Office, group activists lost control over the planning, scheduling, and rulemaking that determined whether the midterm conference became an opportunity to exercise party accountability or simply a media event to showcase the president’s achievements and promote his reelection. As a telling reflection on the politics of the advocacy party, when the Democrats regained the White House for the first time since the 1968 crisis, the party became subordinated to the agenda of its incumbent leader. As this chapter has made clear, while policy demanders invest a great amount of resources in politics and pay close attention to the policy process, officeholders can try to co-opt or pay lip ser vice to placate group demands. The Humphrey-Hawkins Act resulted in a purely symbolic gesture that acknowledged the significance of fighting unemployment during times of economic crisis but failed to implement any concrete mechanisms for enforcement. The hollowness of the law was not lost on key policy demanders. But its transformation into a symbol robbed the groups of their key demand and took the wind out of the sails of the coalition.

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Also, threats of being cut off from the Carter White House were effective because, despite their routine support for Democrats, group capture makes the threat of exit or defection implausible. The full employment coalition was an ensemble of progressive organizations and advocacy groups that had deeply institutionalized links with the party. Not only did these networks constitute significant sunk costs that could still potentially deliver policy results (e.g., the CWA and the Telecommunications Act), but also, more importantly, a right-moving Republican coalition was unlikely to be receptive to any of these groups or their demands. While there was such friction between the Carter White House and these groups that some, including the AFL-CIO, UAW, ADA, and NOW, supported Ted Kennedy’s nomination challenge in 1980, they resumed their support for President Car ter in the 1980 election against Ronald Reagan. No matter their role in nominations or elections, groups are likely to lose leverage over party officeholders to the degree that they are well-established members of one partisan coalition and have no realistic alternative.

CHAPTER 7

The Officeholders Strike Back The Success and Failure of the New Democrats

In March 1980, the liberal magazine New Republic ran a front-page editorial urging the Democratic Party to “bring back the pols.” Reflecting the generalized dissatisfaction with the Jimmy Car ter administration, the editors looked upon the upcoming presidential election pitting the Democratic incumbent against Ronald Reagan with a sense of despondency. The “major reason” for the discouraging state of American politics, they argued, was “the triumph of the movement known as ‘new politics.’ ”1 While the authors lauded the party reformers for opening national conventions to women and racial minorities, they criticized them for abolishing the institution’s “deliberative function” and forcing “rigid and extreme views on the Democratic party” by “virtually bann[ing] state party leaders from automatic positions of influence at conventions and at other phases of the presidential nominating process.” Party professionals now had “no ability to act as a keel for a party blown by popular winds.”2 The solution, they continued, was not a return to the “old politics” of boss rule, but rather a process of “readjusting the new politics reforms in the direction of the old politics.” Specifically, they foregrounded the need to increase the “influence of party leaders and elected officeholders” in the presidential nominating process. If the latter were granted uncommitted delegate seats, they proposed, presidential aspirants would feel the pressure to cultivate the good graces of elected officials and party officeholders—at least to the same extent as the media and narrowly focused candidate enthusiasts. “Good government,” they concluded, “requires experience, knowledge, steadiness, and depth.”3 Who better to review these qualities in a potential president than experienced, knowledgeable party professionals?

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The 1980 elections delivered a new, “traumatizing” level of defeat for the Democratic Party.4 While 1968 had been a narrow loss for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and 1972 a blowout for an insurgent candidate, 1980 was not only a landslide loss for Car ter but also the first time a sitting Democratic president had failed in his reelection bid since 1888. Democrats also saw their House majority substantially reduced, and the party lost control of the Senate for the first time since 1952. Whatever optimism Democrats accumulated by denying Nixon any coattails effect in 1972, sweeping Congress in 1974, and retaking the White House in 1976 had crumbled in the earthquake that marked the beginning of the Reagan revolution. Such a stinging defeat at the polls provided fertile ground for the soul searching that the editors of the New Republic had encouraged at the beginning of 1980. As we have seen, the model of entrepreneurial party change framing this book highlights the role that major electoral defeats can play in shifting the political landscape, disgracing incumbent leaders, and providing a window of opportunity in which relatively small groups of political entrepreneurs may exert outsized influence over the institutional structure and identity of a political party. Electoral defeats stir up probing questions about who does, and who should, exercise party power and authority. While the speed and effect of the post-1980 round of entrepreneurial party change differed significantly from what came before, the fundamental pattern of defeat and reform persisted, as did the contentious relations between officeholders and party-oriented groups. In the wake of a string of electoral defeats in the 1980s, a contingent of Democratic officeholders and party officials struck back against the new advocacy party. Despite the limits of group control in the new party form, a new set of party entrepreneurs pinned the Democrats’ dwindling electoral power on the persistence of group influence and pursued a broad range of institutional changes and ideological shifts to reempower party professionals and break from the advocacy party’s dependence on group patronage. These self-described “New Democrats,” spearheaded by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), sought to rebuild a big-tent coalition of southern conservatives, moderate blue-collar voters, and white men—all of which had defected in large numbers since the 1970s. The success of the DLC’s own Bill Clinton and Al Gore in returning the Democrats to national power in 1992 and 1996 appeared to confirm that the DLC achieved their aim. Previous accounts of the New Democrats’ effect on the Democratic Party have principally examined the ideological and policy dimensions of

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this effect, specifically its alleged neoliberal conversion of the party.5 To be sure, as I will describe below, the New Democrats brought with them a new vision for the party, one that explicitly broke from the traditions of New Deal and New Politics liberalism. This had lasting effects on the party and public policy, specifically regarding the welfare state, finance, and free trade. However, notwithstanding the significance of these issues, too few scholars have adequately assessed the New Democrats’ overriding goal of party transformation. As I will argue, the New Democrats’ attempt to unmake the advocacy party was dramatically unsuccessful. Multiple efforts to reshape the party organization, reprogram its identity, and govern according to its priorities failed. Indeed, rather than resist and break the logic of the advocacy party, the New Democrats fundamentally succumbed to it, adopting advocacy politics as their own guiding strategy in their quest for party hegemony. What dominance they did manage to achieve did not outlast their hold on the presidency. Decades later, from the perspective of the 2016 election, New Democrats constituted only yet another advocacy network in the dense constellation of groups orbiting the Democratic Party.

Bringing the Party Professionals Back In: The Success and Failure of Superdelegates As Democratic electoral fortunes declined in the 1980s, party actors across a range of venues groped for a diagnosis of what ailed the party and what could be done about it. The negative view of the nominating reforms, expressed in the New Republic above, was corroborated by none other than some of the leading party entrepreneurs of the McGovern-Fraser period. In a postelection exit interview with the Washington Post, a senior assistant to President Car ter, Anne Wexler, expressed her dissatisfaction with the advocacy party: “When you look at the [Democratic National] Convention what you see is a collection of interest groups. You don’t see a political party anymore. . . . It’s because of the reforms. And it’s because of the dominance of the most activist people.”6 Political scientist James MacGregor Burns further claimed, “The reformers did not understand that the imperative task . . . was less to rectify or redeem [the party] than to repair and regenerate it. . . . Carried along by the anti-Establishment spirit of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the reformers tried to cleanse the presidential primary system of its exclusive and elitist elements rather than contain [them].”7 Even before the

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outcome of the 1980 election confirmed what these critics feared, the Democratic National Convention voted to create yet another reform commission to reconsider the party’s presidential nomination process. The disastrous outcome of the election only reinforced the urgency of its task. In keeping with the emerging consensus of party officials and elite opinion makers, the newly appointed Commission on Presidential Nominations, chaired by North Carolina governor James Hunt, had at the top of its agenda the elevation of party leaders and elected officials within the nomination process.8 As one white paper authored by a group of California Democrats put it, “by bringing the process ‘to the people,’ the Democratic Party has lost its leadership, collective vision, and ties to the past.”9 In appointing the seventy-member commission, the new Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman, Charles Manatt, who also was a former chair of the California Democratic Party and the DNC’s finance council, screened every appointee to ensure that the body “held no strong reservations against expanding the role of party professionals” in delegate selection.10 After only six months, four regional hearings, and three meetings, the Hunt Commission issued its final report. The commission maintained the core McGovern-Fraser principles of demographic representation, extended its antidiscrimination ban to “sexual orientation,” and specified that “participation of target groups” be “commensurate with their presence in the Democratic electorate.”11 (Due to the efforts of the National Women’s Political Caucus and the success of the women’s movement more generally, the 1980 convention had mandated an “equal division” of delegates between men and women.)12 The singular contribution of the Hunt Commission, however, was its revision of the McGovern-Fraser guidelines’ abolition of automatic delegate status for party officials and officeholders, which led to the creation of what has come to be known as “superdelegates.” As discussed in Chapter 4, the attendance rate of party officeholders at the party’s national conventions had declined precipitously with the revocation of automatic delegate status in 1972. Despite McGovern’s defeat and the backlash against the New Politics reformers, high-ranking Democratic officials had not returned to the conventions. In fact, as Table 2 demonstrates, with the partial exception of Democratic governors, even greater proportions of party officeholders withdrew their participation from national conventions in 1976 and 1980 than had those in 1972. Emphasizing the necessity of restoring automatic delegate privileges to party insiders, Hunt commissioner and future vice presidential nominee

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Table 2. Participation Rate (in Percentages) of Democratic Elected Officials as Delegates at National Conventions, 1968–1984 Year

Governors

Senators

Representatives

1968 1972 1976 1980 1984

92 67 44 74 83

67 35 18 14 62

36 15 15 14 66

Source: William G. Mayer, “Superdelegates: Reforming the Reforms Revisited,” in Reforming the Presidential Nomination Process, ed. Steven S. Smith and Melanie J. Springer (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 88, table 5-2.

Geraldine Ferraro argued, “Either they’re going to go as uncommitted delegates or they won’t go [at all].”13 Louisiana representative and House Democratic Caucus chairman Gillis Long and his aide Al From (who would later found the DLC) introduced the recommendation for the superdelegate category as a means “to temper the influence of interest group leaders and party activists in the nominating process.”14 Initial discussions proposed making the new superdelegate category as much as 30  percent of all convention seats. After drawing fire from the women’s caucus for the provision’s likely violation of the “equal division” mandate (because most top officials and party leaders were men), the proportion was lowered in a compromise. As is clear from the data presented in Table 2, the advent of superdelegates in 1984 not only reversed the decline of party leaders and officeholders participating in the national conventions, but also, in the case of Democratic representatives, brought it to new heights. As Table 3 shows, the total number and proportion of superdelegates as participants at national conventions continued to grow after their introduction in 1984. This was a product of the gradual relaxation of the terms of the original Hunt Commission compromise as women and people of color gained greater presence in the upper ranks of the party hierarchy. By gradually raising the ceiling on the proportion of superdelegates, as well as the absolute number of convention delegates, the category was extended to not only all Democratic governors, members of the House and Senate, and the DNC, but also all former distinguished party officeholders such as presidents, vice presidents, congressional leaders, and DNC chairs.

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Table 3. Superdelegates at Democratic National Conventions, 1984–2016 Year

Number of Superdelegates

Total Number of Delegates

Percentage of Superdelegates

1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016

568 645 772 777 802 802 853 726 712

3,933 4,162 4,288 4,298 4,399 4,322 4,419 5,552 4,763

14.4 15.5 18.0 18.1 18.5 18.6 19.3 13.1 14.9

Sources: William G. Mayer, “Superdelegates: Reforming the Reforms Revisited,” in Reforming the Presidential Nomination Process, ed. Steven S. Smith and Melanie J. Springer (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 94, table 5-4; www.thegreenpapers.com.

But the advent of superdelegates quickly proved to be no panacea for Democratic ills in the 1980s. While the participation of senators and representatives improved dramatically for the 1984 convention, its presidential nominee, former vice president Walter Mondale, went down to a humiliating defeat against President Reagan, carry ing only Mondale’s home state of Minnesota as well as the District of Columbia. What was worse, increased numbers of superdelegates at the following convention failed to prevent another defeat in 1988. Evidently, bringing party officials and officeholders back in as unpledged delegates did little to affect the outcome of the nomination process. Indeed, the superdelegate category constituted less of a restoration of the old system than it was an instance of party officials’ adaptation to the advocacy party model. As Byron Shafer observes, “A conscious effort to reintroduce the official party to ‘its’ convention only underlined the extent to which party officials themselves had become just one more organized interest” in the Democratic Party.15

The Shifting Tactics of the New Democrats in the Advocacy Party In the aftermath of the 1984 defeat, Al From drafted a memo for Representative Long to be presented to a dinner of concerned party officials and public

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officeholders convened to discuss the “lessons of the election” for the future of the party. From’s diagnosis was as bleak as his recommendations were far-reaching: As a national party, Democrats are in deep trouble. . . . We cannot afford to become a liberal party; our message must attract moderates and conservatives, as well. . . . As elected officials and party leaders, we need to do a better job of steering our party away from trouble. . . . [The] lessons of this election all point to one thing: the need for our party to change, and change drastically. We need a new image; we need a new structure; and we need new spokesmen. If we don’t act now to develop and promote a new message, to rid the party of the cancer of single interest and single constituency caucuses, to showcase new leaders, to establish a nominating procedure that produces a candidate who can win a general election, then we are destined to become a minority party for the foreseeable future.16 Making a subtle though significant rhetorical shift, From explained that modern Democratic liberalism had strayed from its “progressive tradition” by embracing “ideas, causes, and values foreign to most Americans.”17 No other figure represented the animus of From’s efforts as Jesse Jackson, who ran two insurgent campaigns for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1988. Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition of labor liberals, New Dealers, and New Politics organizations embodied every thing that From saw as wrong with the Democrats’ advocacy party. Like the turn-of-the-century Progressives before them, New Democrats saw their role as “modernizing liberalism” for a post–New Deal era that rendered New Deal–New Politics proposals based on programmatic rights and welfare state–provided protections against the vagaries of the market obsolete. By bringing Democratic politics into alignment with the changed circumstances of globalization and the information age, From saw the New Democrats as “saving liberalism from its excesses.”18 From cultivated a bloc of support for his vision to remake the Democratic Party within the House Democratic Caucus and the Democratic Governors Association. The nascent New Democrats’ initial phase of entrepreneurial activity centered on an ultimately unsuccessful institutional strategy to transform the party structure. As we have already seen, bringing elected officials back into the nomination process as unpledged superdelegates did not have its intended effect of tempering the influence of so-called

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special interests and returning the party to national power. Subsequently, From and his allies tried and failed to take control of the DNC by intervening in the election of the new chair. The resulting election of Paul Kirk, a Kennedy aide with major support from the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations, demonstrated to From that “we didn’t have any votes on the national committee.”19 Finally, as the DNC created yet another party reform commission in the wake of Mondale’s defeat, the DLC’s Task Force on Party Renewal recommended radical changes, including returning to winner-take-all primaries and further opening the nomination process to “mainstream” independent voters. These too failed to gain support. When From found little support within the DNC, he founded the DLC as an extra-party organization so that the New Democrats “could operate without any party constraints at all.”20 DLC membership was based mostly in southern, western, and border states and was overwhelmingly composed of white men. Of the forty-three founding members, all but four held office in states that Reagan had carried twice. Eventually, the DLC would come to attract future party leaders such as Al Gore and Bill Clinton. The failure of the DLC’s institutional strategy was unsurprising. First, the fledgling group was small, with no direct connection to any organized party constituencies. As Kenneth Baer, the DLC’s first major biographer, has put it, the group “was an elite organization in every regard.”21 This presented the DLC with a strategic conundrum it could not escape. As an organization of officeholders that opposed the power of constituency groups, the DLC faced insuperable barriers to cultivating any significant coalition in the DNC, even in the wake of yet another presidential defeat. Second, while Mondale’s defeat was technically worse than McGovern’s, it carried less of a shock, given the electoral prospect of defeating the popu lar incumbent. Perhaps owing to this, the DLC did not at all try to mobilize a popu lar backlash to the same extent as did the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) in 1972. The failure of their institutional strategy reoriented the New Democrats toward a more programmatic approach in effecting party change. This renewed effort began as a series of DLC-sponsored policy forums around the country, which offered DLC congressional members a platform to promote their distinctive policy views and to gain the necessary publicity for a run in the 1988 primaries. These events, covered in the national press, provided the DLC with a public forum in which to convey not only their distinctly

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centrist policy alternatives but also their broader vision for a new Democratic Party oriented around markets, law and order, and entitlement reform. Colorado senator Tim Wirth declared to a press conference that “we want to move away from a temporary economic policy of redistribution to a long-term policy of growth and opportunity.”22 Virginia governor and DLC chairman Chuck Robb framed their politics in even grander, historic terms: “The New Deal consensus which dominated American politics for 50 years has run its course.” We need, he continued, to confront a “new social dilemma . . . the rise of a dependent, demoralized, and self-perpetuating underclass in our cities. . . . [M]illions of people, mostly black, are trapped in a tragic cycle of deprivation, disorder and dependency,” at risk of becoming permanent “wards of the state.”23 This “issue blitz” tour appeared to have an effect. In the run-up to the 1986 midterm elections, the DNC’s official policy statement, “New Choices in a Changing America,” emphasized fiscal discipline, strong national defense, stronger families, and the importance of private investment. The report failed to mention full employment, abortion, or gay rights. From welcomed the statement as evidence of the party’s shifting “center of gravity.”24 That November every DLC House member won reelection, seven of the eleven new senators were DLC-ers, and three DLC incumbents won reelection to the upper chamber. However, the clustering of southern presidential primaries into “Super Tuesday”—a procedural reform many DLC-ers thought would improve the chances for a southern moderate to gain an insurmountable delegate lead in 1988—backfired. Jesse Jackson, the most liberal candidate, won five southern states, carry ing a historic 96  percent of black Democratic voters, while the DLC’s Al Gore won four states and Dick Gephardt carried only his home state of Missouri. Jackson would eventually place second to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in the race for the Democratic nomination. And while the Democratic candidate entered the general election with a healthy lead in the polls, he would go down to yet another historic defeat in November. After 1988, the DLC perceived its programmatic strategy to have failed as well, and it recommitted itself to continue on working to transform the party’s image and governing philosophy by doubling down in its war of ideas. Accordingly, following the election the DLC launched its own think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). In its first major postelection statement, The Politics of Evasion, drafted by academics William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, the DLC’s de facto manifesto elaborated From’s initial

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diagnosis of the party crisis into a factional indictment of New Politics liberalism. Democrats must now come face to face with reality: too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defense of their national security. . . . Since the 1960s, the public has come to associate liberalism with tax and spending policies that contradict the interests of average families; with welfare policies that foster dependence rather than self-reliance; with softness toward the perpetrators of crime and indifference toward its victims; with ambivalence toward the assertion of American values and interests abroad; and with an adversarial stance toward mainstream morals and cultural values.25 At the root of the problem was the “liberal fundamentalism” of a coalition of “minority groups and white elites” who had come to dominate the national party through the institutional reforms of the presidential nominating process. Strategies premised on mobilizing new voters, such as Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, were flawed. The simple facts, they argued, were that the party’s open nominating system reflected the influence of “upscale liberals” and produced candidates “without significant appeal to the demographic and political center.” To win back the votes of “average Americans,” Democratic officials, officeholders, and particularly presidential candidates “must have the courage to challenge entrenched orthodoxies and to articulate new visions” for the party, crafted around individual responsibility, hard work, and equal opportunity.26 In articulating their New Democratic project in more overtly factional rhetoric, the DLC was in many ways picking up where the CDM had left off in the 1970s. Like the CDM before them, the DLC took aim not at Republicans, but at New Politics liberals, arguing that by moving to the left since the late 1960s, liberal Democrats had moved the party away from an electoral majority.27 In fact, shortly after forming the DLC, From and cofounder Will Marshall met with the senior leadership of the CDM: Penn Kemble, Peter Rosenblatt, and Ben Wattenberg. The CDM had become much less visibly involved in the struggle over party reform in the second half of the 1970s. During that time, the organization had assumed a sharply critical position to the right of the Carter administration, especially regarding foreign policy.28

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The subject of discussion at the DLC-CDM meeting was the potential merger of the two intraparty organizations, with the CDM focusing on foreign affairs and the DLC taking on domestic issues.29 But while the proposed merger never came to be, the meeting between the leaderships of the DLC and the CDM illustrated the continuity linking the two groups.30 Indeed, From later acknowledged that it was the experience of the CDM in the 1970s that had inspired the formation of the DLC in the first place.31 But as much as the New Democrats were continuing the project of distancing the party from New Politics liberalism, the DLC was a different kind of organization, reflective of the changing organizational universe of American politics. First, as already mentioned, it lacked roots in any of the party’s core constituency organizations or networks, especially labor. This distinguished it from the CDM as well as older advocacy organizations like Americans for Democratic Action. Second, unlike the CDM, the DLC had ultimately opted for an “ideas war” strategy, rooted in the PPI, to shift commonsense thinking among their fellow Democrats. Such a strategy more closely resembled the newly pioneered “advocacy model” of the think tank used by the conservative movement in its transformation of the Republican Party. Breaking from the older tradition of academic-driven nonpartisan policy development by such Washington establishments like the Brookings Institution (“a university without students”), new think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and a transformed American Enterprise Institute explicitly dedicated themselves to providing an intellectual infrastructure for an openly ideological agenda.32 In this mold, the DLC and PPI sought to enter and win the “war of ideas” by promulgating an ideological vision that could win adherents inside the party’s formal councils and across its extended network. It was to be a rebranding of the Democratic Party’s ideational foundations, transforming the common sense of the party to be “not liberal, not conservative, but progressive.”33 Finally, while the CDM had scored decisive victories against its New Politics opponents in the battle over party structure, the self-declared defenders of vital center liberalism failed to consolidate a positive policy vision for a new Democratic regime in the wake of the New Deal order’s collapse. Whereas the CDM and other Cold War liberals looked back with nostalgia on the New Deal Democratic Party, New Democrats explicitly rejected any possible return to the party’s golden age. This was rooted in the DLC’s futurist vision of the new, “weightless” high-tech economy, unleashed by innovations

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in information-communications technology (especially the Internet) and the growth of finance. National economic strategies of the 1950s and 1960s had been eclipsed by “the new forces and terms of global competition.” The solution, opined two PPI staff economists, was to “enhance competition and liberate markets” through “fiscal and monetary discipline” rather than the “old economics” of public jobs programs, Keynesian demand management, and industrial policy.34 The relatively young cohort of rising officeholders and opinion makers, many of whom self-identified as neoliberals or were castigated as “Atari Democrats,” looked forward to a postindustrial future “encased in silicon.”35

Carving Out a Third Way Accordingly, the transformation in the political economy necessitated in turn a new kind of politics, one that reflected a departure from the old categories of the Cold War industrial age. This entailed embracing a new policy agenda, such as free trade, school choice, and entitlement reform—proposals that were at odds with some of the main shibboleths of the Democratic coalition. In a major statement of principles unrolled in New Orleans in 1990, DLC signatories declared that “the old isms have run their course, and old politics must give way to new realities. The political ideas and passions of the 1930s and 1960s cannot guide us in the 1990s.”36 In their stead, the guiding ideas of the Democratic Party would transcend traditional dichotomies of left and right, opening a third way that would not only propel the United States into the leadership of the information age but also return the Democrats to national power. New Democrats saw no better vehicle for installing their programmatic vision than a successful presidential candidacy cut from their own cloth. Such a presidential strategy would not only circumvent the need to cultivate support within the DNC. By delivering on the electoral test and returning the party to the White House for the first time in over a decade, New Democrats would secure their credibility as effective party leaders and undermine the lingering legitimacy of their factional rivals. Thus, early on From made it a priority to entice Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to take up the DLC banner in the 1992 nomination race. Clinton’s relative youth, his southern background, as well as his past history as a McGovern activist made him the perfect spokesperson for realigning the party through a presidential cam-

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paign.37 Accepting the position of DLC chairman, Clinton gained access to a growing network of party contacts through which to lay the foundations for his entrance into the primaries. From supplied Clinton with DLC-PPI talking points, speeches, and policy advisers, who in turn conveyed the New Democratic policy agenda with confidence and charisma around the country in media appearances, activist meet-and-greets, and party fundraisers. Indeed, when Clinton announced his presidential candidacy in October 1991, he emphasized that political change was needed, but “the change we must make isn’t liberal or conservative. It’s both and it’s different.”38 On the campaign trail, Clinton demonstrated his New Democrat credentials consistently, including several high-profile public appearances during which he could be seen pushing back against Democratic constituency groups that the DLC often derided as “special interests” or even “special pleaders.” In a speech to the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, he called for the elimination of one hundred thousand federal jobs. In a speech before the United Auto Workers, he spoke about the benefits of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA). More famously, Clinton disparaged hip-hop artist Sister Souljah in an address to the Rainbow Coalition. With few rivals to his left (Jackson declined to run), and a major boost from Super Tuesday, Clinton sailed to the nomination with relative ease. His selection of a fellow DLC-er, Senator Al Gore, as his running mate underscored his intention to redirect the party away from the old constituencies of labor, feminism, and civil rights. Clinton’s margin of victory ensured his team effective control over the Democratic National Convention and the platform, which rearticulated Democratic Party priorities around the three core DLC values of opportunity, responsibility, and community.39 In his acceptance speech, Clinton depicted his general election campaign as a turning point in the party’s fortunes: My fellow Democrats, it’s time for us to realize we’ve got some changing to do. . . . We need a new approach to government, a government that offers more empowerment and less entitlement. More choices for young people in the schools they attend. . . . And more choices for the elderly and for people with disabilities and the long-term care they receive. A government that is leaner, not meaner; a government that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy; a government that understands that jobs must come from growth in a vibrant and vital system of free enterprise. . . . The choice we offer is not conservative or

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liberal. In many ways, it is not even Republican or Democratic. It is different. It is new. And it will work.40 That November, with the economy in recession and the surprisingly successful third-party candidacy of businessman Ross Perot, Clinton won the election on the promise of being a new kind of Democrat and breaking from business-as-usual Washington politics.

New Democratic Governance in the Advocacy Party However, while the New Democratic philosophy appeared to work in returning the Democrats to the White House that November, very little of Clinton’s early term resembled the New Democratic policy agenda outlined throughout the campaign. From, who had served as domestic policy adviser during the transition but waived a formal position in the executive, saw his advice fall by the wayside as the new president entered office with an overwhelmingly non-DLC Democratic Congress. The PPI had prepared for the president a large compendium of policy proposals entitled Mandate for Change, including calls for adding one hundred thousand police officers to the streets; tackling welfare reform; expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit; and implementing national ser vice, an assault weapons ban, business tax credits, free trade, and market-based environmental protections. From had encouraged Clinton to take heed of such ideas in an early postelection strategy memo, where he emphasized the need to attract Perot voters to complete their realignment of the party. For From, this meant prioritizing welfare reform, “a symbol of three decades of failure on the left and the right.”41 And while Clinton’s first State of the Union address underscored New Democratic themes of restraining government spending, protecting families, and stimulating private-sector investment, it would prove to be an isolated event rather than the beginning of a sustained effort to remake the Democrats’ advocacy party. Much to the chagrin of From and other hardline DLC-ers, the operation of the advocacy party proved difficult to overcome in practice. Due in part to the strength of the diverse and increasingly liberal Democratic caucus in Congress as well as the lobbying of interest groups, one of Clinton’s first executive orders lifted the ban on gay men and lesbians from military ser vice. The action thrust what New Democrats considered a divisive “values issue”

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best left out of the conversation into the center of political debate. Further, bowing to pressure from women’s organizations and female members of Congress, Clinton lifted restrictions on federal regulations for the funding, access, and provision of abortion abroad. Later, in the face of Republican and DLC opposition, Clinton was forced to withdraw his nominee for assistant attorney general, University of Pennsylvania law professor Lani Guinier, due to her views on minority representation. An internal White House poll showed Clinton’s approval rating had dropped by twenty points. Writing in the New Republic, John Judis observed that given “the centrality of cultural and social issues” for the new administration, Clinton was, in fact, governing as an “old Democrat.”42 Signature legislative initiatives also mostly broke from the New Democratic vision, while also failing to disrupt the logic of the advocacy party. In late 1993, Clinton signed NAFTA, negotiated under the previous Republican administration, into law. However, he did so over the opposition of most of the House Democratic Caucus (including its leader and whip). Despite signifying a policy victory for the DLC, it hardly figured as a defining moment for the Clinton administration. More significantly, a complex 1,300-page health-care initiative, designed behind closed doors in the White House under the direction of First Lady Hillary Clinton, proposed to extend new programmatic rights to citizens and expand the administrative bureaucracy. The plan ultimately died in Congress at the hands of a filibuster after sustaining attacks from Republicans, industry lobbyists, and DLC-ers. For the House leadership to pass an omnibus crime bill that increased the police force, expanded prison construction, and implemented three-strikes sentencing laws, they had to acquiesce to a host of pork-barrel spending requests from black Democrats, some of whom objected to the bill’s emphasis on punishment, and from Republicans, who balked at the included assault weapons ban. Despite the bill’s roots in the New Democrat imagination, From protested to the president that his efforts to break from politics as usual “will not succeed if the same forces in Congress and the interest groups that have run the Democratic Party into the ground for the past 25 years continue to dominate the party.”43 Clinton’s attempts to recover from a turbulent start to his presidency included stressing welfare reform in his second State of the Union address as well as introducing accompanying legislation. However, as the 1994 midterms approached, From observed that Clinton “was less and less perceived as the different kind of Democrat he had promised to be.”44 While it was

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true that many New Democratic issues had been presented to the national public as defining priorities for the administration, and, indeed, some of them had been enacted into law, it seemed that Clinton could satisfy neither New Democrats nor the old. As Senator Joseph Lieberman observed, “The DLC themes—social responsibility, anti-crime, pro-business—just got lost.”45 The drubbing that the Democrats received in the 1994 midterms, however, had a paradoxical effect on the Clinton administration and the New Democrats. Led by conservative firebrand Newt Gingrich and his ten-point policy agenda for a new “Contract with America” (originally a Heritage Foundation study), Republicans won fifty-two seats in the House, eight in the Senate, and ten governorships, taking control of Congress for the first time since 1957. Most of those gains had come from the South, Midwest, and West. At the DLC, From and Marshall greeted the outcome as “liberating,” holding that such a defeat contained the potential for “teaching our party that we can’t stick with the old regime much longer.”46 The editors at the New Republic agreed, blaring the following across the cover of their December issue: THEY BLEW IT The fundamental STRATEGIC MISTAKE of the CLINTON PRESIDENCY is now clear. If President Clinton had pushed for WELFARE REFORM rather than HEALTH CARE REFORM in 1994, we would now be talking about a great DEMOCRATIC REALIGNMENT, rather than a great REPUBLICAN REALIGNMENT.47 As with 1984 and 1988, DLC entrepreneurs seized the opportunity of the 1994 electoral defeat to press forward their transformative party project, promulgating a narrative that explained the defeat as the result of Clinton’s failure to adhere to his own New Democratic program that had won him the presidency two years earlier. With GOP majorities in Congress, Clinton was free to take a middle position between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats—a strategy Clinton’s newly appointed aide Dick Morris called “triangulation.” As From explained to the president soon after the midterm elections, “The increased polarization of Congress” presented an “opportunity . . . to seize the vital center of the political spectrum. . . . [S]ooner or later, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle will join you there.”48 Yet if triangulation

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was a new strategy available to the president, it did not imply any shift in the administration’s substantive goals. While it was certainly the case that Clinton’s subsequent leadership on “ending welfare as we know it,” budget balancing, and eschewing big government programs undercut the self-described “revolutionary” policy agenda of the Gingrich Republicans, these ideas were nothing new to the DLC program. The 1994 electoral earthquake cleared the path for the president to pursue the New Democratic agenda without the constraints of the Democratic Congress. This was most obvious during the passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill, ending a sixty-year-old entitlement program for low-income mothers with dependent children. The president added his signature despite the fact that half of House and Senate Democrats voted against it and several of his own cabinet members resigned in protest. Subsequently, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, limiting marriage to heterosexual couples. For From, Clinton’s subsequent reelection in November confirmed that the party now stood “for New Democratic values, beliefs, and policies that an overwhelming majority of Americans can support.”49

A New Democratic Party? During the years 1995–2001, it appeared that the DLC realignment of the Democratic Party was well under way. After Clinton’s easy reelection, From declared that “the ideological battle in our party is over.”50 Despite the impeachment scandal that consumed the White House in the latter half of Clinton’s second term, the party prepared to pass the torch to yet another New Democratic ticket headed by Vice President Al Gore and Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman in 2000. The success of a New Democrat in the White House had also inspired spin-off organizations such as the New Democratic Network (NDN) political action committee and formally organized New Democratic coalitions in both the House and Senate. Moreover, the DLC-PPI vision of a new progressive centrist politics was being pushed into the international arena through a global network of center-left party leaders such as British prime minister Tony Blair, Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, and German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, among others. United under the banner of the Third Way, DLC-PPI and top Clinton administration figures convened or attended elite meetings of world leaders in the United States and Europe throughout the late 1990s, culminating in an

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international conference, “Progressive Governance for the 21st Century,” in Florence, Italy, in November 1999. In his opening remarks, Clinton defined the “great challenge” of the new millennium as marrying “our conceptions of social justice and equal opportunity with our commitment to globalization.”51 Together, the Third Way had a mission of “modernizing center-left politics around the world.”52 Domestically, Clinton also turned his attention toward party-building activities during his second term, breaking with the persistent tendency of postwar Democratic presidents to exploit the DNC and its state-level affiliates for their own narrow electoral and policy ends. But as Daniel Galvin has argued, the loss of durable Democratic congressional majorities altered the president’s incentives, pushing Clinton to adopt a more constructive approach to his own party organization. Indeed, “to the extent that Clinton could lift his party back onto its feet and convince his fellow partisans of the value of his New Democrat approach, he could fortify a durable organizational vehicle with which to perpetuate his personal brand of politics after he left the White House.”53 Accordingly, at Clinton’s direction, DNC chairman Joe Andrew undertook major investments in activist training, candidate recruitment, and new computer technologies, including building a national voter file. Its comprehensive party-building program, America 2000, aimed to rebuild the Democratic majority by winning more elections, “from dogcatcher to the United States Presidency . . . not just in 1999 and 2000, but in 2009 and 2010.”54 Thus, despite the bitterly narrow loss of the 2000 election after the Supreme Court stopped a ballot recount, effectively deciding the outcome in favor of George W. Bush, the New Democrats exited the White House with a seemingly well-institutionalized legacy. The DLC-PPI policy advocacy network continued to grow nationally and internationally with the creation of a new crop of D.C.-based think tanks, including the Center for American Progress in 2003 and Third Way in 2005, which joined the continuing efforts of the NDN (now a think tank with its own advocacy organization: the New Politics Institute), the moderate New Democratic Coalition in Congress, as well as the new Blue Dog caucus of conservative Democrats in the House. Despite White House scandals, Democrats had performed well in the 1998 midterms, leading to the resignation of Gingrich as House Speaker. A study of national Democratic convention delegates found self-identified New Democrats to have grown from about one-eighth in 1992 to more than twofifths by 2000.55 Indeed, midway through President Barack Obama’s first

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term, Al From officially shuttered the DLC, reflecting in his memoirs, “We had accomplished our mission and there was no reason to keep it going.”56 Yet the sense of completion implied in From’s declaration of “mission accomplished” is belied by the reality of the DLC’s failure to remake the Democrats by breaking from the institutional logic of the advocacy party. As Clinton observed in an address to the 1998 DLC annual conference, “The real test of our ideals is whether they outlive this presidency; whether they are bigger than any candidate, any speech, and campaign, and debate.”57 However, it is precisely after the loss of the presidency when New Democratic ideals were eclipsed. The success of the New Democrats as an agent of party transformation can be measured across several dimensions. First, the DLC clearly did achieve its paramount goal of returning the Democratic Party to the White House in 1993, breaking the Democrat’s losing streak of five out of the previous six presidential contests. Moreover, New Democrats subsequently helped reelect a Democratic president for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt. However, the impact of Clinton’s initial election was somewhat mitigated by the downturn in the economy, which put the incumbent George H. W. Bush at a disadvantage. Additionally, the entrance, exit, and reentry of Perot as a major third-party candidate also shifted the playing field, as he directed most of his attacks at President Bush.58 In the final tally, Clinton carried only 43 percent of the popular vote, making the DLC-PPI’s insistence on a “mandate for change” unpersuasive. Moreover, while both of Clinton’s elections brought greater southern support for a Democratic candidate than in any presidential election since 1976, those southern states he carried (Georgia, Gore’s Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky, and his home state of Arkansas) proved to be the exceptions to the rule, and by the turn of the century Gore failed to carry a single state south of the Mason-Dixon line. No southern state would return to the Democratic column until Obama’s 2008 election, and then only three: Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida (with North Carolina returning to the GOP in 2012). If one of the DLC’s goals was to reverse the course of political realignment and return the South to the Democratic Party, it evidently did not succeed. Moreover, beneath the desire to regain the White House, New Democrats were especially keen at drawing white, moderate male voters back to the party. This was often framed as courting the working-class and middleclass defectors who had become Nixon Democrats in 1972 and Reagan Democrats in the 1980s. In fact, the problem had its origins much earlier, in

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the mid-1960s, when Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the majority of white voters in 1964. In the three-way presidential contests of the 1990s, Clinton was able to win despite carry ing only two-fifths of the white vote (though he won more than half of the white major-party vote). In fact, Clinton’s highest levels of support came from Jews and African Americans. Gore also narrowly won the popu lar vote in 2000 with less than a majority of whites, as did Barack Obama in his presidential victories of 2008 and 2012. Despite the efforts of the DLC, decline of white support for the Democratic presidential candidates was especially pronounced in the South, where John McCain took two-thirds of the vote in 2008.59 Nor did Clinton’s late-breaking embrace of bold, new party-building initiatives seem to pay off. In fact, their prohibitive cost was one of the major obstacles slowing the creation of the national voter file and the efforts to strengthen state parties. While the new party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, was an adept fundraiser, and accumulated enough soft money to rebuild the DNC headquarters before the McCain-Feingold ban on such contributions took effect in November 2002, the tens of millions of dollars he directed into the states during his tenure “barely scratched the surface” when it came to meeting their financial, staffing, legal, technological, media, and campaign needs.60 As former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley later observed, “Charisma [doesn’t] translate into structure.”61 As the decade following the turn of the millennium would demonstrate, the influence that came with capturing the presidency in the 1990s proved fleeting. New Democrats appeared particularly inept at responding to the general deepening of partisan polarization and the specific crises of the George W. Bush presidency. With roots in the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton impeachment, partisan polarization sharply accelerated during the contested outcome of the 2000 election, which many Democratic voters viewed as unfair and democratically suspect. Despite a bounce in his popularity in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush decided to extend his War on Terror into Iraq, and that action mobilized the largest protests in U.S. (and world) history. The vocal protest movement that subsequently emerged channeled much of its energy into the Democratic Party, and it figured largely in decisive victories in the 2006 midterm congressional elections.62 The DLC prominently supported the Iraq War, but saw supporters for its position dwindle as the U.S. military occupation persisted and the human

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and financial costs of the war mounted. The Bush administration’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans fueled a virulent animus for the president and a widespread impatience with the DLC’s brand of centrist moderation among Democratic activists and its new elite donor consortium, the Democratic Alliance, which became a hub for its members to consult with labor unions and philanthropic foundations to vet and fund progressive organizations such as the Center for American Progress, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Media Matters, America Votes, and ACORN.63 Many New Democrats felt compelled to alter their politics in response to these changing political and institutional circumstances. When the Bush administration attempted to solidify free trade agreements with Central America (CAFTA) and Colombia, a majority of congressional Democrats voted against it, with the New Democrat Coalition in the House publicly opposing it. As Ellen Tauscher, co-chair of the New Democratic Coalition, said, “The promise of trade liberalization has not lived up to the rhetoric, certainly not for American workers.”64 When Bush outlined his initiative to privatize Social Security (a DLC proposal), the DLC opposed it, along with the rest of the Democratic Party.65 The Bush tax cuts (two of the largest in history), which disproportionately favored top income earners, spurred renewed populist attacks on the wealthy and their GOP proxies from many corners of the Democratic Party—a far cry from the business-friendly rhetoric and policy positions of the DLC. The Obama and Hillary Clinton contest in the 2008 primaries further demonstrated how much ground the DLC/PPI/Third Way perspective had lost through the intervening Bush years. While Obama emphasized his antiwar credentials against his principal opponent, who, as a New York senator, had cast a vote authorizing the Bush administration’s use of force in Iraq, this should not overshadow how both Obama and Clinton distanced themselves from the New Democratic tradition. On the one hand, Obama shaped his platform in large part against DLC policies, speaking openly about the need for redistributive social and economic policies, including raising taxes on rich families making more than $250,000 a year, promising to renegotiate NAFTA, deemphasizing fiscal restraint and balanced budgets, and explicitly distancing himself from the New Democrats, vowing that “I am not currently, nor have I ever been, a member of the DLC.”66 On the other hand, despite her continuing association with the DLC,67 Clinton framed her campaign to a significant extent around identity-based

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claims regarding the symbolism of her candidacy and her qualifications for the Democratic nomination. This development was a combination of the very nature of the primary contest—pitting an African American man against a white woman—and the appetite for such rhetoric within the primary electorate and the media. While Clinton’s gender politics were not attempts to appeal to women on the basis of a feminist agenda—she neither identified as a feminist nor highlighted women’s issues in her campaign68— Clinton emphasized her gender on the campaign trail as her initial frontrunner status began to slip, inviting her supporters to help “break the highest and hardest glass ceiling in America,” and dismissing any criticism of her record, conduct, and judgment as sexist (as surely some of it was).69 In addition to what many perceived to be Clinton’s turn to identity politics, she also broke from the DLC by calling for renegotiating NAFTA and deemphasizing fiscal restraint. When Clinton did adopt New Democrat themes during the campaign, they often failed or fell flat. In a debate before the Nevada caucuses, Clinton likened the role of the president to that of a corporate CEO who has “to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy” efficiently and competently. The statement paled in comparison to Obama’s view of the presidency in articulating a “vision” for the country, and then mobilizing and inspiring citizens to come together around an “agenda for change.”70 Subsequently, at the eleventh hour of the campaign, Clinton directed an appeal to the unpledged superdelegates to shift the margin of victory in her favor, arguing that “Obama’s support among . . . hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening. . . . These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat.”71 Like Al From two decades earlier, Clinton promoted the putative commonsense logic that prioritized courting the white electorate over all other possible coalitions, and she implied that only she could effectively court them on the basis of her race. Ironically, this too failed to convince the group of Democratic officeholders that From had helped institutionalize in the nomination process to curb the power of liberal interest-group activists. The relative decline of the New Democrats could also be seen at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, where Democratic delegates identifying as liberals greatly outnumbered moderates, 60 to 37  percent—a dramatic shift from 51 to 47  percent in 2004 (with conservatives holding steady at 3 percent). Self-identifying New Democrats declined as a percentage of convention delegates too, from 31  percent in 2004 (and 42  percent in 2000) to 25 percent in 2008.72

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Finally, in his general election victory, Obama constructed an electoral coalition that also departed significantly from the DLC’s vision of a New Democratic Party based largely on white, middle-class, southern men. So similar was it to the demography of the New Politics movement, some political analysts referred to it as “McGovern’s revenge.”73 According to exit polling data, Obama carried an unsurprising 66  percent of young voters, a large increase over John Kerry’s performance in 2004. While Obama won 60 percent of those with low or moderate incomes, he also carried over half of voters with annual incomes of $200,000 or more, up from only 35 percent in 2004. He carried 66 percent of the Hispanic vote, 95 percent of the African American vote, and 43 percent of white voters, although only 31 percent of southern whites. The onset of the Great Recession, along with the widespread disillusionment with the Bush presidency, also boosted protest voters and delivered Obama significant congressional majorities.74

The Consolidation of the Advocacy Party Based on the foregoing analysis, the track record of the DLC in installing a durable centrist vision and moderate policy agenda for the Democratic Party is mixed at best. To be sure, the power of the New Democrats’ entrepreneurial politics lives on, if in somewhat of a diminished form, years later.75 But their attempt to uproot the advocacy party itself failed dramatically. On the contrary, as Chapter  8 will show, the Democrats’ advocacy party model not only survived the New Democrats’ attempt to dismantle it, but also thrived, constituting the foundation of the politics and governance of the Obama presidency and the intraparty contention thereafter. At the root of the New Democrats’ failure to transform the Democratic Party was their own inability to escape the institutional logic of the advocacy party itself. After more than two decades of reform and counter-reform, the Democratic Party was organizationally hollowed out, dependent on interest groups and movement associations in the extended party network to supply the resources and legitimacy the formal party apparatus sorely lacked on its own. Rather than reverse this development, New Democrats adapted to it, mounting their entrepreneurial project through extra-party organizations and advocacy networks too. Their capture of the executive branch catapulted their advocacy politics to the commanding heights of the party. Indeed, as we will see, influence

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over the presidency and the use of the administrative state is the fundamental political pattern of the advocacy party. But by establishing a direct link to the White House, the New Democratic advocacy network was able to temporarily compensate for the major liabilities it faced in comparison to its rival advocates. As a coalition of officeholders and party operatives, New Democrats had neither the popular legitimacy nor the resources to compete for influence in partisan networks that continued to cast a skeptical eye on the trustworthiness of Washington insiders and policy experts without any clear links to popular movements or causes. This was made abundantly clear when their grip on executive power lapsed after 2000, after which the profile of the New Democrats’ DLC-PPI advocacy network decisively receded, diminished by the chorus of rival groups in the Democrats’ extended party network.

CHAPTER 8

The Advocate-in-Chief Barack Obama’s Harnessing of the Advocacy Party

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall. . . . It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. —President Barack Obama (2013)

When President-Elect Barack Obama greeted his jubilant election-night supporters in Grant Park, Chicago, on November 4, 2008, and announced that “change has come to America,” forty years had passed since the same park had been host to the riots of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Instead of a party torn by the turmoil of movement politics and new group demands, Obama ascended to the helm of the Democratic Party with a message of unity amid diversity, which aimed to embrace “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.”1 As the location and the content of his message suggested, while America had indeed changed, so had the Democratic Party. In many ways, candidate and then president Obama cut a very interest ing contrast to his Democratic predeces sor. Whereas Bill Clinton and the New Democrats represented a project to restore party professionals to power in the Democratic Party and draw white Reagan Democrats back into the fold, Barack Hussein Obama embodied a new, younger, multiracial, and multicultural identity that more clearly reflected the

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future of the party. While both returned the Democrats to power in Washington, Obama did so with a commanding popu lar majority—the first Democratic president to do so since LBJ— and a clear mandate for change. This mandate, combined with the political capital accrued from the unpopularity of the out going George  W. Bush administration and the precipitous economic crisis coinciding with the 2008 election, was put to use in the first two years of the Obama administration to achieve historic and far-reaching progressive victories in health care (which had eluded Clinton) and education, in spite of relentless Republican opposition in Congress and the widespread mobilization of the Tea Party movement. Yet few things distinguished Obama from Clinton more than the former’s approach to the advocacy party. Clinton and the New Democrats diagnosed the dominance of “special interest” groups in the party to be an electoral liability, and they campaigned on and attempted to govern in opposition to the logic of advocacy party governance. As we have seen, such a project met with mixed success and did little to durably alter the relations between politicians and groups in the party thereafter. By contrast, as this chapter will argue, Obama sought to harness and master, rather than counter, the politics of the advocacy party. Rhetorically, this involved interweaving clear signals to traditional and new Democratic constituency groups with his soaring, often-idealistic desire for bipartisan unity in an increasingly polarized age. Organizationally, Obama harnessed his party’s advocacy politics by building his own centralized, grassroots campaign organization, which he subsequently spun off into his own personal, permanently active, advocacy vehicle. This novel form of organization signaled Obama’s recognition of the centrality of advocacy groups to the modern Democratic Party, and his attempt to contain their contentious politics from the top down. Ultimately, however, Obama’s efforts to master the advocacy party could not resolve the fundamental tension produced by the discrepancy between his own public-facing persona as a veritable “advocate-in-chief” and his practical inability to deliver substantively on his policy commitments, especially after the GOP’s capture of the House in the 2010 midterm elections. While enjoying a temporary respite during the 2012 reelection effort, the new legislative constraints placed on the president after the Tea Party insurgency subjected Obama to the anger and impatience of Democratic-aligned interest groups and movement actors, whose elevated expectations for action

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on his promissory statements surfaced in public criticism, disruptive collective action, and protest. In the institutional context of the advocacy party, group leaders no longer had the veto power over presidential nominees they once did. Exercised in the old smoke-filled rooms of the pre-reformed party, groups used to engage in elite brokerage behind closed doors until a mutually agreeable candidate emerged. That candidate, it was understood, could count on group support in the election, and group leaders could, in turn, count on access and assistance from the most powerful officer in the world. Should that access not be granted or that assistance not given, group support could be withdrawn, leaving elites to broker a new, more agreeable candidate before the next election cycle. These days, given the incentives for presidents to take what groups offer while providing lip ser vice in return, and the absence of any equivalent of the old smoke-filled rooms, groups’ principal means of affecting officeholder compliance is to “go public” with their grievances and apply pressure on party leaders through press releases, protest, and disruptive actions. Samuel Kernell’s observation about the presidential strategy of “going public” holds equally in such cases: “Going public is more akin to force than to bargaining . . . [and] it makes subsequent compromise . . . difficult.”2 While group strategies of going public might lead to attempts to broker a mutual agreement, bargaining in the old pattern is no longer the first resort, nor is it always possible with groups whose internal leadership structures lack the formal hierarchy that would empower duly authorized leaders to make binding decisions on behalf of their constituents or their rank-and-file activists. This contradiction in Obama’s advocacy party leadership encouraged a key dynamic pattern embedded in the structure and operation of modern Democratic Party politics, one that has conjoined disruptive group demands and unilateral presidential action. The use of executive action to achieve what cannot be achieved through legislation is, of course, nothing new. As Sidney Milkis argues, this has been a fundamental feature of the American political system since the New Deal, for liberals and conservatives alike.3 And, indeed, in keeping with this pattern, Obama relied on his broad executive powers to undertake many of his preferred initiatives. However, what changed for the Democrats with the rise of the advocacy party since the 1970s is groups’ increasing willingness to resort to public pressure and disruptive collective action to compel the administrative presidency

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into action on their behalf. Moreover, as I will show below, this behav ior, observable across a range of key Democratic constituencies, does not apply equally to all. Displaying the dynamics of group-party institutionalization and capture, groups’ variable capacity to “go public” in disruptive ways resulted in very unequal patterns of presidential attention and action. Labor and women’s groups, with long-standing ties to the Democratic Party, received relatively less from the advocate-in-chief than did newcomers, such as environmentalists, immigration rights groups, and the LGBTQ community. Thus, while groups are more essential than ever to the advocacy party, this role does not smoothly translate into political or policy influence.

Obama’s Rhetorical Presidency and the Dilemma of Advocacy Party Leadership Like most modern presidents, Obama campaigned on promises of change. Running on slogans like the “Audacity of Hope,” “Change We Can Believe In,” and affirmations of “Yes We Can,” candidate Obama echoed popu lar dissatisfaction with the policies of the Bush administration and the polarized partisanship of Washington. In contrast, he ensconced himself firmly in the Progressive tradition of a singular independent leader, above party, acting as the people’s tribune, and carry ing on with the course of building on the foundation of past victories, moving the nation toward “that more perfect union.”4 Like his Progressive predecessors, many of them children of Protestant ministers, Obama spoke in the language of freedom and rights, as well as obligation, responsibility, and justice.5 However, unlike his Progressive forebears, Obama campaigned for and won the leadership of the Democrats’ advocacy party. This novel institutional context placed new demands on the party leader, which he met by marrying—at times awkwardly—his progressive commitment to a “postpartisanship” independence from his party with the need to cultivate the support of the Democrats’ organized constituencies by acting as a “fierce advocate” on their behalf.6 In addition to his direct policy pledges, which he targeted at specific groups, Obama spoke in the language of movement politics, often couching his own personal story within the metaphor of the nation’s journey over obstacles and opposition to change.7 As the epigraph to this chapter suggests, Obama used his oratorical talents to suture together separate historic moments of movement politics—Seneca Falls and women’s

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suffrage, Selma and African American civil rights, and Stonewall and the LGBTQ community—into a coherent and cohesive partisan identity. By doing this, he also sought to connect old and new struggles in an unbroken national tradition of equality-seeking politics, stretching back to the country’s founding. At the same time, while Obama united Democratically oriented groups and movements together into one transcendent national story of progress, he also frequently turned a sharp critique toward his partisan opponents by listing their failures. “For eight long years . . . our President sacrificed investments in health care, and education, and energy, and infrastructure on the altar of tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs—trillions of dollars in giveaways that proved neither compassionate nor conservative.”8 Indeed, in these instances, Obama merged his partisan attacks on the Bush administration with his articulation of a positive policy agenda—making health care and education a programmatic right and tackling climate change with clean energy—which become the basis of his first term in office. These efforts, sustained from the campaign trail to the office of the presidency, not only solicited the electoral and political support Obama needed from the party groups that were in favor of those specific policies but also raised the expectations of the Democrats’ constituency groups for what the Obama presidency could deliver. This was not a problem of simply overpromising or Obama’s personal idealism. It was symptomatic of an advocacy party leader who had embraced the role of advocate-in-chief.

Advocacy Politics from the Top Down Scholars of the presidency and political parties have noted that during his tenure as party leader, Obama largely stuck to the traditional Democratic pattern of acting as a “party predator” when it came to relating to the formal party organization.9 In sharp contrast to his Republican predecessors, who all invested significant resources in building up their party organizations, Obama effectively sought to build a policy legacy rather than a durable partisan organization, wrongly “assuming that the enactment of significant legislation would create supportive constituencies that would reward the party at the voting booth.”10 Evidently it did not. During Obama’s presidency Democrats lost control of Congress, losing sixty-three seats in the House and eleven seats in the Senate, ten governorships, twenty-seven state

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legislative chambers, and nearly one thousand state legislative seats, reducing Democratic state power to its lowest level since the Civil War. However, while it is accurate to observe the continuity between Obama and his Democratic predecessors and the costs this had for the Democratic Party, it should not overshadow the significant organizational innovations that Obama made in the course of his presidential campaigns and his party leadership. That these efforts did not build the party organization is not in dispute. Rather, by assuming the role of advocate-in-chief, Obama’s efforts can be understood as an attempt to harness the power of the advocacy party by tapping its capacity for group mobilization while containing the pressure of group demands. Such a strategic approach further reinforced the logic of the advocacy party by delegitimating the Democrats’ formal organization, while simultaneously failing to preserve the legislative majorities necessary for control of the national policy agenda. Obama’s top-down approach to the politics of the advocacy party was made possible by technological and political changes within the advocacy universe itself and their effects on political campaigns. After the turn of the millennium, the rise of the Internet facilitated the construction of a new progressive infrastructure at the base of the Democratic Party. By networking together socially liberal, anti-Bush activists from across the country (and, indeed, around the world), a new generation of political advocacy organizations developed unprecedented capacities for instantaneous mass outreach, online petitions, offline location-based organizing, and massive small-dollar fundraising. Through websites such as MoveOn.org (launched in 1998) and the blog Daily Kos (2004), and their annual Netroots Nation conclave (which since 2006 has become a requisite destination for presidential aspirants), a new activist base became a major force in Democratic Party politics in a matter of only several years.11 These new progressives became “adept enforcers” of a liberalism that “amalgamates the New Deal and Great Society programs with a dose of 1970s cultural liberalism.”12 The rising power of netroots activists was first reflected in the highprofile though short-lived candidacy of Vermont governor Howard Dean in the 2004 Democratic nominating contest. Mobilizing what he called “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” the Dean campaign combined Internet-based fundraising with a focus on door-to-door grassroots organization. He recruited so many supporters into his campaign activities that Dean entered the primaries with more money and higher poll numbers than any of his rivals. While new innovations in information and communications

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technology facilitated his insurgency, “Dean’s candidacy was made viable not by the technology but rather by the issue-driven supporters who used the technology to create a movement of political and cultural significance.”13 While Dean’s campaign for the Democratic nomination was ultimately unsuccessful, sputtering out after a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses, his campaign’s successor political action committee, Democracy for America, persisted, innovating campaign technology, building new organizational capacity, and sponsoring offline meetings for citizen activism around the campaign platform.14 Four years later, in the 2008 primaries, Obama rebooted and enhanced Dean’s netroots operation to great effect, harnessing the new digital infrastructure invented by Dean staffers and supporters (as well as GOP strategists), and subsequently developed in coordination with the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which Dean had chaired since 2005.15 Obama also declined public financing that would have put a ceiling on his campaign spending in the primaries (as he would do for the general election as well). Also following in the tracks of the Dean campaign, Obama emphasized his antiwar credentials against his principal opponent, Hillary Clinton, who as New York senator had cast a vote in favor of authorizing the Bush administration’s use of force in Iraq. Moreover, Obama put his significant oratorical skills to work in fashioning himself as a candidate whose very identity appeared to reflect the progressive advance of American political culture from its racist past. And while his portrayal of Clinton as a foreign-policy hawk effectively courted the antiwar movement, Obama extolled the virtues of transcending partisan political conflict altogether rather than defining himself in a consistently liberal mold. With this potent mixture of liberal credibility, racial transcendence, and postpartisanship, Obama waged an ultimately victorious campaign that drew in millions of small-dollar donations and recruited legions of dedicated volunteers. Transitioning from the primaries to the general election, the Obama campaign built one of the most impressive campaign organizations in the history of American elections, Obama for America (OFA). OFA eschewed traditional Democratic reliance on labor unions and other constituency organizations for mobilizing volunteers and voters. Instead, OFA combined netroots outreach with face-to-face canvassing, centrally coordinated from its data-rich headquarters in Chicago.16 This pathbreaking nationwide digital network and ground-game operation deployed four times as many field operatives as John Kerry in 2004 or Al Gore in 2000. The campaign sent one

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billion emails to over thirteen million addresses, and it reaped the benefits of the ambitious fifty-state strategy that Dean had undertaken as DNC chairman.17 While the scope and success of OFA in Obama’s election is impressive, it was in itself only an improvement—massive though it was—on what had come before in the ongoing revolution of digitally mediated campaign operations. What truly set Obama apart, however, was his decision to keep his campaign organization in operation during the early years of his presidency. OFA’s postelection spin-off, Organizing for America (OFA 2.0), was a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a permanent field organization that folded Obama’s vast support network of three million donors, thirteen million email addresses, millions of volunteers, and tens of thousands of neighborhood coordinators into the DNC and persist in its operations between elections. OFA 2.0 marked a new experiment in American party politics, resembling in outline some of the proposals for an “activist” party organization first heard in the McGovern-Fraser hearings, albeit as a personal vehicle for the president rather than for the party and its activist members. The stated purpose of OFA 2.0’s program was to serve as a semi-autonomous “grassroots arm of the DNC” by promoting, organizing, and mobilizing support for the new president’s policy agenda through community-level events, petition drives, letters to the editor, and lobbying activity directed at state legislators or members of Congress.18 By the end of its first year in operation, OFA 2.0 had an impressive staff covering every congressional district in all fifty states. House parties of the kind that had become popu lar through MoveOn.org, the 2004 Dean campaign, and Obama’s general election campaign were held throughout the first year of the administration in an effort to rally support for Obama’s economic stimulus bill, federal budget negotiations, the confirmation of Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, and health-care reform. In sum, while Obama continued to neglect the needs of his party organization, he built himself a personal advocacy organization that circumvented normal political channels to connect him directly with the activist base of the Democratic Party. The implications of Obama’s particular approach to advocacy party leadership became clear in the course of the legislative battle for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In the midst of intense congressional negotiations and campaign-style public events, OFA activists directed their attacks against moderate Democrats in Congress who opposed retaining the president’s preferred provision for a public option in the pending legislation. In a special

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one-day effort, activists made over 315,000 calls to members of Congress in support of the president’s proposal, causing consternation among party officeholders who, broadly speaking, supported the president’s agenda.19 Further evidence of the OFA’s presidential rather than party orientation came over the course of the next several election cycles. While OFA’s combination of grassroots organizing and centralized control proved very effective at laying the groundwork for Obama’s own 2012 reelection, the benefits of Obama’s permanent field organization did not spill over to down-ballot Democrats, who lost big in 2010 and in 2014—a result some had anticipated as the likely outcome of a “campaigning to govern” strategy that narrowcasts to the base rather than aims to persuade wavering voters.20 Following the 2012 elections, OFA was removed from the DNC and rebranded as Organizing for Action (OFA 3.0), a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization unconstrained by campaign finance regulations and “committed to the agenda Americans voted for in 2012.”21 Meanwhile, in the course of building a personal advocacy organization to mobilize support for the president’s agenda, the Obama White House also rebranded the Office of Public Liaison as the Office of Public Engagement (OPE) to manage its public outreach to constituency groups. Originally institutionalized under the Nixon and Ford administrations, what came to be the OPE was headed by one of Obama’s most senior and trusted advisers, and it reflected the administration’s “commitment to openness” and the “need [for public officials] to draw on what citizens know.”22 Themes of public engagement and open government were integral to the president’s image as breaking from traditions of closed-door policy making and politics as usual. Accordingly, over the course of Obama’s first term, especially during the rapid explosion of policy making during the two years of unified Democratic control, the OPE actively sought out input and advice from myriad groups and individuals, organizing a series of meetings and events with youth, women, racial minorities, LGBTQ representatives, small business owners, and others. These events, attracting 450 people a week to the White House, were used to hear groups’ concerns, coordinate messages and strategies, and advance their shared goals, such as confirmation of Supreme Court justices.23 However, despite the administration’s solicitation of feedback and input, policy impact was limited.24 While constituency groups were encouraged to make a logical connection between “engagement” and “policy making,” the OPE was institutionally separated from any policy-making channels in the

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executive, rendering its operations more akin to “listening sessions” that attempted to promote public support for the agenda the president had already crafted. As Lawrence Jacobs concludes, the Obama White House’s public engagement program “appears to have been an elaborately drawn façade designed to shield” the administration from its closed-door sessions with industry lobbyists.25 Taken together, these top-down actions had mixed results for the core constituency groups at the center of the Democrats’ advocacy party. On the one hand, the iterations of Obama’s OFA experiment recognized and adapted to the significant role that party-oriented groups and movements had come to play in shaping the Democrats’ electoral strength. The tactics employed by the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, emphasizing personalized approaches to volunteer recruitment and empowering them with organ izing responsibilities, became a new model for electioneers all over the world.26 On the other, however, Obama’s postelection OFA entities remained presidential organ izations, prioritizing a presidential policy agenda, and ultimately reinforcing unrestrained presidential independence from his party. Some longtime supporters were disappointed that Organ izing for Amer ica and Organ izing for Action failed to be “responsive to bottom-up energy.” As one activist reported, “It seems like they’re still just running it like electoral campaigners and saying, this is the menu you can order off of. But it’s not a potluck.”27 While not resisting the advocacy party in a comparable way to Clinton or Car ter, Obama attempted to use the advocacy party as a tool for governing. And rather than benefiting symbiotically from the president’s popularity, the Democrats became subsumed by it, leaving a vacuum at the core of the party’s identity when he left office.28 Obama’s creation of his own advocacy organization reflected and reinforced the logic of the advocacy party he inherited. In response to modern party arrangements, Obama embraced advocacy politics and tried to become its most influential player. OFA’s agenda did indeed mirror many of the priorities of the party’s constituent groups. As a t-shirt sold on its website listed across its front, “Climate Change & Economic Opportunity & Gun Violence Prevention & Health Care & Immigration Reform & Marriage Equality & Women’s Rights.” But this list of policy issues was not the result of any kind of formal democratic process or grassroots input, nor did the groups have any formal way to hold the Obama administration accountable for its promises. On the contrary, when interest groups and movements

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became frustrated with the advocate-in-chief, they registered their dissent in less institutionalized, more disruptive ways.

Advocacy Politics from the Bottom Up As a form of party that institutionalizes the mutual dependence of groups and politicians, the advocacy party elevates the contentious relations characteristic of all party politics to new heights. While always a contest of rival claims to leadership authority, officeholders’ increased need for group resources incentivizes politicians to practice a form of advocacy politics that makes promissory commitments to groups’ issues and causes while sacrificing as little autonomy as possible in the exchange. As a result, groups’ heightened expectations are inevitably frustrated by the institutional and political conditions that fragment policy-making authority across the American state and compromise, if not fully shut down, delivery of those promissory commitments. Obama’s embrace of the advocacy party raised groups’ expectations and deepened their sense of frustration with the Democratic Party and its leader. Paradoxically, Obama was assailed by the right and the left both as a dangerous figure dedicated to sweeping, radical change and as a sellout insufficiently dedicated to radical, sweeping change, respectively.29 His rhetorical approach to the advocacy party locked him into a discursive politics that encouraged numerous Democratically aligned groups and movements to see the president as an ally in their struggle. Echoing widespread comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt’s transformative presidency, Obama explicitly reminded his supporters of what the New Deal president reportedly told A. Philip Randolph when he agreed with the civil rights leader’s suggestions: “go out there and make me do it.”30 After losing unified control of Washington in early 2011, activists put Obama under increasing pressure to deliver on their demands. The organized interests in the Democratic Party’s advocacy party infrastructure, including women’s groups, labor unions, black and Hispanic civil rights organizations, environmentalists, LGBTQ groups, and senior citizens’ lobbies, all pressed their claims on the Obama administration, with wide variations in effectiveness. While some sought incremental changes in regulatory policy or statutory law, others sought to fundamentally transform America’s political order. In all instances, groups prioritized particular ends

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over process or procedure, and the rhythms of movement mobilization and shifts in public opinion often imposed short time horizons and demands for immediate action. These contentious relations between party leader and affiliated groups were frequently resolved by resorting to administrative solutions, rendering these progressive advances less secure than legislative victories, while also promoting presidential aggrandizement. Moreover, the patterns of group effectiveness also display the effects of group capture. Deeply institutionalized party-group relationships, such as with labor unions and women’s organizations, gained less traction in their pressure campaigns than did relative newcomers, such as LGBTQ activists, suggesting that the dynamics of group capture reduce the leverage of even the most significant “anchoring” alliances.31 LGBTQ Rights The success of a coalition of LGBTQ rights groups in pushing for same-sex marriage and antidiscrimination laws since the turn of the millennium was matched only by their equally impressive impact on shifting public opinion in their favor. In 2001, 57  percent of the public opposed same-sex marriage while only 35  percent approved. By 2015, however, the numbers had reversed: 55 percent in favor; 39 percent opposed.32 One of the most significant factors in this turnaround was Obama’s public embrace of marriage equality in May  2012, reversing himself from his religiously inflected defense of heterosexual marriage offered in his 2008 campaign. Evidence suggests that Obama overcame his initial reluctance due to the sustained and multifaceted pressure tactics from a pro-LGBTQ coalition that had been decades in the making. Since the 1970s, politically active LGBTQ groups, such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the National Gay Rights Lobby, and the Human Rights Campaign, forged solidaristic links across the Democrats’ extended party network, including with the National Organization of Women (NOW); the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the National Education Association; the American Federation of Teachers; the American Civil Liberties Union; and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Some of these groups had active LGBTQ caucuses within their own organizations or had shared with gay rights groups a common enemy in the New Right.33

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However, despite the formation of these organizational links and the generally more supportive attitude of Democrats for LGBTQ rights, few party leaders were quick to step out on the issue. New Democrats largely counseled sidestepping controversial social issues. In 2000, Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore declined to support marriage equality. Subsequently, LGBTQ activists responded to Obama’s equivocations on the issue of marriage equality with disruptive protests and direct action, intensive lobbying efforts, and the withholding of campaign donations. These efforts saw executive, legislative, and judicial action across a number of policy issues, including passage of a new Hate Crimes Act, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, workplace protections for federal employees, and, finally, the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015.34 Environmentalism While Obama’s presidency was host to the hydraulic fracking revolution and the surge of domestic oil and gas production, environmentalists made significant material and symbolic gains during his tenure. Combating the threat of climate change and responding to specific environment-related health and safety issues rose to an unprecedented level of public attention and official recognition after 2008. From the outset Obama had reserved $90 billion of Troubled Asset Relief Program funds and $1.4 billion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to dedicate to projects designed to promote renewable energy sources and carbon capture and storage. Such efforts were complemented with informal deals brokered with the heads of the largest automobile companies, who agreed to nearly double fuel economy standards. However, due to fierce Republican resistance and the reluctance of Democrats from energy-rich states, Obama’s plan for a cap-and-trade antipollution bill failed to gain traction. Moreover, following the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil-rig spill in the Gulf of Mexico, administration officials stepped back from a bipartisan deal that would have opened up oil drilling in Alaska in exchange for GOP support on cap-and-trade.35 What many environmentalists saw as Obama’s foot-dragging and lackluster attention to changing the public discourse on climate change was countered by grassroots pressure from the group 350.org, which transformed the president’s pending decision to permit the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico into a

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litmus test for his commitment to prevent climate disasters. In August 2011, more than 1,200 protestors were arrested outside the White House. After a subsequent demonstration in November, Obama acquiesced to the pressure, announcing that he would delay his Keystone decision until after the 2012 elections. Subsequently, Obama used his second inaugural address to foreground the need to avoid the “devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms,” and he declared in his 2013 State of the Union address that “if Congress won’t act to protect future generations, I will.”36 His instruction to the Environmental Protection Agency to move forward on regulating the greenhouse gases that cause climate change took aim at reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants. In November 2015 Obama also announced his cancelation of the Keystone pipeline project. This was followed by the international summit of 195 United Nations countries in Paris, where Obama led the effort to pledge signatories to an aggressive schedule for reducing carbon emissions. Immigration Rights Hispanic, Latinx, and other pro-immigration groups had initially been quite skeptical of Obama and his administration’s vigorous deportation policy, which had earned him the unflattering moniker of “deporter-inchief” by the head of the Latino advocacy organization the National Council of La Raza. While the White House aimed at achieving comprehensive immigration reform (Latino voters displayed relatively lower levels of partisan loyalty and were viewed as key swing voters in battleground states), Obama expanded Bush-era enforcement efforts to gain credibility with conservative skeptics.37 Altogether, between 2009 and 2015, it is estimated that the Obama administration removed 2.5 million people from the United States. However, building on the unprecedented demonstrations for immigration reform in 2006–2007, the fomenting of an immigrants rights movement foregrounded the issue and stirred electoral concerns inside the Obama White House before the 2010 midterms.38 Tens of thousands of liberal activists rallied on the National Mall ahead of the elections, while inside Congress Democrats pressed their bill for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would have provided a conditional pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. All but three Republicans along with the

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support of five Democrats filibustered the bill, ensuring that any bipartisan “grand bargain” on immigration reform was dead. In response to congressional inaction and activist pressure, in June 2012 Obama issued his executive order for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which instructed the Department of Homeland Security to grant temporary reprieve to 1.5 million young immigrants other wise subject to deportation. Subsequently, in the 2012 elections, Latinos turned out in record numbers, giving Obama 71 percent of their vote (George W. Bush had carried a record 44  percent in 2004). In a survey of Latino voters, 58  percent reported that DACA had made them “more enthusiastic” about supporting Obama’s reelection.39 When a renewed effort for comprehensive immigration reform faltered in the House, Obama again deployed his executive power, this time rolling out the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program while also expanding the population covered by DACA. Together, Obama’s immigration initiatives promised to protect up to five million undocumented immigrants—just under half the nation’s total unauthorized population. African American Civil Rights Notwithstanding his historic election as the first African American president of the United States and the popular embrace of a foretold postracial era, the eruption of Black Lives Matter (BLM) in 2013 returned issues of racial discrimination and inequality to public consciousness. Linking together issues of poverty, unemployment, segregation, police brutality, and mass incarceration, BLM activists juxtaposed the elevated expectations of the Obama presidency with the persistent reality of racial stratification and oppression, criticizing conventional modes of political advocacy as selfevidently inadequate. Indeed, BLM’s radical politics often put its activists in opposition to traditional civil rights organizations such as the NAACP or Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.40 As BLM protests and urban unrest unfolded in response to viral videos of police shootings of unarmed black teenagers and men, Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder—the first African American to hold the position— responded with an unprecedented effort to reform the federal criminal justice system.41 Holder convened meetings with local families and community activists impacted by gun violence and police brutality, and, in a speech before the American Bar Association, outlined proposals to reduce prison

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sentencing, dismantle the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and increase the resources provided for criminal defendants’ legal counsel.42 While the White House convened a meeting with BLM activists in December 2014, Obama equivocated in responding to instances of police brutality and subsequent protests. However, by 2015 Obama appeared to shift, signaling his support by reframing the ongoing unrest in the legacy of the civil rights movement, linking racial disparities in the criminal justice system to “a legacy of hundreds of years of slavery.”43 Subsequently, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, and his second attorney general, Loretta Lynch, dismissed over 32,000 court cases and canceled $1.5 million in fines imposed on predominantly black and poor citizens, signally a significant shift from the toughon-crime rhetoric of Democratic leaders in the 1990s. Indeed, Obama became the first president in thirty-six years to oversee a drop in the federal prison population.44 Women’s Rights Despite the narrow defeat of the constitutional battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the early 1980s, women’s rights groups have since significantly curtailed sex discrimination through civil rights statutes and federal enforcement agencies. More generally, women activists and their allies brought women’s equality to the center of political debate, completely realigning the party system around the issue.45 Whereas back in the early 1970s a bipartisan consensus weakly supported the ERA (with Republicans slightly more favorable), by the 1980s the GOP had withdrawn it from their presidential platform. Meanwhile, Democrats had not only embraced but also foregrounded their programmatic support for women’s equal rights and reproductive freedom, and, in response to the efforts of NOW and the National Women’s Political Caucus, backed it up with the historic first of nominating Representative Geraldine Ferraro for vice president in 1984. The role of women and women’s issues continued to rise in the Democratic Party in the Obama years. The president fulfilled a major campaign promise by putting his very first presidential signature on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, facilitating equal-pay lawsuits. He also reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, revoked the prohibition on federal funding for NGOs providing family planning and abortion-related ser vices abroad,

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and issued an executive order creating the White House Council on Women and Girls as well as a task force to protect students from sexual assault. White House relations with some women’s groups became strained, however, during the health-care reform debate, specifically regarding federal support for abortion coverage. While organizations such as Planned Parenthood lobbied intensively for the passage of Obamacare, NOW condemned Obama for “negotiating health care on the backs of women” and leaving his commitment to women’s reproductive health “shaky at best.”46 Relations failed to improve when the activity of the terrorist network Boko Haram and the mosquito-borne Zika virus renewed the public debate about U.S. foreign aid for abortion ser vices for women in conflict zones in 2016. A coalition of women’s rights groups placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post calling on Obama to employ unilateral action to strike down the 1973 Helms amendment, which prevented any foreign aid from being used for family planning. The ad reflected the strained relationship underlying the debate: “We have grown weary of years of excuses and silence” on abortion rights. “Women would benefit greatly if President Obama took leadership to break barriers to abortion.”47 That leadership, however, was not forthcoming, and Obama left office with those barriers remaining in place. Labor Rights Finally, conventional wisdom on the decline of trade unionism notwithstanding, organized labor remains one of the most powerful constituency groups in the Democratic Party, whether measured by campaign contributions, grassroots mobilization, lobbying, and legislative influence.48 To be sure, union density figures paint a bleak picture of the fate of the house of labor since the early 1970s. Private-sector membership rates fell by nearly half between 1983 and 2016, with unions representing only 6.4  percent of workers in collective bargaining.49 At 35.2 percent, public-sector union density defied the downward trend, but showed limits to renewed growth.50 Indeed, some scholars have pointed to the new era as the “end of the working class” as such.51 However, while it is true that labor leaders, lobbyists, and activists faced increasing government and employer resistance and scored fewer victories since the end of the New Deal order, the claims about the end of the working class since the 1970s can be exaggerated. While resulting in fewer and fewer victories, working people orga nized union drives and affiliation votes at

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nearly the same rate from the 1950s to the 1980s. Moreover, large proportions of the workers attempting to form unions were women, young people, and people of color, accessing jobs that had long been closed to them in the 1960s by combining their struggle for labor rights with prior struggles over civil rights and women’s rights.52 Unions had initially expected great things from the Obama administration. On the one hand, for the first time since 1978, a Democratic president held a filibuster-proof majority in Congress and had vocally prioritized long-sought-after labor law reform, namely the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would have made it easier to overcome managerial resistance to organizing drives, increase the penalties for employer violations of labor law, and help reverse the organizational decline of the trade union movement. Some viewed the bill as the Wagner Act for the twenty-first century. On the other hand, organized labor had made a significant effort in Obama’s election, deploying some 250,000 volunteers in swing states. Obama received the votes of 69 percent of union households and carried white union men by eighteen points while losing white men in the broader population by sixteen points.53 And, indeed, the new president prioritized some of labor’s key long-standing legislative demands, including health-care reform.54 However, expending much of their initial efforts on passing the Affordable Care Act, the economic stimulus, and new financial regulations, labor and Obama found they were unable to overcome the historic stumbling block of labor law reform: the Senate filibuster. The surprising loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat to a Tea Party Republican in a January  2010 special election deprived the Democrats of their filibuster-proof majority, dooming the fate of the EFCA. The subsequent GOP sweep in the 2010 midterm elections definitively closed the short-lived window of opportunity for labor. As with the other policy areas listed above, in the face of congressional opposition Obama sought to placate organized labor through a variety of administrative mechanisms. After three failed legislative efforts to raise the federal minimum wage in his second term, Obama resorted to executive action, raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers in 2014. Moreover, he made pro-labor appointments to a number of agencies charged with monitoring and enforcing workplace standards and protections (including recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board), and he followed through with regulatory changes that added millions of workers to existing overtime pay protections.55

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While affecting a much larger constituency than just trade union workers, Obama also used the bully pulpit to reframe the national conversation around income inequality. In the wake of the Great Recession and the subsequent upsurge of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Obama visited Osawatomie, Kansas—the site of John Brown’s abolitionist forces in the Civil War and President Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech—to declare inequality to be “the defining challenge of our time.”56 While significantly constrained to translate the issue of inequality into positive policy change, Obama’s panoply of economic recovery efforts, including the rescue of General Motors, his signature health-care reform, as well as the repeal of the Bush tax cuts to high-income earners, all “substantially mitigated the effects of the Great Recession on poverty and inequality.”57 These efforts notwithstanding, unions’ frustrations with the Obama administration mounted over the president’s support for the free-trade TransPacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, extending new regulations regarding labor, the environment, and intellectual property. Public criticism of the deal from labor unions and environmentalists influenced presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, who had negotiated the deal as secretary of state, to come out against it. In response, Obama asserted, “Right now, I’m president, and I’m for it.”58 The number of union members in the U.S. economy declined nearly every year of the Obama presidency.59 As a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research found, where unions suffer, Democratic votes invariably decline.60 Despite their singular and historical role as the key group powering Democratic electoral victories, the Obama administration largely took labor unions for granted and did little to improve unions’ capacity to sustain themselves and grow in the future.

Promoting the President over the Party The foregoing list, intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive, conveys that few of these organized interests got every thing they wanted from Obama or the Democratic Party. Indeed, the political and policy results were quite mixed, due in part to competing group, presidential, and congressional priorities; limited administrative capacities; staunch Republican opposition; as well as the fiscal impact of the Great Recession. Many groups, especially in the BLM movement, found the president’s response to their

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demands too slow and ineffectual. Others, such as pro-immigrant groups, found Obama-era policies to be paradoxical and puzzling. The above list is not meant to imply that Obama’s unilateral action was qualitatively distinct from that of his predecessors. In fact, Obama issued fewer executive orders than previous presidents and generally did not make major advances in presidential control over bureaucratic operations.61 Rather, the fundamental point is that Obama’s attempts to harness the contentious politics of the advocacy party created dilemmas for groups and the president. Acting as the advocate-in-chief, Obama was compelled to advocate on behalf of Democratic groups, and when circumstances made legislative success difficult, both president and advocacy groups resorted to the administrative state as a solution. However, for the most part, groups had an uneven capacity to compel the advocate-in-chief into concrete policy action on their behalf. Those with deeply embedded relations with the Democratic Party, such as labor and women’s rights groups, found their tactics relatively ineffective. Those with relatively new institutional relationships, such as LGBTQ, immigration, and environmental groups, could employ more disruptive, movement-like tactics, which on balance resulted in greater political and policy action. Obama’s race and the explosion of the BLM movement made civil rights groups a partial exception to this pattern. However, the pattern displays how dynamics of group capture can mitigate group influence, despite their material and symbolic significance to the party. In a twist of irony, Obama’s initiatives as advocate-in-chief struck a vague family resemblance to several of the core reform proposals at the center of the New Politics movement decades earlier. As we have seen, those party entrepreneurs tried to build a new type of Democratic Party, one that was a continually active agent in public affairs, to mobilize citizens into politics in between election cycles. Moreover, New Politics reformers had been motivated by notions of participatory democracy and the desire to have greater access to and influence over the policy-making process. On the surface level, Obama’s Organizing for Action and the White House Office of Public Engagement seemed to embrace these goals. However, their intention to tame the contentious politics of the advocacy party and grant the president greater room for maneuver reversed the intention of the New Politics reformers: to constrain the independence of the president and make them an agent of the party rather than its principal. This was not a personal failing on the part of the president, let alone a revelation of disingenuous or duplicitous intentions. Rather, it reflected the

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political dilemmas that attend the advocacy party. The contentious groupparty relations at its center paradoxically encourage semiautonomous and relatively unaccountable forms of presidential power. By incentivizing promissory commitments on the part of an advocate-in-chief, the advocacy party increases group expectations for policy victories, through unilateral action if necessary. When those expectations inevitably run up against the hard realities of slow, fragmented governance, groups take their frustrations public to pressure their advocate-in-chief to deliver. The capacity to bring disruptive pressure to bear on the president, however, is a variable, not a constant. As group organizations mature and crystallize durable institutional connections to parties, their leverage over officeholders can diminish, effectively capturing groups in a coalition from which they cannot meaningfully threaten to exit. Thus, while groups have become more central to the Democratic Party, this does not translate into group dominance.

CONCLUSION

The Consequences of the Advocacy Party

So, who actually governs political parties? As this book has shown, the question is one whose answer is perpetually unsettled. As inherently contentious institutions, parties house dynamic relations between groups and officeholders, which have been central to the development of the modern Democratic Party. As Part I showed, rival claimants to representational legitimacy, party authority, and policy governance have had recurrent conflicts as they sought to remake the party in their own image since the late 1960s. In the process, the sustained conflict between reformers and counterreformers reshaped the party’s structure, procedures, and identity in enduring ways. The constraints imposed on New Deal liberals by the Democrats’ decentralized party structure were decidedly shattered by New Politics activists as they sought to transform the Democratic Party into a nationally integrated, participatory vehicle for sweeping programmatic reform. But their partial defeat at the hands of counter-reformers resulted in a hybrid party form—the advocacy party—that facilitated greater access for affiliated constituency groups but failed to redeem the efficacy or legitimacy of the formal party apparatus. As a result, while the political entrepreneurs of the New Politics movement had sought to empower the party base and constrain officeholders to the primacy of the party organization and its agenda, the advocacy party promotes—indeed, relies on—presidential independence and, more generally, its continual aggrandizement over partisan institutions. Aside from the causal narrative I have laid out and the empirical corrections I have made to the conventional wisdom regarding the history of Democratic Party reform, this book has also tested and found wanting the claims of scholars who see parties as controlled by interest groups. To be sure, as I have shown in Part II, interest groups and movement activists

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have gained considerably more influence over party politics since the McGovern-Fraser reforms. This was facilitated by those reforms themselves as well as changes to campaign finance laws, declining party organization and legitimacy, and the explosion of professional advocacy organ izations in and around Washington, D.C. Still, while party-group relations have become more deeply institutionalized in the modern advocacy party, the question of party governance has become all the more contentious. The group-control thesis elides the essential question by positing a smooth translation of group demands into officeholder agency. But, as Part II showed, politicians are loath to cede party control to groups and have undertaken significant efforts to co-opt, resist, and contain group demands. The question of who governs parties, as essential as it was to the politics of 1968 and thereafter, is just as essential now as both Republicans and Democrats strain in the vice grip of internal party strife concerning the precise locus of party authority and the exact content and trajectory of partisan identity. Notwithstanding their differences and nuances, both parties have been subjected to explosions of grassroots activism and insurgent politics. Tea Party activists helped propel the GOP further to the right after the election of Barack Obama, and then paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders challenged Democrats with a bold vision for the post-Obama era. The subsequent election, elevating Trump to the White House, sent shockwaves throughout the country, spurring the widespread mobilization of citizens, especially women, to orga nize in opposition to his administration and its policies. Some of the new activists, modeling their tactics on the success of the Tea Party movement, took aim at pressuring Democratic officeholders to obstruct Trump’s agenda, object to his politics, and offer a compelling progressive alternative to his vision to “Make America Great Again.”1 The upsurge of popu lar activism was channeled into the 2018 midterm elections, spiking voter turnout to the highest level in over a century, helping Democrats retake the House of Representatives in the biggest “blue wave” since Watergate, and inaugurating the most diverse Democratic caucus in history. The Republicans’ loss of full control of government also delivered a deathblow to the Trump administration’s legislative agenda and paved the way for his impeachment in December 2019. Debates about Democratic identity and direction continued to rage as the party approached the 2020 elections, with centrist and left candidates vying for the party leadership.

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The outcome cannot definitively answer who governs the Democratic Party. But it will offer its next leader the benefits and liabilities that are associated with taking on the role of advocate-in-chief. Taking a step back from the argument in this book about the rise and political dynamics of the advocacy party, I conclude by considering its consequences for three major developments reshaping modern American politics: the rise of executive-centered partisanship; the asymmetrical quality of partisan polarization; and rising inequality. While not the primary cause of any of these three phenomena, the advocacy party articulates with and reinforces their troubling dynamics. This perspective gives us a more nuanced and complex understanding of the advocacy party and its role in American political development.

The Advocacy Party, Executive-Centered Partisanship, and Presidential Unilateralism The advocacy party contributes to and relies on the development of what Sidney Milkis has called “executive-centered partisanship.”2 In the wake of the New Deal and the Great Society, presidents increasingly expanded their capacities to circumvent their party organizations in the pursuit of their policy agendas by tapping their directive powers over an expanding array of executive agencies and regulatory enforcement mechanisms. Since the presidencies of Reagan and George W. Bush, parties have increasingly centered on presidents and their ability to make use of the administrative state for mobilizing partisans. But as Daniel Galvin has argued, while both Republican and Democratic presidents since the 1930s have used the powers of the executive branch to escape the constraints of their party organizations, they diverge in their strategic orientation to their national party committees.3 As party leaders occupying the most powerful office in the world, presidents have the greatest potential to make durable changes to parties. Curiously, however, this potential has been realized in unequal ways going back to the 1950s. Republican presidents systematically make incremental investments in their national organizations, improving their capacities to recruit candidates and staff, develop human capital, and build robust state and local organizations. Democratic presidents, on the other hand, systematically exploit their party organizations for narrow, short-term benefits, harvesting what resources

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they can while leaving the national committees bereft of talent, institutional memory, or organizational capacity. Part of the explanation for this asymmetrical pattern, despite the shared incentives for all presidents to wriggle free of party constraints, is that historically, under the New Deal order, Republican presidents felt acutely the disadvantages of their party’s seemingly permanent minority status. Despite capturing the White House from 1953 to 1961 and from 1969 to 1977, those occupants had been what Stephen Skowronek calls “preemptive presidents,” who steered their opposition party into a largely accommodating position in relation to the prevailing political regime.4 And these brief Republican presidencies were the exception to the rule. Republicans remained the minority party in Congress throughout (with the brief exceptions of 1947–1949 and 1955–1957) and accrued a lower identification in the electorate than did the Democrats. The need to dig the party out from this state of affairs and establish partisan control of the policy agenda incentivized the GOP leadership to make sustained, incremental investments in their parties. Democrats, firm in their belief of the durability of the New Deal order and their partisan majorities, made no similar investments and instead preyed on their party organizations. However compelling this explanation may be for the past, its explanatory power recedes as we approach the present, an era that has been defined by the unusual parity of partisan competitiveness.5 Despite having clearly lost their lock on national power, Democratic presidents have not responded by borrowing from the Republicans’ party-building playbook. On the contrary, what little sustained investment there has been in rebuilding Democratic Party organization since the 1990s has been sporadic and ineffective.6 The bitter fruits of this lackluster effort resulted in across-the-board declines in Democratic strength at all levels of government by the end of the 2016 elections. Beyond presidents’ perceptions of their parties’ competitive status, the rise of the advocacy party has reshaped the incentives to make sustained investments in party infrastructure. As we have seen, while Obama benefited from and endorsed Howard Dean’s fifty-state strategy during his 2008 campaign, as president he opted instead to convert his impressive campaign apparatus into a personal advocacy organization, formally independent from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), for the purposes of promoting his policy agenda and securing his own reelection. This remained the case even after the “shellacking” Obama considered the Democrats to have received in

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the 2010 midterm elections. As Milkis and York observe, “The decision to decouple [Organizing for America] from the DNC was an admission that the sort of community organizing Obama had learned in Chicago, put to use in his first campaign, and reprised for his reelection bid, was not within the core competencies of a national party committee.”7 Instead of reassessing the party’s competitive standing and making renewed commitments to rebuilding state and local parties, Obama took the route of the administrative presidency to secure the support of key Democratic groups, which were applying increasing pressure on the president to make good on his political and policy commitments. In response, and in the face of the new partisan constraints on his legislative agenda, the president galvanized public support, asserting that “where Congress won’t act, I will.”8 His subsequent “We Can’t Wait” campaign circumvented congressional inaction by pressing ahead with programmatic changes through the executive agencies under his direct control. While this decision was undoubtedly motivated by the available means to act as a prime mover in American politics, publicly the president justified his action as a necessary tactic for making good on his commitments to promote the public interest.9 Less than a year later, Obama’s presidential initiatives listed over forty-five directives, ranging across a wide spectrum of policy making, but focused largely on health care, labor law, and environmental protection, among others.10 As we saw in the last chapter, many of these initiatives placated the demands of key Democratic groups. All of this suggests that, despite the change in the competitive standing of the Democratic Party, path-dependent trends in the development of its advocacy party structure may diminish both the need and the ability of presidents to redirect resources toward improving the party organization. Instead, as an incentive structure that compels presidents toward a leadership role as an advocate-in-chief, the modern Democratic Party “combines executive prerogative, party politics, and social movement activism” into a new durable pattern.11 The advocacy party, then, institutionalizes deeper, mutually dependent relations between groups and politicians while also aiding and abetting the growth of executive power.

The Advocacy Party and Asymmetric Polarization Our current age of polarization has witnessed deepening partisan differences across a number of mea sur able dimensions, including ways of

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campaigning, governing, legislating, and deciding court cases.12 Though scholars agree that the voters are now better “sorted” into relatively homogeneous camps of liberals and conservatives, they continue to be divided on just how far these patterns of polarization extend down from the elite level to regular voters and everyday members of the public.13 But what nearly all agree about is the asymmetry of partisan polarization. As Matt Grossman and David Hopkins amply demonstrate, multiple measures make it quite evident that Republicans have moved dramatically further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left.14 This has occurred despite the common pressures and systemic changes imposed on both parties over the last fifty years. This leaves us with a puzzle about precisely what makes the parties so different. The account offered in this book provides us with some analytical clarity not only about how the parties differ from one another, but also about why their asymmetrical pattern of polarized politics is likely to continue. Republicans have undergone their own experience of reform since the late 1960s. While the details of the GOP’s internal decision-making process have yet to be fully fleshed out, the Republican Party followed the Democrats in adopting binding primary elections as their method of selecting their presidential nominees. Part of the explanation has to do with Democratic state legislatures changing their presidential primary laws, effectively “reforming” the Republican parties as well.15 Other procedural reforms, akin to those in the Democratic Party, were also pursued in two different Republican Party reform commissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, because of the absence of an organized demand for party reform inside the party, as well as their already well-codified party statutes, procedural changes were modest. Reforms that smacked of further empowering the Republican National Committee (RNC) were defeated.16 In short, the Republicans’ experience proceeded as “reform without revolution.”17 Instead, the party reforms that did take place within the GOP were programmatic and organizational rather than procedural. As Philip Klinkner has shown, while Democrats continued to tinker with procedural changes long after the initial McGovern-Fraser reforms, RNC chairs systematically sought to renew their party by developing the nuts-and-bolts capacities of the state, local, and national organizations to recruit candidates, train staff, manage voter data files, and generally supply candidates with ser vices to help them win office.18 When in control of the White House, these efforts were sustained by Republican presidents.19

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However, the rise of the Republicans’ ser vice party in the late 1960s, while helpful in remaking the GOP into a nationally competitive party, converged with the rise of the New Right and facilitated their entrance and eventual domination of the Republican Party. In the aftermath of the devasting Goldwater candidacy in 1964, RNC leadership under the sway of chairman Ray Bliss embraced the path of organizational renewal as a means to reunify the party and quell calls for recriminations and even purges. The grassroots conservatives backing Barry Goldwater’s unlikely nomination had themselves already taken advantage of the party-building initiatives undertaken by President Eisenhower’s RNC chair, Meade Alcorn, to encourage the growth of moderate Republicanism in the South.20 Likewise, while Bliss built out the organizational capacity of the party, New Right conservatives staffed its bodies, filled in their program, and generally redirected the development of Republican politics thereafter.21 From this point of divergence, Republican and Democratic parties followed distinct pathways to the present, culminating in two qualitatively different kinds of parties with very different political orientations and ideological identities. On the one hand, as this book has shown, the Democrats followed a twisted path of party reform, which left the party organizationally hollow and dependent on the power of organized groups. By the late 1970s the party had become an advocacy party, principally oriented to groups’ political and policy demands. On the other hand, Republicans followed a path of party renewal focused on organizational development, which intersected with the ideological movement of the New Right. Subsequently, this developmental trajectory integrated the invigorated religious right on the basis of conservative ideology.22 Rather than an advocacy party, the Republicans became a “vehicle of a conservative ideological movement.”23 Accordingly, as a “movement party,” the GOP couches its policy goals within an explicitly conservative set of principles, which promotes a politics of purity and ideological contestation, propelling the party to the right. The organizational and ideological developments underpinning the parties’ distinct forms suggest that their asymmetric pattern of polarization is likely to remain in place for some time. Indeed, even the logic of electoral competitiveness seems to be a diminishing influence on party development under these conditions. For instance, following their defeat in the 2012 presidential election, the RNC commissioned an official report to examine the future of the party’s national competitiveness. Their assessment was candid:

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“The GOP today is a tale of two parties. One of them, the gubernatorial wing, is growing and successful. The other, the federal wing, is increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.”24 The report diagnosed the looming crisis as the result of having “remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next.”25 Specifically, without courting Democratic-leaning groups, such as young people, minorities, and women, the Republicans would be stuck with a shrinking share of the electorate, effectively locking themselves out of the White House. The report recommended rebranding the party’s image to make it attractive to and inclusive of those groups. Of course, the path charted by the Growth and Opportunity Project report was demolished during the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, who, rather than courting nontraditional Republican voters, doubled down on exclusionary rhetoric and polarizing politics, which the report identified as significant electoral liabilities. While Trump’s Electoral College victory was made possible by flipping several traditionally Democratic states, this did not amount to a durable broadening of the Republican coalition. As the 2018 midterms suggest, the Trump presidency may in fact be costing the party its grasp on middle-class suburbs. That the GOP did not take its own advice in the wake of 2012 is a testament to the lasting significance of past nominating reforms as well as the enduring institutional and ideological roots of asymmetric polarization. On the other side of the aisle, the Democrats’ advocacy party remains firmly in place, despite the rise of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other high-profile progressives who pose an explicit challenge to the style and content of Bill Clinton–era Third Wayism. Indeed, while articulating their politics in a more programmatic mold, the new progressives simultaneously followed in the footsteps charted by Obama’s embrace of advocacy party politics while also building their candidacies on the dilemmas and perceived failures that resulted from his role as advocate-in-chief (which they in turn would likely confront should they assume the mantle). Sanders’s 2016 primary insurgency was powered by the small-dollar donation networks pioneered by groups like MoveOn.org, and he quickly spun off his own advocacy organization, Our Revolution, once his formal campaign concluded. Our Revolution took its place among the new generation of progressive advocacy organizations, such as Run for Something, Brand New

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Congress, Swing Left, Justice Democrats, and the late Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America, whose dues-paying membership mushroomed from three thousand to over thirty thousand during and after 2016. While the new advocates concentrated most of their energy on state and local elections, they were critical in supporting some of the longshot primary campaigns that brought new members to Congress, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib. It appears that all internal party resistance to the logic of the advocacy party has collapsed in the post-Obama era. Hillary Clinton’s efforts to distance herself publicly from the New Democratic themes and policies of the 1990s increased in the course of the 2016 nominating contest. While this may have been motivated in part by the competition of Sanders to her left, Clinton had already positioned herself as the advocate-in-chief well before Sanders’s emergence as a real contender. She announced her candidacy for president with a video tweet featuring a “conspicuous variety of racial, sexual, and generational identities,” vowing to “advocate policies benefiting the kinds of people pictured in the video.”26 The bitter nominating contest that followed ended with Clinton’s victory, but it made major policy and political concessions to the Sanders campaign to influence the platform and call for a new reform commission concerning the nominating process. A key upshot of the postelection Unity Reform Commission was to further curtail the autonomy and influence of Democratic superdelegates—never very power ful to begin with.27 The defenses of superdelegates that were offered, concerning their professional credentials and experience in vetting presidential candidates, failed to rally public support. The logic of an open nominating process governed by the will of primary voters, movement activists, and Democratically aligned constituency groups has become the new common sense. To be sure, the rise of the new progressives has significantly shifted the policy debate inside the Democratic Party. Large-scale proposals such as Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, wealth taxes, free college, and tighter regulation of Wall Street and Silicon Valley have all moved from the fringes to the center of the conversation and begun to redefine the party’s identity, despite the mixed evidence of their palatability to the median voter or even the median Democrat. At the same time, however, underlying this debate is the common referent of who benefits. Indeed, while contenders for party leadership diverge over which policy is best, they agree—in fact, assume—that the party advocates on behalf of the groups that compose the

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coalition. The current debate centers on which policies accomplish the goals of the advocacy party.

Advocacy Party Politics and Representational Inequality In addition to deepening polarization, the last several generations have also witnessed the astronomical rise of income and wealth inequality, reaching levels not seen since the 1920s. The New Gilded Age has challenged all consolidated democracies, but appears to be the most pronounced in the United States.28 The new American inequality, however, is complex, as its rise has coincided with the decline of most de jure forms of discrimination since the late 1960s. The conjunction of expanding rights and declining equality thus confronts citizens and policy makers with a puzzle. The advocacy party intersects with these paradoxical trends in complex ways. On the one hand, there can be little doubt that the Democratic Party of the early twenty-first century is a much more equal party than the Democratic Party of 1968. The institutional changes wrought by the contentious forces of reform and counter-reform alongside the proliferation of advocacy organizations have significantly diversified the Democratic coalition and solidified its claim to adequately represent the public. From a party that the McGovern-Fraser Commission criticized in 1970 as “predominately white, male, middle-aged, and at least middle class,” Democrats now claim to represent the poor, workers, women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, the young, and many others.29 Beyond the normative good that comes from having a greater range of identities and voices influencing the Democratic Party and American politics more broadly, scholars have demonstrated Democratic administrations’ lower rates of income inequality and how they use social policy to redistribute resources to their constituents at the bottom half of the income ladder.30 However, on the other hand, political participation in all its varied forms carries costs. Rising levels of inequality therefore portend increasing political forms of inequality as well. Despite the significant advances of diversified representation, scholars of social movements and interest-group politics register considerable skepticism regarding the abilities of advocacy organizations to act as vehicles for mitigating participatory and representational inequality. As a core component of the advocacy party, then, the unequal

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Table 4. Organized Interests in Washington, D.C. (in Percentages) Corporations Trade and other business associations Occupational associations Unions Education Health Social welfare and poor Identity groups Public interest State and local governments Foreign Other Don’t know Total

36.6 10.2 5.4 0.7 5.7 5.2 1.1 3.6 4.4 12.3 6.2 7.9 0.7 100

Source: Kay Lehman Schlozman, Henry E. Brady, and Sidney Verba, Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the People’s Voice in the New Gilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 156.

terrain of the advocacy universe is likely to affect the party’s politics and its identity, as well as its future development. On the whole, the interest-group universe skews toward the powerful and privileged. Recent research has verified the wisdom of E.  E. Schattschneider’s well-known aphorism that “the flaw in the pluralist heaven [of group politics] is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.”31 Or, as a team of scholars has rephrased it, when it comes to expressing political voice, “some people have a megaphone while others speak in a whisper.”32 Generally, as evident in Table 4, the terrain of the interestgroup universe is populated by a large plurality of organizations that work on behalf of corporations and trade and business associations. This comes as little surprise. Organization and political engagement require resources, especially money. Thus, organized political activity, such as lobbying, research, and campaigning, tracks with wealth and income. While this should not be interpreted to suggest that corporations get every thing they want, it does mean that those without substantial resources, or who advocate for diffuse public interests, encounter significant barriers to entry.33 However, barriers to mobilization and organization notwithstanding, the interest-group universe does have a significant number of individual and collective actors working on behalf of the public interest and specific

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disadvantaged groups. Whether a lasting legacy of past social movements, the work of ambitious legal activists and lawyers, or the result of civically active constituencies, the “advocacy explosion” since the late 1960s has seen the rise of a sprawling industry of D.C.-based organizations claiming to represent a diverse number of identity and issue constituencies.34 While greatly overshadowed by the depth of corporate pockets, these advocacy groups are rich in resources, policy expertise, and media communications. Most are not membership-based organizations.35 Yet, despite their top-heavy character, some advocates strike stunning impact on the political system, typically by outcompeting their rivals for institutional recognition as legitimate representatives and spokespersons.36 This process of formal recognition, legitimation, and integration of advocacy organization leaders into positions of influence in political and policy-making channels is facilitated in part by the advocacy party. Political entrepreneurs seeking to monopolize an issue niche and influence policy making are met halfway by ambitious office seekers looking for group support. And although the alliances forged in the advocacy party may in fact result in mutually beneficial relations, including policy victories that shower benefits on the broad constituencies that advocates claim to represent, the advocacy party’s recognition of one rather than another representative might affect who is represented, the quality of that representation, and the extent of the distribution of benefits. Moreover, the advocacy party is likely to reproduce, rather than compensate for, the representational biases and blind spots that inhere in the world of organized politics. For instance, trade unions, which were once powerful voices for redistributive policies, have relatively declined, especially in the private sector, leading some observers to cast doubt on their continuing political clout in the political system.37 Others have emphasized how the relatively new public interest and citizen groups that have emerged since the late 1960s pursue a distinctly middle-class, quality-of-life range of issues that do not redound much to the benefit of poorer and working-class people.38 Even when advocacy organizations do target their efforts on helping the most disadvantaged, they may be constrained by limited resources and the complexities of the intersecting forms of inequality they attempt to remedy.39 As a type of political organization that depends heavily on the resources that advocates can supply, the advocacy party reflects and reinforces these inequalities in representation. The result is what Lawrence Jacobs calls “the

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tiering of access and influence,” as “not all interests are represented, and presidents do not treat equally those that are.”40 While procedural barriers to participation and representation were overthrown by the McGovernFraser reformers, openness, it seems, has its own systematic silences. The rising level of income inequality is likely to worsen participatory inequality and the representational distortions that result.

Conclusion As this discussion makes clear, for all the positive changes that have come with the rise of the advocacy party, it has reinforced some of the most problematic developments in modern American politics. From executive aggrandizement and presidential domination over party to deepening polarization and rising inequality, the advocacy party provides little in the way of countervailing power to these troubling trends, and in fact does much to exacerbate them. This has not gone unnoticed by political scientists and other observers of American politics, who have advanced new versions of old criticisms of the modern party system and its effects on the quality of American democracy. The 2016 insurgencies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders resulted in renewed skepticism regarding the use of democratic elections to pick the party nominees. Echoing some of the voices heard in the 1970s era of party reform, these critics argue that the logic of party democracy is double-sided: on the one hand, it provides party institutions with legitimacy because decisions are made by the rank-and-file voters; on the other hand, it undermines party legitimacy because it may compromise their ability to win elections. This is because party democracy takes the decision-making power out of the hands of those best positioned to pick an electable candidate: official party leaders. Insurgents such as Trump and Sanders, moreover, cast additional doubt on the legitimacy of the party institution and its leadership as they invade the party through the primaries and try to capture the nomination. And, in recalling Schattschneider, these critics remind us that without parties there is unlikely to be any democracy.41 Other voices from within the academic community express even greater criticism of the democratizing party reforms of the McGovern-Fraser era, which, they argue, embraced the ill-conceived notion that increasing popular control over politicians enhances accountability. They assert that this has

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produced the opposite: increasing voter disaffection, diluting party authority, and increasing the capacity of citizens to make uninformed policy decisions. The remedy, we are told, requires reversing these democratizing trends and restoring strong parties.42 However, reversing these trends may be quite difficult. The advocacy party was long in the making and its construction followed no one’s precise design. It is the result of a confluence of structural, agential, and contingent factors, many of which are deeply engrained in the modern political landscape. That said, when compared to the troubling developments that stem from executive aggrandizement, presidential unilateralism, rising inequality, and the skew of the advocacy universe, parties—while still durable institutions—are the most mutable. Indeed, flexibility has been the key strength of America’s weak parties and a critical element in the endurance of the two parties individually and as a system since the Civil War. Their permeability has channeled protest movements, interest groups, and insurgents into one of the existing parties rather than into third or fourth parties. As this history and the story recounted in this book show, parties can be transformed, perhaps not always according to the exact design of any particular set of political entrepreneurs, but transformed nonetheless. The transformation of both of America’s political parties illuminates how we traveled to the present. Their further transformation will carry us into the future.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Michael Kazin, “Trump and American Popu lism,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2016). 2. For a small sample, see Bernie Sanders, “Where Democrats Go from Here,” New York Times, November  11, 2016; Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, November  18, 2016; Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, “Back to the Center, Democrats,” New York Times, July  6, 2017; Steve Phillips, “The Democratic Party’s Billion-Dollar Mistake,” New York Times, July 20, 2017; Lanny Davis, The Unmaking of the President 2016: How FBI Director James Comey Cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency (New York: Scribner, 2017); Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). 3. John Haltiwanger, “Bernie Sanders Is the Most Popu lar Politician, Even as Some Blame Him for Clinton’s Loss,” Newsweek, July 25, 2017. 4. Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Kathleen Bawn, Martin Cohen, David Karol, Seth Masket, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, “A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands, and Nominations in American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 10 (2012). On state parties and nonpresidential elections, see Hans J. G. Hassell, The Party’s Primary: Control of Congressional Nominations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 5. See Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, “Party Versus Faction in the Reformed Presidential Nominating System,” PS: Political Science and Politics (October 2016). 6. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). 7. John H. Aldrich, Why Parties? A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 8. Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 9. Cedric de Leon, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tugal, eds., Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Leslie McCall and Ann Shola Orloff, “The Multidimensional Politics of Inequality: Taking Stock of Identity Politics in the US Presidential Election of 2016,” British Journal of Sociology 86 (2017). 10. Cohen et al., Party Decides; Bawn et al., “Theory of Political Parties”; David Karol, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (New York: Cambridge

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University Press, 2009); Christopher Baylor, First to the Party: The Group Origins of Political Transformation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 11. Gregory Koger, Seth Masket, and Han Noel, “Partisan Webs: Information Exchange and Party Networks,” British Journal of Political Science 39 (2009); Gregory Koger, Seth Masket, and Hans Noel, “Cooperative Party Factions in American Politics,” American Politics Research 38 (2010); and Karol, Party Position Change. 12. This theory draws on the work of scholars of contentious politics as well as historical institutionalists working in the American political development tradition. For useful overviews, see Sidney Tarrow, “Contentious Politics,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); and Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, In Search of American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13. Richard E. Fenno Jr., Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (New York: Longman, 1978); David R. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974); Aldrich, Why Parties? 14. Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 15. Bruce Miroff, “Movement Activists and Partisan Insurgents,” Studies in American Political Development 21 (2007). 16. Hannah F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 17. E. E. Schattschneider, Party Government (1942; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004), 1. See also American Political Science Association Committee on Political Parties, Toward a More Responsible Two Party System: A Report (New York: Rinehart, 1950). 18. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1962); Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). 19. McGee Young, Developing Interests: Organizational Change and the Politics of Advocacy (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2010). 20. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, “Prophets of Party in American Political History,” Forum 15 (2017). 21. Boris Heersink, “Politicians, Interest Groups, and the Next Steps in the Study of American Political Parties as Institutions,” Journal of Politics 80 (2018): e95. 22. For example, see Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Boris Heersink, “Party Brands and the Democratic and Republican National Committees, 1952–1976,” Studies in American Political Development 32 (2018). 23. The literature on the Republican Party’s transformation is vast and growing. Key texts include Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the 1960s: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008); Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins

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of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Geoffrey Kabaser vice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 24. On party asymmetry, see Nolan McCarty, Keith  T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); and Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). On the layering of new conflicts over the economic cleavage of the New Deal alignment, see Geoffrey  C. Layman and Thomas M. Carsey, “Party Polarization and ‘Conflict Extension’ in the American Electorate,” American Journal of Political Science 46 (2002); and Geoffrey  C. Layman, Thomas M. Carsey, John C. Green, and Richard Herrera, “Activists and Conflict Extension in American Party Politics,” American Political Science Review 104 (2010). 25. Sam Rosenfeld, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics; Baylor, First to the Party. 26. Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen, Process-Tracing Methods: Foundations and Guidelines (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019). 27. This specific formulation of political entrepreneurialism is from John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). See also Adam D. Sheingate, “Political Entrepreneurship, Institutional Change, and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 17 (2003). 28. John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 29. Julia R. Azari, Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 30. David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 31. In American political culture, “smoke-filled backrooms” refer to the secret meetings of powerbrokers behind closed doors, often for the purpose of brokering over a nominee for public office. 32. Daniel J. Galvin, “Political Parties in American Politics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism, ed. Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia  G. Falleti, and Adam Sheingate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 33. But see Adam Hilton, “The Politics Insurgents Make: Reconstructive Reformers in US and UK Postwar Party Development,” Polity 51 (2019). 34. See in par ticu lar the exhaustive accounts in Byron E. Shafer, Quiet Revolution: The Strug gle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics (New York: Russell Sage, 1983); and William Crotty, Decision for the Democrats: Reforming the Party Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 35. Shafer’s Quiet Revolution is characteristic in this regard, but see also Austin Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction: Party Reform in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Jeane Kirkpatrick, The New Presidential Elite: Men and Women in National Politics (New York: Russell Sage, 1976); Jeane Kirkpatrick, Dismantling the Parties: Reflections on Party Reform and Party Decomposition (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute

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Notes to Pages 12–15

Press, 1978); Nelson Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); James  W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 86–94. For notable exceptions to this trend, see Crotty, Decision for the Democrats; William Crotty, Party Reform (New York: Longman, 1983); and Philip A. Klinkner, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956–1993 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 36. Shafer, Quiet Revolution; Kirkpatrick, New Presidential Elite; Kirkpatrick, Dismantling the Parties; Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction; Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform; and Ceaser, Presidential Selection. 37. Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform, 76–77. 38. See Gary D. Wekkin, “National-State Relations: The Democrats’ New Federal Structure,” Political Science Quarterly 99 (1984); Leon D. Epstein, Political Parties in the American Mold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 209; and Jaime Sánches, “Revisiting McGovern-Fraser: Party Nationalization and the Rhetoric of Reform,” Journal of Policy History 32 (2020). 39. To his credit, James Ceaser, who generally characterizes McGovern-Fraser as antiparty, grants that one could see the reforms as strengthening the party if one focuses on the assertion of national party authority over its state affiliates. However, he incorrectly asserts that “the reformers in the Democratic Party have used this power . . . to weaken the influence of existing state organizations and have made no effective provision for their replacement either by state organizations of a different sort or by a national organization” (Ceaser, Presidential Selection, 291). As I will show below, proposals for replacement organizations of a different type were indeed provided but subsequently defeated by counter-reformers. 40. For scholarship that does integrate the post-1972 phase of party reform, see Crotty, Decision for the Democrats; Klinkner, Losing Parties; and Rosenfeld, Polarizers. 41. Amel Ahmed, “Reading History Forward: The Origins of Electoral Systems in European Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies 43 (2010). 42. See Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Hugh Heclo, “Sixties Civics,” in The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); Susan M. Hartmann, “Liberal Feminism and the Reshaping of the New Deal Order,” in Making Sense of American Liberalism, ed. Jonathan Bell and Timothy Stanley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); and Claus Offe, “Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics: Social Movements Since the 1960s,” in Challenging Boundaries of the Political: Essays on the Evolving Balance Between the State and Society, Public and Private in Europe, ed. Charles Maier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 43. Milkis, President and the Parties. 44. Milkis, President and the Parties. 45. James O’Hara, quoted in Alan L. Otten, “Charter,” Wall Street Journal, June 1, 1972. 46. Rosenfeld, Polarizers, 142. 47. David Plotke, “Party Reform as Failed Democratic Renewal in the United States, 1968–1972,” Studies in American Political Development 10 (1996): 252–253. 48. Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, “Political Development and Contemporary American Politics,” in The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of

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Conservatism, ed. Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 286. 49. For a different notion of “advocacy party,” see John  M. Bruce, John  A. Clark, and John H. Kessel, “Advocacy Politics in Presidential Parties,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991). 50. For a review of this scholarly perspective and an endorsement, see Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics. 51. See Hans Noel, Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Verlan Lewis, Ideas of Power: The Politics of American Party Ideology Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 52. For overviews of interest groups and advocacy organ izations, see Marie Hojnacki, David Kimball, Frank  R. Baumgartner, Jeffrey  M. Berry, and Beth  L. Leech, “Studying Orga nizational Advocacy and Inf luence: Reexamining Interest Group Research,” Annual Review of Politi cal Science 15 (2012); and Kenneth  T. Andrews and Bob Edwards, “Advocacy Organ izations in the US Political Pro cess,” Annual Review of Sociology 30 (2004). I use the terms interest groups and advocacy organizations synonymously throughout this book. 53. Of course, one could argue that the Republican Party is also an advocacy party because it advocates on behalf of its affiliated groups, such as the National Rifle Association or the Christian Coalition, which includes individual citizens who feel themselves to be socially or politically marginalized. However, there are two problems with this claim. First, while the GOP has been subject to the same system-level changes as the Democrats—the relative decline of orga nizational capacity and legitimacy, changes to campaign finance laws, as well as the rise of well-resourced advocacy networks—the parties responded to these changes in very different ways, depending in part on their competitive standing with the electorate, their in-house orga nizational resources, their control of government, and the actions and ideas of the political entrepreneurs in their midst. As a result, the parties are not mirror images of each other. Second, given the Republicans’ overtly ideological nature, I am persuaded by scholars who have argued that the modern GOP is best understood as a “movement party.” The Democrats, by contrast, do not unite their coalition around an explicit commitment to liberalism or even progressivism. While a thorough analysis of the Republicans’ transformation falls outside the scope of this book (but see the Conclusion), it is my hope that my analysis of the Democrats’ transformation into an advocacy party will be helpful in sorting out the precise nature of the parties’ asymmetries. For a developmental perspective on party asymmetry, see Daniel J. Galvin, Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Klinkner, Losing Parties. For the GOP’s “movement party” character, see Milkis and Tichenor, Reform and Rivalry; Rosenfeld, Polarizers; and Kabaser vice, Rule and Ruin. 54. See Laura Montanaro, “The Democratic Legitimacy of Self-Appointed Representatives,” Journal of Politics 74 (2012); and Matt Grossman, The Not-So-Special Interests: Interest Groups, Public Representation, and American Governance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 55. Matthew Dean Hindman, Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens: Neoliberalism, Postpluralism, and LGBT Organizations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

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56. Jane Mansbridge, “A ‘Selection Model’ of Political Representation,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (2009). 57. Richard M. Skinner, More Than Money: Interest Group Action in Congressional Elections (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 58. Alan Ware, The Breakdown of Democratic Party Organization, 1940–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); David  R. Mayhew, Placing Parties in American Politics: Organization, Electoral Settings, and Government Activity in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 59. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, “The Hollow Parties,” in Can Amer ica Govern Itself? ed. Frances E. Lee and Nolan McCarty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Schlozman and Rosenfeld, “Party Blobs and Partisan Visions: Making Sense of Our Hollow Parties,” in State of the Parties 2018: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Political Parties, ed. John C. Green, Daniel J. Coffey, and David B. Cohen (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). 60. James Q. Wilson, The Amateur Democrat: Club Politics in Three Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 61. On the advocacy explosion, see Jeffrey M. Berry and Clyde Wilcox, The Interest Group Society (New York: Routledge, 2018); Jeffrey M. Berry, The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999); and Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civil Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). 62. Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties. 63. Daniel J. Galvin, “The Dynamics of Presidential Policy Choice and Promotion,” in Building Coalitions, Making Policy: The Politics of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Presidencies, ed. Martin A. Levin, Daniel DiSalvo, and Martin M. Shapiro (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 64. Katherine Krimmel, “The Efficiencies and Pathologies of Special Interest Partisanship,” Studies in American Political Development 31 (2017). 65. Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties; Paul Frymer, Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in Amer ica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 66. Frymer, Uneasy Alliances. 67. Bawn et al., “Theory of Political Parties,” 575. 68. Carmines and Stimson, Issue Evolution; de Leon, Desai, and Tugal, Building Blocs; Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); John R. Zaller, The Nature of Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 69. Milkis, President and the Parties; Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 70. Heersink, “Politicians, Interest Groups, and Next Steps,” e93. See also Daniel  J. Tichenor, “The Presidency and Interest Groups: Allies, Adversaries, and Policy Leadership,” in The Presidency and the Political System, ed. Michael Nelson (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press, 2018). 71. Bawn et al., “Theory of Political Parties,” 575.

Notes to Pages 25–31

213

Chapter 1 1. Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 17. 2. William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 171. 3. Leuchtenburg, White House Looks South, 189. See also Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 4. V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949; Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 394. 5. Nicol Rae, “Be Careful What You Wish For: The Rise of Responsible Parties in American National Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 176. 6. Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, trans. Barbara North and Robert North (London: Methuen, 1964), xxvi; John A. Aldrich, Why Parties? A Second Look (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 70–129. 7. Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 67–70. 8. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2009). 9. Shefter, Political Parties and the State, 6–7. 10. Shefter, Political Parties and the State, 67–70; Aldrich, Why Parties?, 111–129. 11. Patronage was, of course, not the only source of party finances. Big-ticket financial contributors, always impor tant for both major parties in America, became more so as patronage became less of a viable resource for party officials in the post–World War II period. See, for example, Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 12. On ideology in the American party system, see John Gerring, Party Ideologies in Amer ica, 1828–1996 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a rich, thick description of party activist-voter linkages in the mid-nineteenth century, see Richard Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 24. 14. Cornelius P. Cotter and Bernard C. Hennessy, Politics Without Power: The National Party Committees (New York: Atherton Press, 1964), vi. 15. E.  E. Schattschneider, Party Government (1942; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004), 164. 16. Leon D. Epstein, Political Parties in the American Mold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 89. 17. James  W. Davis, National Conventions in an Age of Party Reform (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 33. See also Epstein, Political Parties in the American Mold, 91. 18. David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 19. Michael Goldfield, “Worker Insurgency, Radical Organization, and New Deal Labor Legislation,” American Political Science Review 83 (1989); William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin

214

Notes to Pages 31–34

D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (1963; New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); Steve Fraser, “The ‘Labor Question,’ ” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Why Americans Still Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want It That Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1995), 201–226. 20. Andrew Battista, The Revival of Labor Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 9–10. 21. Robert  H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order. 22. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), 52. 23. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, 84. 24. J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 69–70. 25. Alan Draper, A Rope of Sand: The AFL- CIO Committee on Political Education, 1955– 1967 (New York: Praeger, 1989). 26. Timothy J. Minchin, Labor Under Fire: A History of the AFL- CIO Since 1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 7; Margaret Weir, “ ‘Beyond the Plant Gates’: Postwar Labor and the Orga nizational Substructure of Liberalism,” Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Working Paper 194-09, October  2009, available at www.irle .berkeley.edu. 27. Lane Kirkland, “Labor in Partisan Politics,” September 29, 1982, Committee on Political Education Files (unprocessed), AFL-CIO Records, George Meany Memorial Archives, University of Maryland, Silver Springs, MD. 28. Kirkland, “Labor in Partisan Politics” (emphasis added). 29. David R. Mayhew, Placing Parties in American Politics: Organization, Electoral Settings, and Government Activity in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 30. Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 153, 175; Epstein, Political Parties in the American Mold, 135; Alan DiGaetano, “Urban Political Reform: Did It Kill the Machine?,” Journal of Urban History 18 (1991). 31. Davis, National Conventions, 4. 32. Shefter, Political Parties and the State, 169–190. 33. Jessica Trounstine, Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 34. Epstein, Political Parties in the American Mold, 139. 35. Mayhew, Placing Parties in American Politics, 324. 36. Lyle  W. Dorsett, Franklin  D. Roosevelt and the City Bosses (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977), 113. 37. Harvey Boulay and Alan DiGaetano, “Why Did Political Machines Disappear?,” Journal of Urban History 12 (1985): 33. 38. John Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 43.

Notes to Pages 34–38

215

39. Robert Salisbury, “Urban Politics: The New Convergence of Power,” Journal of Politics 26 (1964); Clarence Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989); John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (1987; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 40. Nancy  J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 41. Kenneth  T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Strug gle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 42. Alan DiGaetano, “The Democratic Party and City Politics in the Postindustrial Era,” in Labor Parties in Post-Industrial Societies, ed. Frances Fox Piven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 217. 43. Alan Ware, The Breakdown of Democratic Party Organization, 1940–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 44. Robert Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in Amer ica’s Deep South, 1944–1972 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 33. 45. Thomas J. Semmes, quoted in Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, 44. 46. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Key, Southern Politics; J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974); Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 47. Key, Southern Politics, 16. But see Devin Caughey, The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Representation in a One-Party Enclave (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 48. Key, Southern Politics, 11. 49. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Second Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1937, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu. 50. Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108 (1993): 285. See also James  T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967). 51. For more on the South’s use of Congress in defending Jim Crow, see Julian E. Zelizer, On Capitol Hill: The Strug gle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For a descriptively rich portrait of the Senate as a tool in the hands of the South, see Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III (New York: Vintage, 2002). 52. Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 111.

216

Notes to Pages 38–41

53. See Frederickson, Dixiecrat Revolt, 19. See also Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth- Century Amer ica (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Paul Frymer, Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Michael K. Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 54. “Democratic Party Platform of 1928,” American Presidency Project, available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu, cited in Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, 132. 55. Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 111. 56. Harvard Sitkoff, “The Impact of the New Deal on Black Southerners,” in The New Deal and the South: Essays, ed. James Charles Cobb and Michael  V. Namorato (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 118. This is not to say that Roose velt ever hesitated to publicly condemn lynching as “murder” or to speak out in favor of universal voting rights. He did, and quite forcefully at times. The point is that he did not make these issues legislative priorities as such. For a discussion, see Leuchtenburg, White House Looks South, 64–65. 57. Harold F. Bass Jr., “Presidential Party Leadership and Party Reform: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Abrogation of the Two-Thirds Rule,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 18 (1988). 58. Sitkoff, New Deal for Blacks, 107, 93; Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, 135–136. 59. Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, 136–137; Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 136–156; Sitkoff, New Deal for Blacks, 77–83. 60. Susan Dunn, Roosevelt’s Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). See also Patterson, Congressional Conservatism. 61. Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 62. Thomas J. Sugrue, “All Politics Is Local: The Persistence of Localism in TwentiethCentury America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William  J. Novak, and Julian  E. Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 311. 63. Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoted in Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 223. 64. Foner, Story of American Freedom, 223. 65. Brinkley, End of Reform, 10. 66. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 29. 67. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 94. See also Pete Daniel, “The New Deal, Southern Agriculture, and Economic Change,” in Cobb and Namorato, New Deal and the South. 68. Schickler, Racial Realignment; Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln. 69. The Taft-Hartley Act, or the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, amended the 1935 Wagner Act by requiring all unionists to sign an affidavit forswearing association with communists, restricting use of solidarity strikes and secondary boycotts, and banning the union closed shop, whereby all employees in a firm were compelled to join the union. See Zieger, CIO, 246–249; Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 114–118.

Notes to Pages 41–46

217

70. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, 93. 71. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, 93. 72. Barbara S. Griffith, The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). 73. Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order. 74. Sean J. Savage, “To Purge or Not to Purge: Hamlet Harry and the Dixiecrats, 1948– 1952,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 27 (1997). 75. Abraham Holtzman, “Party Responsibility and Loyalty: New Rules in the Democratic Party,” Journal of Politics 22 (1960). 76. Herbert  S. Parmet, The Democrats: The Years After FDR (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 133. 77. Zelizer, On Capitol Hill, 33. 78. American Political Science Association, Towards a More Responsible Two-Party System: A Report of the Committee on Political Parties (New York: Rinehart, 1950). See also Mark Wickham-Jones, Whatever Happened to Party Government? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). 79. See Sean J. Savage, JFK, LBJ, and the Democratic Party (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), chap. 5; and Sam Rosenfeld, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 23–53. 80. Sam Rosenfeld, “A Choice, Not an Echo: Polarization and the Transformation of the American Party System” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014), 76. 81. Rosenfeld, “A Choice, Not an Echo,” 76. 82. Philip  A. Klinkner, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956–1993 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 22. 83. Rosenfeld, “A Choice, Not an Echo,” 63. 84. Klinkner, Losing Parties, 24. See also Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV (New York: Vintage, 2012), xviii, where he sums up the modus operandi of Johnson’s pre-presidential political career with the quote “It’s not the job of a politician to go around saying principled things.” 85. Klinkner, Losing Parties, 23. 86. John P. Roche to state party chairs, June 13, 1964, Box 28, Folder: Democratic National Convention—1964, Americans for Democratic Action Records, Wisconsin State Historical Society, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. 87. Joseph L. Rauh Jr., brief submitted by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for the Consideration of the Credentials Subcommittee, Box 28, Folder: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1965, ADA Records. 88. Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Plume, 1993), 121. See also Harold  F. Bass  Jr., “Presidential Party Leadership and Party Reform: Lyndon B. Johnson and the MFDP Controversy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 21 (1991): 90. 89. Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie, 294. 90. Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention 1964 (Washington, DC: Democratic National Committee, 1964), 30–31. 91. Richard J. Hughes to William L. Taylor, Box 44, Folder: 1968 Democratic Convention Credentials Committee, James O’Hara Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

218

Notes to Pages 49–55

Chapter 2 1. Walter Reuther, Wall Street Journal, April 20, 1970, quoted in Sam Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers: The Birth and Transformation of a Union (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1995), 143. See also Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 433. 2. See James Ridgeway, “Freak-Out in Chicago: The National Conference of New Politics,” New Republic, September 16, 1967. 3. William  H. Chafe, Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Strug gle to Save American Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 265. 4. Chafe, Never Stop Running, 265. 5. Steven M. Gillon, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 193. 6. “Hitched to LBJ?,” New Republic, September  30, 1967; Chafe, Never Stop Running, 269. 7. Dominick Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 179. See also Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 893–894. 8. Gillon, Politics and Vision, 207. See also Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy, 173; George Rising, Clean for Gene: Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential Campaign (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 62–63. 9. Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy, 174. 10. Paul R. Wieck, “ADA Goes for McCarthy,” New Republic, February 24, 1968. 11. Gillon, Politics and Vision, 208. 12. Gillon, Politics and Vision, 209; Wieck, “ADA Goes for McCarthy.” 13. Leon Keyserling to ADA National Board, “What Has Happened to the ADA?,” Box 36, Folder: Leon Keyserling Matter, 1967–68, ADA Records, Wisconsin State Historical Society, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. 14. Wieck, “ADA Goes for McCarthy”; Gillon, Politics and Vision, 210. 15. Wieck, “ADA Goes for McCarthy.” 16. Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy, 186; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 865. Exit polling, however, showed that McCarthy’s strength in New Hampshire did not necessarily translate into voters’ opposition to the war. In fact, according to Sandbrook, most voters were ignorant of the senator’s dovish position on the war and, had they been aware, would not have voted for him. In a survey conducted by the University of Michigan, three out of five McCarthy supporters felt that LBJ’s mishandling of the war was due to his insufficiently aggressive tactics. McCarthy’s victory in New Hampshire then was more of an anti-Johnson vote than an antiwar vote. See Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy, 184. 17. Sean J. Savage, JFK, LBJ, and the Democratic Party (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 292. 18. Lawrence O’Brien Oral History XXI, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, TX. 19. Savage, JFK, LBJ, and the Democratic Party, 294. 20. O’Brien Oral History XXII, Johnson Library. 21. Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 216. 22. O’Brien Oral History XXII, Johnson Library.

Notes to Pages 55–58

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23. Memo from Fraser Barrow to Night Reading, April  11, 1968, 1968 Presidential Campaign National Headquarters Files, Youth/Student Division, Box 5, Folder: Grassroots Activities, Robert F. Kennedy Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA. 24. Memorandum from Larry O’Brien to Steve Smith, May 18, 1968, Box 5, Folder: Memoranda: To Campaign Headquarters, RFK Papers. 25. Memo for EMK/SES/TCS/et al., re: Youth/Student/Community Organization Effort, March 25, 1968, Box 5, Folder: Memoranda: To Campaign Headquarters, RFK Papers. 26. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 75. 27. Jack Newfield, quoted in Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 79. 28. Taylor E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 80. 29. Lane Kirkland, “Labor in Partisan Politics,” September 29, 1982, Committee on Political Education Records (unprocessed), George Meany Memorial Archives, University of Maryland, Silver Springs, MD. See also Dark, Unions and the Democrats, 81. 30. Steve Arons to Jim Flug and Marion Wright, “Counter Primaries,” 1968 Presidential Campaign National Headquarters, Speechwriters Division, Box 5, Folder: Presidential Campaign: General, RFK Papers. 31. Arthur I. Waskow to Peter Edelman et al., June 3, 1968, 1968 Presidential Campaign National Headquarters, Speechwriters Division, Box 5, Folder: Presidential Campaign: General, RFK Papers. 32. Waskow to Edelman et al., RFK Papers. See also Savage, JFK, LBJ, and the Democratic Party, 307. 33. Waskow to Edelman et al., RFK Papers. 34. See the series of memoranda in RFK 1968 Presidential Campaign, Box 3, Folder: “Unit Rule: Southern States,” Abram Chayes Papers, Kennedy Library. See also Savage, JFK, LBJ, and the Democratic Party, 307–308. 35. See Correspondence: Subject File, 1968, Box 13, Folder: “Democratic Party: New York State,” RFK Senate Papers, Kennedy Library. 36. Notes, RFK Presidential Campaign Papers, Black Books, Box 2, Folder: Alabama Background and Intelligence, RFK Papers. 37. Waskow to Edelman et al., RFK Papers. 38. Sam Rosenfeld, “A Choice, Not an Echo: Polarization and the Transformation of the American Party System” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014), 187. 39. Arons to Flug and Wright, “Counter Primaries.” 40. Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (New York: Viking, 1969), 444. 41. Chester, Hodgson, and Page, American Melodrama, 441–442. 42. See Chester, Hodgson, and Page, American Melodrama, 443, as well as Lanny J. Davis, The Emerging Democratic Majority: Lessons and Legacies from the New Politics (New York: Stein and Day, 1974), 41. 43. Chester, Hodgson, and Page, American Melodrama, 445. 44. See the discussion of the Connecticut credentials challenge in The Presidential Nominating Conventions 1968 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1968), 103; as well as Chester, Hodgson, and Page, American Melodrama, 442; and Davis, Emerging Democratic Majority, 56–58. For a firsthand account of the Connecticut convention walkout, see Geoffrey

220

Notes to Pages 58–64

Cowan to Theodore H. White, August 1, 1969, Box 149.C.14.2F, Folder: Miscellaneous Packet, Donald Fraser Papers, Minnesota History Center, St. Paul, MN. 45. Presidential Nominating Conventions 1968, 100–101. 46. These instances are all drawn from Presidential Nominating Conventions 1968. 47. On the case of Pennsylvania, see Chester, Hodgson, and Page, American Melodrama, 171; Davis, Emerging Democratic Majority, 41–42; and Presidential Nominating Conventions 1968, 101. 48. William Crotty, Party Reform (New York: Longman, 1983), 31. 49. Chester, Hodgson, and Page, American Melodrama, 444. 50. Byron  E. Shafer, Quiet Revolution: The Strug gle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics (New York: Russell Sage, 1983), 15 (emphasis in original). 51. William J. Crotty, Decision for the Democrats: Reforming the Party Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 15; Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 20–21. 52. The Democratic Choice: A Report of the Commission on the Democratic Selection of Presidential Nominees, Box 157, Folder: Democratic National Committee— Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, George S. McGovern Papers, Seely G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. All quotations in this paragraph are drawn from this source. 53. David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 204. 54. For a comprehensive background on the 1968 credentials challenges, see John  R. Schmidt and Wayne W. Whalen, “Credentials Contests at the 1968—and 1972—Democratic National Conventions,” Harvard Law Review 82 (1969). 55. The importance of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as a factor in changing the balance of power in southern Democratic parties is pointed out in the final report of the SERC, submitted to the DNC on the eve of the Chicago convention. A copy of this report can be found in the records of the McGovern-Fraser Commission, Box 12, Folder: Hearings: Special Testimony, Democratic National Committee Records, National Archives, Washington, DC. See also the excerpts from the report included in Presidential Nominating Conventions 1968, 197–198. 56. Crotty, Decision for the Democrats, 11. 57. See the coverage of the Credentials Committee hearings in Presidential Nominating Conventions 1968, 88, 96. 58. James O’Hara to Lawrence O’Brien, n.d., Box 44, Folder: 1968 Democratic Convention Credentials Committee, James O’Hara Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (emphasis added). 59. O’Hara to O’Brien, O’Hara Collection (emphasis added). 60. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1968 (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1969), 312. 61. “The 1968 Democratic National Convention Should Abolish the Unit Rule,” Box 28, Folder: 1968 Democratic Convention, ADA Records (emphasis added). 62. Transcript, Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention 1968, 202, Box 78, Folder: 1968 Democratic Convention Rules and Order of Business Committee, McGovern Papers. 63. Ken Olson to Jim Wright, John Hoving, and J. D. Williams, “Preparations for Convention Rules Committee,” August  12, 1968, Box 44, Folder: 1968 Democratic Convention Credentials Committee, O’Hara Collection. 64. Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 34 (emphasis in original).

Notes to Pages 64–70

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65. Presidential Nominating Conventions 1968, 141. 66. Presidential Nominating Conventions 1968, 147, 199–200; Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 30–32. 67. Presidential Nominating Conventions 1968, 148. 68. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1972 (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1973), 24. 69. See the postelection report sent to the DNC chair, Lawrence O’Brien, from the Meat Cutters Union political education director, Helmuth Kern (no ally of the party insurgents), who pinned the electoral defeat on party “disunity,” adding that “a great share of the responsibility for this defeat goes . . . to those who prevented the compromise Vietnam plank in the Democratic Platform.” Helmuth Kern, “Post-Election Observations 1968,” Box 221, Folder: Postmortem, Presidential Election, 1968 (1 of 3), Lawrence O’Brien Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA.

Chapter 3 Note to epigraph: George McGovern, “The Lessons of 1968,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1970. 1. Byron E. Shafer, Quiet Revolution: The Strug gle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics (New York: Russell Sage, 1983); Austin Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction: Party Reform in Amer ica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Jeane Kirkpatrick, Dismantling the Parties: Reflections on Party Reform and Party Decomposition (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1978); Jeane Kirkpatrick, The New Presidential Elite: Men and Women in National Politics (New York: Russell Sage, 1976); Nelson Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); James W. Ceaser, Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 86–94. For notable exceptions to this trend, see William J. Crotty, Decision for the Democrats: Reforming the Party Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); William Crotty, Party Reform (New York: Longman, 1983); Philip  A. Klinkner, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956–1993 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); and Sam Rosenfeld, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 2. Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 76. 3. Hubert Humphrey, “How About Yesterday?,” Democrat, January 1969, Box 174, Folder: DNC Meeting, January 14, 1969, Lawrence O’Brien Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA. 4. Lawrence O’Brien, DNC press release, November  24, 1968, Box 174, Folder: DNC— News Release, Party Reorga nization, O’Brien Papers. 5. Klinkner, Losing Parties, 98–99. 6. Paul Schrade to Walter Reuther, September 19, 1968, Box 27, Folder 42, Mildred Jeffrey Collection, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. 7. New Democratic Coalition, “Statement of Political Purpose,” Box 3, Folder: National Committee Reform, DNC Records, National Archives, Washington, DC. 8. Stephen  C. Schlesinger, The New Reformers: Forces for Change in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 112. See also Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 54; Paul R. Wieck,

222

Notes to Pages 70–72

“The New Politics Still Lives,” New Republic, January 1969; Paul R. Wieck, “What Happened to the New Politics?,” New Republic, February 28, 1970. 9. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949). 10. See Henry Brown, “Orientation Paper: Political Reform,” and James Loeb, “Comments on the Hughes Commission Report: ‘The Democratic Choice,’ ” Box 28, Folder: Political Reform, 1962–1974, ADA Records, Wisconsin State Historical Society, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. 11. For a complete list of all members of the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, see Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 70, table 2.1. For the members of the Rules Commission, see Crotty, Decision for the Democrats, 32. 12. Schlesinger, New Reformers, 5. 13. Throughout the late summer and early fall of 1968, COPE field reports poured into the AFL-CIO’s executive council as well as the DNC decrying the “disorga nization” and “financial chaos” plaguing state and local parties. The party organizations, the reports detailed, had been found in most places to be “non-functioning, non-existent, or feuding,” requiring “the political organization, abilities, and capacities of the trade union’s political arm (COPE) to bear the brunt of this year’s election campaign.” See Alexander E. Barkan, COPE report of September 1968, Box 39, AFL-CIO Executive Council Meeting Minutes, AFL-CIO Records, George Meany Memorial Archives, University of Maryland, Silver Springs, MD; Helmuth Kern, “Post-Election Observations 1968,” Box 221, Folder: Postmortem, Presidential Election, 1968 (1 of 3), O’Brien Papers; Lawrence Steinberg to Lawrence O’Brien, November 13, 1968, Box 221, Folder: Postmortem, Presidential Election, 1968 (1 of 3), O’Brien Papers; and David  S. Broder, “COPE Director Al Barkan Flexing Labor’s Big Muscle,” Washington Post, May 7, 1968. See also Daniel J. Galvin, Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 190; and David R. Mayhew, Placing Parties in American Politics: Organization, Electoral Settings, and Government Activity in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 14. Alexander E. Barkan, COPE report of December 1968, Box 39, AFL-CIO Executive Council Meeting Minutes, AFL-CIO Records. 15. Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 166. See also Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 83. 16. Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 55 (emphasis in original). 17. Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 88. 18. See the entries of James O’Hara’s diary, July 8, 1969, and July 14, 1969, Box 48, Folder: O’Hara Diary June 2–August 6, 1969, James O’Hara Collection, Bentley Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. 19. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), 263. See also Taylor E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1999), 86–87; as well as Andrew Battista, The Revival of Labor Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). Compare to Shafer, Quiet Revolution; Kirkpatrick, New Presidential Elite; and Shefter, Political Parties and the State, 88–89.

Notes to Pages 73–76

223

20. Dudley W. Buffa, Union Power and American Democracy: The UAW and the Democratic Party, 1935–72 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 226. 21. Bill Dodds to Lawrence O’Brien, n.d., Box 181, Folder: Correspondence, McGovern Commission (2 of 3), O’Brien Papers. 22. Testimony of Sam Fishman, Box 13, Folder: 4A Detroit Hearing 4/26/69, DNC Records. 23. Battista, Revival of Labor Liberalism, 65–66. 24. Address of George McGovern to Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, Box 12, Folder: 14A Washington, DC 4/25/69, DNC Records. 25. Commission staff to commission members, “Purpose of Hearings,” April  15, 1969, Box 1, Folder: Correspondence to Commission Members, DNC Records; commission staff memo to commission members, “Task Force Hearing Themes,” May 27, 1969, Box 6, Folder: Subcommittees: Party Structure, DNC Records. 26. Fred Harris, address before the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, Box 12, Folder: 14A Washington, DC 4/25/69, DNC Records; Harris, quoted in George McGovern to commission members, March 7, 1969, Box 1, Folder: Correspondence to Commission Members, DNC Records. 27. Commission staff to commission members, “Purpose of Hearings,” DNC Records. 28. Keynote address by Harold Hughes, New Democratic Coalition, Box 3, Folder: National Committee Reform, DNC Records. 29. Testimony of Channing Emory Phillips, April 25, 1969, Box 12, Folder: Hearings: Special Testimony, DNC Records. 30. Testimony of Paul Schrade, Box 16, Folder: LA Hearings 6/21/69, DNC Records. 31. Testimony of Julian Bond, Box 16, Folder: Atlanta Hearing 6/16/69, DNC Records. 32. Testimony of Theodore Sorensen, Box 13, Folder: 3A New York Hearing 5/3/69, DNC Records. 33. Testimony of Al Fishman, New Democratic Coalition, Box 13, Folder: 4A Detroit Hearing 4/26/69, DNC Records. 34. See Donald Fraser, “Rough Draft of Tapes of Discussion Re Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection,” conducted by Jim and Iric Nathanson, August 9, 1972, Box 149.G.11.10F, Folder: Draft Interview, Donald Fraser Papers, Minnesota History Center, St. Paul, MN. 35. Leroy Collins to Party Structure Subcommittee members, April 4, 1969, Box 6, Folder: Subcommittees: Party Structure, DNC Records. 36. Report of the Grass Roots Participation Subcommittee, August  22, 1969, Box 149.C.12.3B, Folder: Democratic Party Reform, 1969, Fraser Papers. 37. Testimony of Katherine Robinson, Box 13, Folder: 4A Detroit Hearing 4/26/69, DNC Records (emphasis added). 38. Testimony of Eugene O’Grady, Box 13, Folder: 4A Detroit Hearing, 4/26/69, DNC Records. 39. Testimony of Joseph Duffey, Box 17, Folder: Boston Hearing 7/10/69, DNC Records. 40. Testimony of Robert Toal, Box 13, Folder: 4A Detroit Hearing 4/26/69, DNC Records. 41. Robinson testimony, DNC Records. 42. Testimony of Stephen Jelin, Box 13, Folder: 4A Detroit Hearing, 4/26/69, DNC Records. 43. Schrade testimony, DNC Records.

224

Notes to Pages 77–82

44. Testimony of Manuel Aragon, Box 16, Folder: LA Hearings 6/21/69, DNC Records. 45. Mandate for Reform: A Report of the Commission for Party Structure and Delegate Selection to the Democratic National Committee, 10, 21, 14, Box 157, Folder: Mandate for Reform, April 1970, George S. McGovern Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. 46. George McGovern to commission members, “Proposed Guidelines, ‘Full, Meaningful, and Timely Opportunity to Participate’ in Delegate Selection Process,” September 1969, Box 157, Folder: Democratic National Committee— Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection 1972, McGovern Papers. For an in-depth analysis of each guideline, see Crotty, Decision for the Democrats, 59–103; and Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 133–193. See also Klinkner, Losing Parties, 97–98. 47. Mandate for Reform, 11, 34, McGovern Papers. 48. Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 204. 49. Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, “Report on Status of the States,” January  7, 1971, Box 181, Folder: Correspondence, McGovern Commission (1 of 3), O’Brien Papers. 50. The Party Reformed: The Final Report of the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, Box 53, Folder: Democratic Convention, July  10–13, 1972, UAW President’s Office: Douglas Fraser Collection, Reuther Library. See also Crotty, Decision for the Democrats, 127, figure 1. “Substantial compliance” was defined to mean meeting all but one or two (or part of one or two) guidelines. 51. Crotty, Decision for the Democrats, 105. 52. See Fraser, “Rough Draft of Tapes of Discussion,” Fraser Papers. 53. Lawrence F. O’Brien, No Final Victories: A Life in Politics from John  F. Kennedy to Watergate (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), 273. 54. Lawrence O’Brien to Democratic National Committee members, governors, mayors, and state chairmen, “The Record of Democratic Party Reform and the Unfinished Agenda,” October 29, 1971, Box 149.G.8.6F, Folder: Reform Comm.—Public Comments on, Fraser Papers. 55. See Crotty, Decision for the Democrats, 106; and Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 359. 56. Crotty, Decision for the Democrats, 238n52. 57. “Report on Status of the States,” O’Brien Papers. For a state-level case study of implementation, see William Cavala, “Changing the Rules Changes the Game: Party Reform and the 1972 California Delegation to the Democratic National Convention,” American Political Science Review 68 (1974). 58. Shafer, Quiet Revolution, 308. 59. ADA press release from national chairman Allard Lowenstein, n.d., Box 28, Folder: 1972 Democratic Convention Task Force, ADA Records. 60. Transcript of first session of the NWPC Organizing Conference, Washington, DC, July 10, 1971, Box 1, Folder 4: Transcript of Organizing Conference, National Women’s Political Caucus Records, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 61. NWPC council meeting resolutions, Box 2, Folder 19: Policy Council Minutes, October 22–23, 1971 (Detroit), NWPC Records. 62. Transcript of first session, NWPC Records. 63. Donald Fraser to Lawrence O’Brien, November 29, 1971, Box 28, Folder: Democratic Party; Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Correspondence, November 1972–September 1973, O’Hara Collection (emphasis in original).

Notes to Pages 82–90

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64. Opening remarks of Donald Fraser, Box 149.C.12.3B, Folder: Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, 1971, Fraser Papers. 65. Donald Fraser to Lawrence O’Brien, March 17, 1971, Box 149.C.12.3B, Folder: Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, 1971, Fraser Papers; Lawrence O’Brien to James O’Hara, March 24, 1971, Box 149.C.12.3B, Folder: Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, 1971, Fraser Papers. 66. For analysis of the O’Hara Rules Commission, see Crotty, Decision for the Democrats, 148–221. 67. See the transcript of the November joint meeting in Box 149.C.14.2F, Folder: Committee Meeting Notebook, Fraser Papers. 68. National Democratic Party Structure, draft cover letter, Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Charter Proposal 2, O’Hara Collection. 69. Charter proposal, Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Charter Proposal 2, O’Hara Collection. 70. Thomas E. Cronin, “On the American Presidency: A Conversation with James MacGregor Burns,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 16 (1986): 536. 71. Austin Ranney, “The Democratic Party,” in We Reform That We May Preserve: A Proposed Charter of the Democratic Party of the United States, Box 14, Folder: Democratic National Convention, Peter Rosenblatt Papers, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX. 72. Fraser, “Rough Draft of Tapes of Discussion,” Fraser Papers. 73. Neil Staebler, “Why a Charter,” December 31, 1973, Box 10, Folder: CDM Task Force on the Party Charter (Sanford Commission), Rosenblatt Papers. 74. Draft party charter, Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Charter Proposal 1, O’Hara Collection. 75. James O’Hara and Donald Fraser to undisclosed recipients, n.d., Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Formation of Commission, Finances, O’Hara Collection. 76. Staebler, “Why a Charter,” Rosenblatt Papers. 77. Charter proposal, Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Charter Proposal 2, O’Hara Collection.

Chapter 4 Notes to epigraphs: The Party Reformed: The Final Report of the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, Box 53, Folder: Democratic Convention, July  10–13, 1972, UAW President’s Office: Douglas Fraser Collection, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI; William J. Crotty, Decision for the Democrats: Reforming the Party Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 148. 1. Bruce Miroff, The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 41. 2. On Nixon’s efforts to ensure a two-party contest in 1972, see Miroff, Liberals’ Moment, 50. 3. Bruce Miroff, “From Friends to Foes: George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, and the Fracture in American Liberalism,” in Making Sense of American Liberalism, ed. Timothy Stanley and Jonathan Bell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 4. See, for instance, Gordon Weil, The Long Shot: George McGovern Runs for President (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).

226

Notes to Pages 90–96

5. William Crotty, Party Reform (New York: Longman, 1983), 142. 6. Miroff, Liberals’ Moment, 45. 7. Quoted in Miroff, Liberals’ Moment, 42. 8. For the appeal of McGovern’s defense reconversion plan to suburban knowledge workers, see Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 9. On Chisholm’s candidacy, see Miroff, Liberals’ Moment, 219. 10. Jeffrey  S. Walz and John Comer, “State Responses to National Democratic Party Reform,” Political Research Quarterly 52 (1999). 11. The raw numbers, rounded to the nearest thousand, for 1972 are 16,715,000 for primaries, 771,000 for caucuses. See Crotty, Party Reform, 142. 12. Bill Welsh to Lawrence O’Brien, “The Labor Movement and the Reform Activities of the State Democratic Parties,” December 9, 1970, Box 225, Folder: Labor 1970, Lawrence O’Brien Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA (emphasis added). 13. Bill Welsh to Lawrence O’Brien, September 20, 1971, Box 235, Folder: Labor 1971 (1 of 2), O’Brien Papers (emphasis in original). 14. Lawrence  F. O’Brien, No Final Victories: A Life in Politics from John  F. Kennedy to Watergate (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), 296. 15. Andrew Battista, The Revival of Labor Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 65–66. 16. Address of Senator Henry Jackson, August 3–5, 1970, Box 40, Minutes of the AFLCIO Executive Council Meetings, AFL-CIO Records, George Meany Memorial Archives, University of Maryland, Silver Springs, MD. 17. Wurf, quoted in Bill Welsh to Lawrence O’Brien, September 11, 1970, Box 225, Folder: Labor 1970, O’Brien Papers. 18. Paul R. Wieck, “Some COPE, Some Don’t: Labor and the Democrats,” New Republic, June 30, 1973. 19. See the letter from Walter Reuther to George Meany, March  2, 1968, March  1968 Meeting, Box 39, Minutes of the AFL-CIO Executive Council Meeting, AFL-CIO Records. 20. B. J. Widick, “George Meany’s Last Hurrah,” Nation, September 4, 1972 (emphasis in original). 21. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 105; Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1972 (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 209. 22. John W. Soule and Wilma E. McGrath, “A Comparative Study of Presidential Nomination Conventions: The Democrats 1968 and 1972,” American Journal of Political Science 19 (1975): 502. These figures are taken from a CBS News report, “The Delegates of ’72,” Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party: Coalition for a Democratic Majority, October 1973–November 1974, James O’Hara Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. For verification using DNC data, see Crotty, Party Reform, 129, 131. 23. CBS News, “Delegates of ’72”; Dick Murphy to Lawrence O’Brien, “Labor and the Democratic National Convention,” Box 240, Folder: Labor 1972, O’Brien Papers. 24. Crotty, Party Reform, 136, table 12.7. DNC memos further indicate that convention planners provided union officials with more box seats and floor passes than even the presidential candidates were allotted, a direct phone line linking Meany’s hotel suite with chair-

Notes to Pages 96–103

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man O’Brien’s, and premium hotel accommodations next door to top party leaders. Murphy to O’Brien, “Labor and the Democratic National Convention,” O’Brien Papers. 25. CBS News, “Delegates of ’72”; Crotty, Party Reform, 136. 26. William J. Crotty, Decision for the Democrats: Reforming the Party Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 138. 27. For a state-by-state breakdown of the credentials challenges and their resolutions, see Crotty, Decision for the Democrats, 140–142, tables 4.2 and 4.3. 28. Women’s Education for Delegate Selection, “South Carolina Challenge,” Box 282, Folder 4: Delegate Selection, National Women’s Political Caucus Records, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. See also Miroff, Liberals’ Moment, 72–81; White, Making of the President 1972, 214–215. 29. Miroff, Liberals’ Moment, 81. 30. White, Making of the President 1972, 219 (emphasis added). An in-depth account of the Chicago credentials challenge can be found in Crotty, Party Reform, 155–202. 31. Thomas J. Sugrue and John D. Skrentny, “The White Ethnic Strategy,” in Rightward Bound: Making Amer ica Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Dennis Deslippe, Protesting Affirmative Action: The Strug gle over Equality After the Civil Rights Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (New York: Russell Sage, 2006), 230–237. 32. “Democratic Panel Opens 1972 Platform Hearings,” New York Times, May 16, 1972. 33. Denis G. Sullivan, Jeffrey Pressman, Benjamin I. Page, and John J. Lyons, The Politics of Representation: The Democratic Convention 1972 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 99. 34. White, Making of the President 1972, 213. 35. McGovern aides successfully quelled minority planks that they felt would compromise their candidate’s appeal in the general election, such as the feminist plank holding that abortion was a “matter between [a woman] and her doctor,” as well as the youth plank calling for the legalization of marijuana. See Sullivan et al., Politics of Representation, 100. 36. New Directions: 1972–76, Democratic Party Platform of 1972, July 10, 1972, available at www.presidency.ecsb.edu. All references to the party platform and, unless noted other wise, quotations about the platform below are drawn from this source. A more moderate version of the Vietnam plank, calling for negotiations and mutual withdrawal of American and Communist forces, was rejected by the convention as a whole. 37. Sullivan et al., Politics of Representation, 96. 38. Still, the Times joined the Wall Street Journal in criticizing the platform’s “sudden and drastic lurch toward income redistribution,” which made the platform as a whole “unfriendly to big business.” “Shaping the Democratic Platform,” New York Times, July 2, 1972; “Unfriendly to Big Business,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 1972. 39. National Democratic Party Structure, draft cover letter, Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party; O’Hara Rules Commission, Charter Proposal 2, O’Hara Collection. 40. James O’Hara and Donald Fraser to undisclosed recipients, Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Formation of Commission, Finances, O’Hara Collection. 41. David Plotke, “Party Reform as Failed Democratic Renewal in the United States, 1968–1972,” Studies in American Political Development 10 (1996).

228

Notes to Pages 103–107

42. James O’Hara and Donald Fraser to all members of the Rules Committee, “Proposed New Charter for the Democratic Party of the United States,” n.d., Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Charter Proposal 3, O’Hara Collection. 43. Marjorie Hunter, “House Democrats Score Party Reform Proposals,” New York Times, June 29, 1972. 44. White, Making of the President 1972, 213. 45. Mary Russell, “Democrats Vote to Delay Some Reforms,” Washington Post, June 29, 1972. 46. Josh to Max, Tom, Penn, and others, n.d., Box 14, Folder: Democratic National Convention 1972, Peter Rosenblatt Papers, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX. 47. Penn Kemble, “The Proposals for a New Party Structure: Some Alarming Facts,” n.d., Box 14, Folder: Democratic National Convention 1972, Rosenblatt Papers. 48. Spencer Oliver to Executive Committee of State Democratic Chairman’s Association, “Restructuring of the Democratic Party,” January 4, 1972, Box 149.C.12.3B, Folder: Minutes of Party Structure 1971, Donald Fraser Papers, Minnesota History Center, Saint Paul, MN. 49. “Comments on New Charter,” Box 149.G.8.5B, Folder: 1, Fraser Papers. 50. Joseph  A. Beirne to Donald Fraser, May  5, 1972, Box 149.C.12.3B, Folder: R/C— Charter 1972, Fraser Papers. 51. Cleta Deatherage, ADA Committee to Study the New Charter, “Comments on New Charter,” Box 149.G.8.5B, Folder: 1, Fraser Papers. 52. Rules Committee, “Explanation of Amendments to the Proposed Charter of the Democratic Party,” Box 44, Folder: Democratic Party, O’Hara Rules Commission, Charter Proposal 3, O’Hara Collection; transcript of interview with Donald Fraser, August  9, 1972, Box 149.G.11.10F, Folder: Draft of Interview with Fraser with Jim and Iric Nathanson, Fraser Papers. 53. Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention 1972, 380–381. 54. Allan Wolper, “Forecast: Meany to Aid McGovern,” New York Post, July 12, 1972. 55. See, for example, Byron E. Shafer, Quiet Revolution: The Strug gle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics (New York: Russell Sage, 1983); Jeane Kirkpatrick, The New Presidential Elite: Men and Women in National Politics (New York: Russell Sage, 1976); Jeane Kirkpatrick, Dismantling the Parties: Reflections on Party Reform and Party Decomposition (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1978); Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 86–94. 56. John P. Roche, “McGovern Faces Class Warfare,” Washington Post, August 12, 1972. 57. White, Making of the President 1972, 48. 58. Philip Shabecoff, “Meany Criticizes ‘Elite’ Democrats,” New York Times, September 19, 1972. 59. Peter R. Rosenblatt, “Democrat ‘on the Outside,’ ” New York Times, July 20, 1972. 60. Joseph  D. Goulden, Jerry Wurf: Labor’s Last Angry Man (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 217. 61. Crotty, Decision for the Democrats, 111. In fact, Meany’s efforts to undermine the Democratic nominee had begun even before the convention let out, when he circulated an anonymous fifty-five-page white paper among the delegates attacking McGovern’s record on labor legislation. While it was widely suspected at the time, Meany later accepted responsibil-

Notes to Pages 107–111

229

ity for the anti-McGovern literature. See his heated exchange with Joseph Beirne on February 19–26, 1973, AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting minutes, AFL-CIO Records; and Neil Gilbride, “Labor Hits McGovern over Vietnam,” New York Post, July 12, 1972. Although it was accurate that McGovern had once voted against the repeal of Taft-Hartley’s section 14b when it was clear that it would not pass the Senate anyway, by COPE’s own rating system, McGovern scored a 95  percent “right” voting record—an impor tant factor in securing union funding for his reelection in 1968. Compared with Nixon’s 13 percent COPE score, or even Lyndon Johnson’s 60  percent rating, the Democratic nominee’s pro-labor record was exceeded only by Hubert Humphrey. See Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 106–107. 62. Transcript, George Meany on Face the Nation, September  3, 1972, Box 47, Folder: George McGovern: Labor Movement, 1972, Civil Rights Department, AFL-CIO Records. 63. Taylor E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1999), 86. 64. Lane Kirkland, “Labor in Partisan Politics,” September 29, 1982, COPE Files (unprocessed), AFL-CIO Records. 65. For two prominent accounts that point to culture and ideology in explaining Meany’s opposition to McGovern, see J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); and Miroff, Liberals’ Moment. 66. Jerry Wurf, “What Labor Has Against McGovern,” New Republic, August 5–12, 1972. 67. Memo, August 18, 1972, Box 47, Folder: George McGovern: Labor Movement, 1972, AFL-CIO Records. In 1974, the Coalition of Labor Union Women formed around very similar demands, aligning closely with the New Politics. Dark, Unions and the Democrats, 91; Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern Amer ica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 201–205. 68. “While Mr. Meany Sits It Out,” Washington Post, July 26, 1972. 69. Moreover, some of the unions backing McGovern took the further step of cutting off their financial contributions to COPE. The CWA, IAM, AFSCME, and others were among the largest in the federation, and their withdrawal of support deprived the AFL-CIO’s political arm of significant funds. Stephen Schlesinger, The New Reformers: Forces for Change in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 91; Ben  A. Franklin, “McGovern Bloc Controls Half of Union Treasuries,” New York Times, July 31, 1972.

Chapter 5 Note to epigraph: CDM Notes, October 1974, Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, October 1973–November 1974, James O’Hara Collection, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. 1. American National Election Studies, table  9A.1.2, cited in Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 222. 2. AFL-CIO press release, November 8, 1972, Box 42, Folder: Coalition for a Democratic Majority 1972, AFL-CIO Records, George Meany Memorial Archives, University of Maryland, Silver Springs, MD. 3. Richard  M. Scammon and Ben  J. Wattenberg, The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970), 143 (emphasis in original).

230

Notes to Pages 111–115

4. Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph Institute press release, November 10, 1972, Box 42, Folder: Coalition for a Democratic Majority, 1972, AFL-CIO Records. 5. “Come Home, Democrats,” Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, By-Laws, Minutes, etc., O’Hara Collection (emphasis in original). A copy of this manifesto is available at the website, www.neoconservatism.vaisse.net, for Justin Vaïsse’s Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). 6. A complete list of CDM members is available at www.neoconservatism.vaisse.net. 7. Ben Wattenberg, quoted in David  S. Broder, “New Demo cratic Coalition Plans Reforming Reforms,” Washington Post, January 7, 1973; Midge Decter, quoted in “Power Strug gle,” New Republic, December 16, 1972. 8. CDM Notes, October 1974, Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, October 1973–November 1974, O’Hara Collection. 9. Ben J. Wattenberg, Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 145–146. 10. In his Jefferson Memorial lectures, delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, at the invitation of Nelson Polsby in early 1973 (later published as Curing the Mischiefs of Faction), Ranney criticized the reforms along the same lines as those of the CDM, specifically regarding its implementation of demographic quotas. And while Ranney frequently cited CDM material in his book, he failed to disclose his active participation in the counter-reform organization. Austin Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction: Party Reform in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 11. Christopher Lydon, “A Disenchanted Reformer Backs Return to ‘the Pols,’ ” New York Times, December 4, 1974. See also Broder, “New Democratic Coalition.” 12. See the cover letter, January 16, 1973, Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Correspondence, November  1972–September  1973, O’Hara Collection. O’Hara’s about-face is curious but not impossible to explain. O’Hara’s leadership role in the reform process severely strained his relationship with the AFL-CIO leadership, a major force in his home district in the heavi ly white ethnic suburbs of Detroit, and that nearly cost him reelection in 1972. (He scraped by with a razor-thin margin of 51 to 49 percent.) O’Hara himself later indicated his own recoil from the counterculture associated with New Politics groups at the 1972 convention. Moreover, O’Hara also became one of the most vocal critics of affirmative action in higher education in Congress. Whatever the true motivation, his conversion from reform advocate to reform critic was a boon to the counter-reformers in the CDM, lending additional legitimacy and expertise to their project from a source within the reform movement itself. 13. Penn Kemble and Josh Muravchik, “The New Politics and the Democrats,” Commentary, December 1, 1972. 14. Decter, quoted in “Power Struggle.” 15. Kemble and Muravchik, “New Politics and the Democrats.” 16. Kemble and Muravchik, “New Politics and the Democrats.” 17. See Jean Westwood’s written recollection of her involvement in the party reform movement and the NWPC in Box 1, Folder 8: Founders Notebooks, National Women’s Political Caucus Records, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Notes to Pages 115–120

231

18. Kathryn J. McGarr, The Whole Damn Deal: Robert Strauss and the Art of Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 107. 19. David  S. Broder, “Labor Exerting New Muscle in Democratic Party,” Washington Post, September 2, 1973. See also McGarr, Whole Damn Deal, 115–127. 20. McGarr, Whole Damn Deal, 112. 21. Jean Westwood, Madame Chair: The Political Autobiography of an Unintentional Pioneer (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007). 22. Wattenberg, quoted in Broder, “New Democratic Coalition.” 23. CDM press release, “CDM Calls for Changes in McGovern-Fraser Guidelines,” April  26, 1973, Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Correspondence November 1972–September 1973, O’Hara Collection. 24. All quotes are from Towards Fairness and Unity for ’76: A Review of the McGovernFraser Delegate Selection Guidelines, Box 149.C.12.3B, Folder: Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, 1971, Donald Fraser Papers, Minnesota History Center, Saint Paul, MN. 25. CDM Task Force on Party Rules, “Statement of Purpose,” Box 48, Folder: Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Affirmative Action 1, O’Hara Collection. 26. Memo from Penn Kemble to CDM Task Force on Democratic Party Structure, “Justification of a Mixed System in Selecting Delegates to Democratic Conventions,” March  15, 1973, Box 42, Folder: Coalition for a Democratic Majority, 1973–1974, AFL-CIO Records. 27. Towards Fairness and Unity for ’76, Fraser Papers. 28. These numbers are reported in CDM Notes, December 1973, Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, By-Laws, Minutes, Etc., O’Hara Collection. 29. Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (New York: Russell Sage, 2006), 5. 30. Towards Fairness and Unity for ’76, Fraser Papers. 31. Stephen Schlesinger, The New Reformers: Forces for Change in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 14. 32. Remarks of Senator George McGovern before the opening session of the Charter Commission, April 10, 1973, Box 13, Folder: Democratic Charter Commission 1973, Mildred Jeffrey Collection, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. 33. ADA chair Donald Fraser, testimony before the Mikulski Commission, August  11, 1973, Box 13, Folder 11: Delegate Selection Committee 1973, Jeffrey Collection. 34. Frances Farenthold to George McGovern, April 17, 1973, Box 281, Folder 43: Delegate Selection Project, NWPC Records. 35. Bill Dodds to Leonard Woodcock, December 6, 1972, Box 197, Folder 4: DNC Commission on Delegate Selection and Party Structure 1972–73, Leonard Woodcock Collection, Reuther Library. 36. Testimony of Eli Segal before the Mikulski Commission, Box 13, Folder: Democratic Charter Commission, 1973, Jeffrey Collection (emphasis added). 37. Lanny Davis to Mildred Jeffrey, April 5, 1973, Box 30, Folder 15, Jeffrey Collection. 38. Penn Kemble to Howard Klueter, July  19, 1975, Box 41, Folder: Delegate Selection/ Proportional Representation, Peter Rosenblatt Papers, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX (emphasis in original). 39. William Crotty, Party Reform (New York: Longman, 1983), 64.

232

Notes to Pages 120–125

40. William J. Crotty, Decision for the Democrats: Reforming the Party Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 230. 41. Democrats All: A Report of the Commission on Delegate Selection and Party Structure, Box 27, Folder 27, Charter Commission, Jeffrey Collection. 42. Official Proceedings of the 1976 Democratic National Convention (Washington, DC: Democratic National Committee, 1976), 204. 43. James MacGregor Burns, “The Democrats’ Opportunity,” New Republic, July 21, 1973. 44. McGarr, Whole Damn Deal, 162; Philip A. Klinkner, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956–1993 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 129–130. 45. DACEO interim report, Box 196, Folder 14: Democratic Advisory Council of Elected Officials, 1974, Woodcock Collection. 46. Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Unity Out of Diversity, Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Papers on Party Charter, O’Hara Collection. 47. Confidential memo from Penn Kemble to undisclosed recipients, n.d., Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Correspondence, November 1972– September 1973, O’Hara Collection. 48. James P. Sterba, “Democrats Vote to Limit ’74 Meeting,” New York Times, July 23, 1973. 49. David S. Broder, “Mid-Term Agenda Divides Democrats,” Washington Post, July 23, 1974. 50. Patricia Derian to Robert Strauss, August 15, 1973, Box 185, Folder: (New) Charter Commission 1, October  1973–September  1974, Neil Staebler Collection, Bentley Historical Library. 51. Robert Vance to Robert Strauss, Box 149.G.8.5B, Folder: Letters, Fraser Papers. 52. Machinists Non-Partisan Political League to members of the Democratic Party Charter Commission, “Position of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers on Subjects Before the Democratic Party Charter Commission,” n.d., Box 149.G.8.5B, Folder: Letters, Fraser Papers. Compare this to the UAW, which preferred a midterm conference “no later than September 1, 1974.” Mildred Jeffrey to Bill Dodds, “Charter Commission,” May 23, 1973, Box 15, Folder 13: Democratic Charter Commission 1973, Jeffrey Collection. 53. “First Written Rules for the Democrats Won by Reformers,” New York Times, March 18, 1974. See also Carol Casey, “The Demo cratic National Charter and Mid-Term National Conference: A Background Analy sis,” Box 149.G.8.6F, Folder: Charter Reform Research, Fraser Papers. 54. Report on Charter Commission, March 16–17, 1974, Box 157, Folder: Democratic National Committee; Draft Charter–1974 Convention (1972), George McGovern Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. 55. Quoted in Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 95. 56. Al Barkan to Milton Shapp, May 29, 1974, Box 43, Folder: Charter Debate, Rosenblatt Papers. 57. Democratic Governors Conference, “Resolution on the Democratic Charter,” Box 16, Folder 15: Charter of the Democratic Party 1974, Jeffrey Collection. 58. Democratic members of Congress to Terry Sanford, July 31, 1974, Box 16, Folder 15: Charter of the Democratic Party 1974, Jeffrey Collection. 59. Press release, “CDM Proposes Broad New Charter for Democratic Party,” July  22, 1974, Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Correspondence, November 1972–September 1973, O’Hara Collection.

Notes to Pages 125–131

233

60. Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Unity Out of Diversity, Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Papers on Party Charter, O’Hara Collection. 61. “CDM Proposes Broad New Charter for Democratic Party,” O’Hara Collection. 62. Coalition for a Democratic Majority, “Resolution on the Charter,” Box 47, Folder: Demo cratic Party, Charter Commission, Drafts and Background Material 2, O’Hara Collection; Josh Muravchik, “The Democrats Divided,” New Leader, September 16, 1974. 63. Coalition for a Democratic Majority, “An Analysis of the Draft Charter for the Democratic Party,” Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Correspondence, October 1973–November 1974, O’Hara Collection. 64. David S. Broder, “Rift Ends Charter Session,” Washington Post, August 19, 1974. 65. The Official Proceedings of the 1974 Conference on Democratic Party Organization and Policy, ed. Sheila Hixson (Washington, DC: Democratic National Committee, 1975). 66. Penn Kemble and Josh Muravchik, “Balancing the Democrats,” New Leader, January 20, 1975. 67. Coalition for a Democratic Majority, “Resolution on Charter,” Box 47, Folder: Democratic Party Charter Commission, Drafts and Background Material 2, O’Hara Collection. 68. CDM Notes, October 1974, Box 48, Folder: Democratic Party, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, October 1973–November 1974, O’Hara Collection. 69. Robert Strauss to Democratic members of the House, October 14, 1974, Box 149.G.8.5B, Folder: Party Reform, Fraser Papers. 70. Arthur Krim and John G. Stewart of DACEO to midterm delegates, Box 43, Folder: 1974 Charter Conference, Rosenblatt Papers. 71. See the series of letters contained in Box 149.G.8.4F, Folder: Charter, Fraser Papers. 72. Robert S. Boyd, “Charter Nails Down Reforms But Is Short of Dems’ Goals,” Detroit Free Press, December 9, 1974. 73. Christopher Lydon, “The Democrats and Reform,” New York Times, December 1, 1974. 74. Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Peter  L. Francia, “Orga nized Labor: Adaptive Strategies in Challenging Times,” in Interest Group Politics, ed. Allan  J. Cigler, Burdett  A. Loomis, and Anthony  J. Nownes (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press, 2016); Clyde Wilcox and Rentaro Ida, “Interest Groups in American Elections,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Parties and Interest Groups, ed. L. Sandy Maisel and Jeffrey M. Berry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 75. Compare this to Cohen et al., Party Decides.

Chapter 6 1. Nelson Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Byron E. Shafer, Quiet Revolution: The Strug gle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics (New York: Russell Sage, 1983). 2. Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 166, 168. Both candidate-centered and “aty pical” interpretations tend to overestimate Car ter’s relative independence from traditional Democratic groups. While Car ter’s nomination did indeed take many traditional party elites by surprise, this was not the case with other impor tant interest groups and movement activists in the party, which gave him impor tant legitimacy.

234

Notes to Pages 131–136

Early support from the UAW president, Leonard Woodcock, as well as several prominent African American civil rights and evangelical leaders was vital to Car ter’s success in the nominating contest. Moreover, whatever extra degree of autonomy Car ter may have gained by circumventing traditional party elites en route to the nomination was likely mitigated by his surprisingly narrow margin of victory in the general election. See Taylor  E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 100–103; Martin Halpern, “Jimmy Car ter and the UAW: Failure of an Alliance,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26 (1996); Burton I. Kaufman and Scott Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Car ter, Jr. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 3. Tracy Roof, American Labor, Congress, and the Welfare State, 1935–2010 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 163. 4. Cohen et al., Party Decides. 5. See the promotional material in Box 10, Folder 2: Democratic Review, National Issues Conference 1975, Steven Schlossberg Collection, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. 6. Democratic National Issues Convention, “Statement of Purpose,” Box 10, Folder 2: Democratic Forum, National Issues Conference 1975, Schlossberg Collection. 7. Democratic National Issues Convention program, Box 10, Folder 2: Democratic Forum, National Issues Conference 1975, Schlossberg Collection. 8. Walter  F. Mondale, The Accountability of Power: Toward a Responsible Presidency (New York: David McKay, 1975), 229–255. 9. Patrick Andelic, “Donkey Work: Redefining the Democratic Party in an ‘Age of Conservatism,’ 1972–1984” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 2015), 154. 10. Franklin  D. Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address, available at https://www .presidency.ucsb.edu. 11. Stephen K. Bailey, Congress Makes a Law: The Story Behind the Employment Act of 1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950); Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1995), chap. 10. 12. On the crisis of the postwar economic growth regime, see Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Alan Wolfe, Amer ica’s Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth (New York: Pantheon, 1981); and Melvyn Dubofsky, “Jimmy Car ter and the End of the Politics of Productivity,” in The Car ter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post–New Deal Era, ed. Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). 13. Quoted in Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 270. 14. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 268. 15. DSOC newsletter, Box 58, Folder 8: Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee 1977, Victor Reuther Collection, Reuther Library. 16. See the memos collected in Box 200, Folder: ICEP, 1975, Leonard Woodcock Collection, Reuther Library. 17. For details of the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, see Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 270–271; Gary Mucciaroni, The Political Failure of Employment Policy, 1945–1982 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 93–100; Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of

Notes to Pages 136–139

235

Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 130–140; Harvey L. Schantz and Richard H. Schmidt, “The Evolution of Humphrey-Hawkins,” Policy Studies Journal 8 (1979); and Patrick Andelic, Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative Amer ica, 1974–1994 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019), chap. 3. 18. M. E. Sharpe to ICEP, Box 201, Folder 1, Woodcock Collection. 19. For instance, see the Initiative Committee for National Economic Planning, “For a National Economic Planning System,” Challenge 18 (1975); Hubert Humphrey, “Planning Economic Policy,” Challenge 18 (1975); Derek Shearer and Lee Webb, “How to Plan in a Mixed Economy,” Nation, October 11, 1975; Augustus Hawkins, “Full Employment: The HR 50 Approach,” New York Times, October 10, 1975; Ann Crittenden, “Pressure Seen for More Explicit Government Role in US Economic Affairs,” New York Times, November 11, 1975; Paul McCracken, “The Targets for Economic Policy,” Wall Street Journal, November  25, 1975; and Robert Heilbroner, “The American Plan,” New York Times Magazine, June 25, 1976. 20. See the FEAC materials collected in Box 23, Americans for Democratic Action Records, Wisconsin State Historical Society, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; as well as the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting minutes for February 16–23, 1976, and May 19, 1976, Box 40, Minutes of the AFL-CIO Executive Council Meeting, AFL-CIO Records, George Meany Memorial Archives, University of Maryland, Silver Springs, MD. 21. See the materials in Box 82, Folder: Correspondence, Augustus Hawkins Papers, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA. 22. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962). 23. Marjorie Gellerman and Jack Clark, Democracy ’76 Worksheet No.  1, February  1, 1976, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Records, Tamiment Library, New York University, New York, NY. 24. Michael Harrington and Marjorie Gellerman to signers of the Democracy ’76 Statement of Purpose, June 4, 1976, Box 58, Folder 7: Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee 1976, Reuther Collection. 25. Timothy Stanley, “Going Beyond the New Deal: Socialists and the Democratic Party in the 1970s,” in Making Sense of American Liberalism, ed. Jonathan Bell and Timothy Stanley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 68. 26. Stuart Eizenstat to Governor Car ter, n.d., Box 20, Folder: Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, 9/76, Stuart Eizenstat Papers, Jimmy Car ter Presidential Library, Atlanta, GA. 27. Eizenstat to Car ter, n.d., Eizenstat Papers. 28. Jimmy Car ter, “A New Beginning: Presentation to the Platform Committee of the Democratic Party,” Section A: The Economy, June 16, 1976, Box 20, Folder 35, Mildred Jeffrey Collection, Reuther Library. 29. Majority Leader Thomas O’Neill, Submission of the House Democratic Leadership to the Platform Committee, May  18, 1976, Box 1, Folder 3: Democratic Party Platform, 1976, Schlossberg Collection. 30. AFL-CIO platform proposals, Box 1, Folder 4: Democratic Party Platform, 1976, Schlossberg Collection. 31. Labor Coalition Clearinghouse, Delegate Update, May 1976, Box 12B, Folder 13, DSA Records. 32. Democratic Party Platform of 1976, July 12, 1976, available at www.presidency.ucsb .edu.

236

Notes to Pages 139–141

33. Michael Harrington, The Long Distance Runner: An Autobiography (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 104. 34. Quoted in Donald Fraser to interested Democrats, “1978 Democratic Mid-Term Conference,” January 25, 1978, Box 149.C.12.2F, Folder: Democratic Conference, Donald Fraser Papers, Minnesota History Center, Saint Paul, MN. 35. Gary M. Fink, “F. Ray Marshall: Secretary of Labor and Jimmy Car ter’s Ambassador to Orga nized Labor,” Labor History 37 (1996). 36. W. Carl Biven, Jimmy Car ter’s Economy: Policy in an Age of Limits (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 37. W. Michael Blumenthal to President Jimmy Car ter, June  6, 1977, Box 221, Folder: Humphrey-Hawkins [Bill] [O/A 6345] [1], Eizenstat Papers. 38. Lyle Gramley to Charles Schultze, July 12, 1977, Box 221, Folder: Humphrey-Hawkins [Bill] [O/A 6345] [2], Eizenstat Papers. 39. Lyle E. Gramley and William Spring to W. Michael Blumenthal et al., September 23, 1977, Box 221, Folder: Humphrey-Hawkins [Bill] [O/A 6342] [1], Eizenstat Papers. To hedge their bets on the issue of a right to a job, the White House senior staff ran the proposed language by the Office of Legal Counsel, which reassured them that “reasonable judicial interpretation would find no actionable entitlement.” It went on to warn that “it is likely, however, that the question would at least be litigated and therefore we recommend alternative language might be used.” Deputy assistant attorney general to Margaret McKenna, deputy counsel to the president, October 26, 1977, Box 221, Folder: Humphrey-Hawkins [Bill], [O/A 6345] [4], Eizenstat Papers. 40. Stuart Eizenstat to Jimmy Car ter, May 24, 1977, Box 221, Folder: Humphrey-Hawkins [Bill] [O/A 6345] [2], Eizenstat Papers. 41. Valerie Pinson to Charles Schultze, June  30, 1977, Box 221, Folder: HumphreyHawkins [Bill] [O/A 6345] [2], Eizenstat Papers. 42. Stuart Eizenstat to Bert Carp, April  11, 1977, Box 221, Folder: Humphrey-Hawkins [Bill] [O/A 6345] [2], Eizenstat Papers. 43. White House senior staff to Jimmy Car ter, “Additional Material for 1 PM Meeting with Senator Baker,” n.d., Box 22, Folder: [Employment]—Humphrey-Hawkins [Bill] [4], Office of Domestic Policy Staff, Car ter Library. 44. DSOC executive secretary Carl Shier to William Winpisinger, February 20, 1977, Box 58, Folder 8: Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, 1977, Reuther Collection. 45. Democratic Agenda press release, “Full Employment Activists Foresee Mass Demonstrations, ‘Accountability Sessions’ for President Car ter, Congress,” November 13, 1977, Box 12A, Folder 11, DSA Records. 46. Democratic Agenda, “Description of Washington Conference Intentions and Goals,” Box 12A, Folder 2, DSA Records. 47. See the Democratic Agenda strategy memos and promotional materials in Box 12A, Folder 2, DSA Records. See also A. H. Raskin, “Nationwide Rallies for ‘Decent’ Jobs at ‘Decent’ Wages,” New York Times, August 31, 1977. 48. William Clayborne, “Democratic Groups Catch President in a Crossfire,” Washington Post, November 12, 1977. 49. Timothy Stanley, Kennedy vs. Car ter: The 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010).

Notes to Pages 141–145

237

50. Quoted in Maurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 334. 51. Weir, Politics and Jobs, 131. 52. Jeffry Rafshoon et  al. to the president, November  22, 1978, Box 38, Folder: 12/8/78—Remarks—Democratic Mid-Term Conference, Memphis, TN [1], Staff Offices Speechwriter’s Chronological File, Car ter Library; Jeffry Rafshoon et al. to the president, December 3, 1978, Box 38, Folder: 12/8/78—Remarks—Democratic Mid-Term Conference, Memphis, TN [2], Staff Offices Speechwriter’s Chronological File. 53. Daniel  J. Galvin, Presidential Party Building: Dwight  D. Eisenhower to George  W. Bush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 219. 54. Tim Kraft to undisclosed recipients, September 7, 1978, Box 238, Folder: Democratic National Committee [6], Rick Hutcheson Subject Files, Car ter Library. 55. T. R. Reid, “Democrats Seeking to Curb Floor Fights,” Washington Post, December 1, 1978. 56. Rick Hutcheson to Hamilton Jordan and Tim Kraft, September  11, 1978, Box 241, Folder: Midterm Conference, 1978 [4], Hutcheson Subject Files. 57. Augustus F. Hawkins, oral history interview, UCLA Oral History Program, for the California State Archives State Government Oral History Program, available at http://www .oac.cdlib.org. 58. August Hawkins to conference delegates, November 28, 1978, Box 12, Folder: [Wall, James—Miscellaneous—Democratic National Committee and Party Conference, 1978], James Wall Subject Files, Car ter Library. 59. Nor was this tactic of denying interest-group access to the president reserved only for this instance. On another occasion, policy disagreements and escalating personal affronts between Car ter and Meany resulted in a total cessation of communication between the two. The White House declined meetings with Meany from September 1978 to January 1979. As one White House memo reported, “Since one of the AFL-CIO’s most impor tant political resources with their affiliated unions is access to the Administration, the decision not to meet has created a special problem for George Meany.” See Dark, Unions and the Democrats, 116. 60. Douglas Fraser to Marjorie Phyfe, n.d., Box 12A, Folder 24, DSA Records. 61. DNC memo from Elaine Kamarck, October 6, 1978, Box 241, Folder: Midterm Conference 1978 [5], Hutcheson Subject Files. 62. Bob Carolla to Donald Fraser, “August 2 Democratic Conference Meeting,” August 3, 1978, Box 149.C.12.2F, Folder: Democratic Conference, Fraser Papers. 63. Carolla to Fraser, “August 2 Democratic Conference Meeting,” Fraser Papers. 64. Victor Reisel, “Inside Labor,” June 28, 1978, Box 12A, Folder 17, DSA Records. 65. Quoted in Marjorie Phyfe to Michael Harrington, “Memphis,” August 4, 1978, Box 12A, Folder 17, DSA Records. 66. David S. Broder and Bill Peterson, “Key Democrats to Shun Midterm Parley,” Washington Post, December 4, 1978; David S. Broder and Edward Walsh, “New Rules for Democrats,” Washington Post, December 8, 1978. 67. A copy of this resolution is available in Box 224, Folder: Midterm Conference [1], Chief of Staff Betty Rainwater’s Subject Files, Car ter Library. 68. Edward Walsh and Warren Brown, “Austerity Prevails Despite Murmurs, White House Says,” Washington Post, December 12, 1978.

238

Notes to Pages 147–155

Chapter 7 1. Editorial, “Bring Back the Pols,” New Republic, March 22, 1980. 2. Editorial, “Bring Back the Pols.” 3. Editorial, “Bring Back the Pols.” 4. Philip  A. Klinkner, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956–1993 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 155. 5. Kenneth  S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Curtis Atkins, “Forging a New Democratic Party: The Politics of the Third Way from Clinton to Obama” (PhD diss., York University, 2015); Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Stephanie  L. Mudge, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 260–303; Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Listlessness: The Democrats Since 1981,” paper prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, August 31, 2019. 6. Meg Greenfield, “Reflecting on Feminism, Politics, and the Democratic Party,” Washington Post, December 9, 1980. 7. James MacGregor Burns, “Coming to the Aid of the Party,” Psychology Today, July 1984, Box 285, Folder 6, National Women’s Political Caucus Records, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 8. William G. Mayer, “Superdelegates: Reforming the Reforms Revisited,” in Reforming the Presidential Nomination Process, ed. Steven S. Smith and Melanie J. Springer (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 91; David  E. Price, Bringing Back the Parties (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1984), 160. 9. Branko Marcetic, “The Secret History of Super Delegates,” In These Times, May  16, 2016. 10. William Crotty, Party Reform (New York: Longman, 1983), 89. 11. Klinkner, Losing Parties, 163. 12. Lanny Davis, “Reforming the Reforms,” New Republic, February  17, 1982. See also Crotty, Party Reform, 137. 13. Price, Bringing Back the Parties, 167. 14. Al From, The New Democrats and the Return to Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 43. 15. Byron E. Shafer, Bifurcated Politics: Evolution and Reform in the National Party Conventions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 111. 16. From, New Democrats, 50–51. 17. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 98. 18. From, New Democrats, 113, 75. 19. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 61. 20. From, New Democrats, 52–53. 21. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 74. 22. From, New Democrats, 38. 23. From, New Democrats, 71–72. 24. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 80.

Notes to Pages 156–162

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25. William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency (Washington, DC: Progressive Policy Institute, 1989), 3–4. 26. Galston and Kamarck, Politics of Evasion, 4–7, 19. 27. Mudge, Leftism Reinvented, 263. 28. Ironically, while the CDM has fashioned its critique of the New Politics as a means to draw back to the party those white, especially male, working-class voters later dubbed “Reagan Democrats,” many prominent CDM members, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Kampleman, Richard Shifter, Ben Wattenberg, and others, accepted official positions in the Reagan administration. See Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), 180–219. 29. CDM to DLC, March  2, 1989, Box 66, Folder: DLC, Peter Rosenblatt Papers, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX. 30. From, New Democrats, 60. At the meeting, CDM-ers encouraged From and Marshall to take up the fight against the recent “equal division” mandate dividing convention delegates equally between men and women. DLC founders, however, balked at taking on a fight that they were likely to lose anyway and that would also highlight how few women were in their own organization. 31. Ben J. Wattenberg, Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo- Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 148. 32. Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Jason Stahl, Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Mudge, Leftism Reinvented. 33. Michael Steinhardt, quoted in Mudge, Leftism Reinvented, 291. 34. Robert Shapiro and Doug Ross, “Enterprise Economics: Rebuilding the American Economy,” in Mandate for Change, ed. Will Marshall and Michael Schram (New York: Berkley Books, 1993). 35. Randall Rothenberg, The Neoliberals: Creating the New American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 80. 36. Democratic Leadership Council, The New Orleans Declaration: A Democratic Agenda for the 1990s, available at www.ndol.org. 37. Bruce Miroff, The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 273–274. 38. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 191. 39. “A New Covenant with the American People,” 1992 Democratic Party platform, American Presidency Project, available at www.presidency.uscb.edu. See also Stephen  A. Borrelli, “Finding the Third Way: Bill Clinton, the DLC, and the Democratic Platform of 1992,” Journal of Policy History 13 (2001). 40. William J. Clinton, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in New York,” July 16, 1992, American Presidency Project. 41. From, New Democrats, 190. 42. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 212. 43. From, New Democrats, 207. 44. From, New Democrats, 211. 45. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 219. 46. Stahl, Right Moves, 160.

240

Notes to Pages 162–168

47. Philip A. Klinkner, “Bill Clinton and the Politics of the New Liberalism,” in Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality, ed. Adolph Reed Jr. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 22. 48. From, New Democrats, 216. 49. From, New Democrats, 229. 50. Stahl, Right Moves, 172. 51. Atkins, “Forging a New Democratic Party,” 229. 52. From, New Democrats, 246. 53. Daniel  J. Galvin, Presidential Party Building: Dwight  D. Eisenhower to George  W. Bush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 234. 54. Galvin, Presidential Party Building, 238. 55. John S. Jackson III, Nathan S. Bigelow, and John C. Green, “The State of the Party Elites: National Convention Delegates, 1992–2004,” in State of the Parties: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Parties, 5th ed., ed. John C. Green and Daniel J. Coffey (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 66–68. 56. From, New Democrats, 255. 57. Daniel DiSalvo, “The Death and Life of the New Democrats,” Forum 6 (2008). 58. Philip Klinkner, “Democratic Party Ideology in the 1990s: New Democrats or Modern Republicans?,” in The Politics of Ideas: Intellectual Challenges Facing the American Political Parties (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 117. 59. John H. Aldrich, Jamie L. Carson, Brad T. Gomez, and David W. Rohde, Change and Continuity in the 2016 Elections (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press, 2019), 135–154. 60. Galvin, Presidential Party Building, 242. 61. Bill Bradley, “A Party Inverted,” New York Times, March 30, 2005. 62. Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party After 9/11 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 63. Matt Bai, The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (New York: Penguin, 2007); Theda Skocpol, “When Wealthy Contributors Join Forces: New Research on Donor Consortia in US Politics,” paper prepared for “Purchasing Power: The Next Generation of Research on Money and Politics,” Ford Foundation, June 16–17, 2016. 64. DiSalvo, “Death and Life of the New Democrats,” 9. 65. DiSalvo, “Death and Life of the New Democrats,” 14. 66. Theda Skocpol and Lawrence R. Jacobs, “Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics,” in Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama’s First Two Years, ed. Theda Skocpol and Lawrence  R. Jacobs (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), 10. See also Obama’s letter to the editors of Black Commentator, June 23, 2006 (emphasis in original); and DiSalvo, “Death and Life of the New Democrats,” 1. 67. In fact, in 2005 Clinton had been appointed to head the DLC’s new “American Dream Initiative,” where she called for a “cease-fire” between party liberals and centrists as she positioned herself for the 2008 nomination. See Ronald Brownstein, “Clinton’s New Job: Defining the Center,” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 2005. 68. Susan  M. Hartmann, “Hillary Clinton’s Candidacy in Historical and Global Context,” in Obama, Clinton, Palin: Making History in Election 2008, ed. Liette Gidlow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 89.

Notes to Pages 168–175

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69. Michael Nelson, “The Setting: Diversifying the Presidential Talent Pool,” in The Elections of 2008, ed. Michael Nelson (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010), 13. 70. George Packer, “The Choice,” New Yorker, January 28, 2008. 71. Tera W. Hunter, “The Forgotten Legacy of Shirley Chisholm: Race and Gender in the 2008 Democratic Primaries,” in Gidlow, Obama, Clinton, Palin, 73. 72. John S. Jackson and John C. Green, “The State of Party Elites: National Convention Delegates, 1992–2008,” in State of the Parties: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Parties, 6th ed., ed. John C. Green and Daniel J. Coffey (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 58, 72–73. 73. John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (New York: Scribner, 2002), 37; Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, The Obama Coalition in the 2012 Election and Beyond, Center for American Progress, December 2012. 74. Pew Research Center, “Inside Obama’s Sweeping Victory,” November 5, 2008. 75. Such a legacy is most pronounced in the realm of social policy, where the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act cemented in place a transition from the New Deal– Great Society welfare state to a neoliberal workfare regime. Moreover, Obama’s economic policy personnel reflected the lasting power of New Democratic–PPI expertise in the appointments of a roster of Clinton veterans, causing some concern about a third Clinton term after all. See Eva Bertram, The Workfare State: Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

Chapter 8 Note to epigraph: Inaugural address by President Barack Obama, January 21, 2013, available at www.obamawhitehouse.archive.gov. 1. Transcript of “This Is Your Victory,” available at www.edition.cnn.com. 2. Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2007), 3–4. 3. Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 4. See Sidney M. Milkis and Jesse Rhodes, “Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and the Future of the ‘New American Party System,’ ” Forum 7 (2009). 5. James T. Kloppenberg, “Barack Obama and the Traditions of Progressive Reform,” in The Progressives’ Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State, ed. Stephen Skowronek, Stephen M. Engel, and Bruce Ackerman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 6. At a preinaugural press conference, Obama described himself as a “fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans.” Quoted in Kerry Eleveld, Don’t Tell Me to Wait: How the Fight for Gay Rights Transformed America and Transformed Obama’s Presidency (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 33. 7. Jeremy  L. Cox, “Politics in Motion: Barack Obama’s Use of Movement Metaphors,” American Communication Journal 14 (2012). 8. Quoted in Sidney M. Milkis, Jesse H. Rhodes, and Emily J. Charnock, “What Happened to Post-Partisanship? Barack Obama and the New American Party System,” Perspectives on Politics 10 (2012).

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Notes to Pages 175–179

9. Daniel J. Galvin, “Obama Built a Policy Legacy. But He Didn’t Do Enough to Build the Democratic Party,” Washington Post, November  16, 2016; Julia  R. Azari, “Party Foul: How Obama Made Partisan, Not Party, Politics in a Polarized Environment,” in The Obama Legacy, ed. Bert  A. Rockman and Andrew Rudalevige (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019). 10. Daniel J. Galvin and Chloe N. Thurston, “The Democrats’ Misplaced Faith in Policy Feedback,” Forum 15 (2017): 333; Daniel  J. Galvin, Presidential Party Building: Dwight  D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 11. David Karpf, The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 12. Daniel DiSalvo, “The Death and Life of the New Democrats,” Forum 6 (2008): 15. 13. Scott Keeter, Cary Funk, and Courtney Edwards, “Deaniacs and Democrats: Howard Dean’s Campaign Activists,” in State of the Parties: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Parties, 5th ed., ed. John C. Green and Daniel J. Coffey (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 154. 14. Daniel Kreiss, Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 15. On the 2000–2006 Republican innovations that prefigured much of the Obama electoral campaign, see Sidney M. Milkis and Jesse H. Rhodes, “George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and the ‘New’ American Party System,” Perspectives on Politics 5 (2007); Milkis and Rhodes, “Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and the Future of the ‘New American Party System’ ”; and Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han, Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in Amer ica (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 39–42. On Dean’s party-building efforts in the DNC, see Elaine C. Kamarck, “Assessing Howard Dean’s Fifty State Strategy and the 2006 Midterm Elections,” Forum 4 (2006). 16. Daniel  J. Galvin, “Changing Course: Reversing Orga nizational Trajectory of the Democratic Party from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama,” Forum 6 (2008). 17. Daniel M. Shea, “The Obama Netroots Campaign, Young Voters, and the Future of Local Party Organizations,” in State of the Parties: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Parties, 6th  ed., ed. John  C. Green and Daniel  J. Coffey (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 142–143; Kamarck, “Assessing Howard Dean’s Fifty State Strategy”; Barbara Trish, “Organizing for America,” in Green and Coffey, State of the Parties (6th ed.), 165. 18. Sidney M. Milkis and John Warren York, “Barack Obama, Organizing for Action, and Executive-Centered Partisanship,” Studies in American Political Development 31 (2017): 1. 19. Ari Melber, “Looking Back at One Year of Organizing for America,” Nation, January  14, 2010; Galvin, Presidential Party Building, 259–262; Galvin, “Obama Built a Policy Legacy”; Trish, “Organizing for America.” 20. See Diane J. Heith, “Obama and the Public Presidency: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There,” in The Obama Presidency: Appraisals and Prospects, ed. Bert A. Rockman, Andrew Rudalevige, and Colin Campbell (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2012). 21. Milkis and York, “Barack Obama, Organizing for Action, and Executive-Centered Partisanship,” 2. 22. Obama, quoted in Heith, “Obama and the Public Presidency,” 129. On the Office of Public Liaison, see Mark A. Peterson, “The Presidency and Orga nized Interests: White House Patterns of Interest Group Liaison,” American Political Science Review 86 (1992); Joseph A. Pika, “The White House Office of Public Liaison,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 39 (2009);

Notes to Pages 179–186

243

and Katherine Krimmel, “The Efficiencies and Pathologies of Special Interest Partisanship,” Studies in American Political Development 31 (2017). 23. Lawrence R. Jacobs, “The Privileges of Access: Interest Groups and the White House,” in Rockman, Rudalevige, and Campbell, Obama Presidency, 156. 24. Jacobs, “Privileges of Access.” 25. Jacobs, “Privileges of Access,” 153. 26. McKenna and Han, Groundbreakers, 11. 27. McKenna and Han, Groundbreakers, 199. 28. Jonathan Martin, “Democrats, Looking Past Obama, Are a Party Without a Cause,” New York Times, July 23, 2016; Robert Draper, “A Post-Obama Democratic Party in Search of Itself,” New York Times Magazine, November 1, 2017. 29. Lawrence R. Jacobs, “Barack Obama and the Angry Left: The Fight for Progressive Realism,” in Obama at the Crossroads: Politics, Markets, and the Battle for America’s Future, ed. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond King (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 30. See David Remnick, “Obama and Gay Marriage,” New Yorker, June 22, 2011. 31. Paul Frymer, Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in Amer ica (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 32. Jeffery M. Berry and Clyde Wilcox, The Interest Group Society (New York: Routledge, 2018), 30. 33. Christopher Baylor, First to the Party: The Group Origins of Party Transformation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 204–215. 34. Sidney M. Milkis and Boris Heersink, “Through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall: Barack Obama and the Gay Rights Movement,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, California, September  3–6, 2015; Timothy Stewart-Winter, “The Gay Rights President,” in The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment, ed. Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Richard E. Matland and Andrea L. Walker, “Obama and Social Policy: Acclamation or Alienation Among Women, Minorities, and Gays?,” in Transforming America: Barack Obama in the White House, ed. Steven E. Schier (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). 35. Meg Jacobs, “Obama’s Fight Against Global Warming,” in Zelizer, Presidency of Barack Obama. 36. Jacobs, “Obama’s Fight Against Global Warming,” 71–72. 37. Sarah R. Coleman, “A Promise Unfulfilled, an Imperfect Legacy: Obama and Immigration Policy,” in Zelizer, Presidency of Barack Obama, 183. 38. Kenneth S. Lowande and Sidney M. Milkis, “ ‘We Can’t Wait’: Barack Obama, Partisan Polarization and the Administrative Presidency,” Forum 12 (2014): 15–16. 39. Coleman, “Obama and Immigration Policy,” 188. 40. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 158–160. 41. Peniel E. Joseph, “Barack Obama and the Movement for Black Lives: Race, Democracy, and Criminal Justice in the Age of Ferguson,” in Zelizer, Presidency of Barack Obama, 134. 42. Joseph, “Barack Obama and the Movement for Black Lives,” 134.

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Notes to Pages 186–190

43. Joseph, “Barack Obama and the Movement for Black Lives,” 139. 44. Chris Weller, “How Obama Became the First President to Oversee a Drop in the Federal Prison Population,” Business Insider, January 10, 2017. 45. Christina Wolbrecht, The Politics of Women’s Rights: Parties, Positions, and Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 46. See Matland and Walker, “Obama and Social Policy.” 47. Laura Bassett, “Women’s Rights Groups Criticize Obama for ‘Excuses and Silence’ on Abortion Policy,” Huffington Post, June 14, 2016; Jasmine Garsd, “Should the US Reconsider Its Stand on Foreign Aid for Abortion Clinics?” National Public Radio, May 2, 2016. 48. Darren T. Warren, “The Unsurprising Failure of Labor Law Reform and the Turn to Administrative Action,” in Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama’s First Two Years, ed. Theda Skocpol and Lawrence R. Jacobs (New York: Russell Sage, 2011), 194; Taylor E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1999); Peter L. Francia, “Do Unions Still Matter in US Elections? Assessing Labor’s Political Power and Significance,” Forum 10 (2012). 49. Bureau of Labor Statistics News Release, “Union Members—2016,” January 26, 2017, available at www.bls.gov. 50. Jake Rosenfeld, What Unions No Longer Do (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 31–44. 51. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010). See also Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 52. Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 53. Timothy J. Minchin, Labor Under Fire: A History of the AFL- CIO Since 1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 2. 54. Marie Gottschalk, The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Healthcare in the United States (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2000). 55. Warren, “Unsurprising Failure of Labor Law Reform,” 214–218; Noam Scheiber, “White House Increases Overtime Eligibility by Millions,” New York Times, May  17, 2016; Binyamin Appelbaum and Michael  D. Shear, “Once Skeptical of Executive Power, Obama Has Come to Embrace It,” New York Times, August 13, 2016. 56. “Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas,” December 6, 2011, available at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. 57. Paul Starr, “Achievement Without Credit: The Obama Presidency and Inequality,” in Zelizer, Presidency of Barack Obama, 48. 58. Michael  D. Shear, “Obama Defends Trans-Pacific Deal Against Strong Anti-Trade Tide,” New York Times, August 2, 2016. 59. Reid Wilson, “Union Membership Hits New Low,” Hill, January 26, 2017. 60. James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Vanessa Williamson, “From the Bargaining Table to the Ballot Box: Political Effects of Right to Work Laws,” NEBR Working Paper No. 24259, February 2019, available at https://www.nber.org /papers/w24259. 61. Sharece Thrower, “The President and the Executive Branch,” in Rockman and Rudalevige, Obama Legacy.

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Conclusion 1. David S. Meyer and Sidney Tarrow, eds., The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo, eds., Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 2. See Sidney M. Milkis, Jesse H. Rhodes, and Emily J. Charnock, “What Happened to Post-Partisanship? Barack Obama and the New American Party System,” Perspectives on Politics 10 (2012). 3. Daniel J. Galvin, Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 4. Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 5. Frances E. Lee, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Morris P. Fiorina, Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2017). 6. Daniel J. Galvin, “Changing Course: Reversing the Orga nizational Trajectory of the Democratic Party from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama,” Forum 6 (2008); Daniel  J. Galvin, “Obama Built a Policy Legacy. But He Didn’t Do Enough to Build the Democratic Party,” Washington Post, November 16, 2016; Julia R. Azari, “Party Foul: How Obama Made Partisan, Not Party, Politics in a Polarized Environment,” in The Obama Legacy, ed. Bert Rockman and Andrew Rudalevige (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019). 7. Sidney M. Milkis and John Warren York, “Barack Obama, Organizing for Action, and Executive-Centered Partisanship,” Studies in American Political Development 31 (2017): 8. 8. For instance, see Remarks of President Barack Obama, Weekly Address, May 17, 2014, available at www.obamawhitehouse.archive.gov. 9. In addition to Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), see also Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 10. Andrew Rudalevige, “Obama and the Unilateral Presidency: Imperial or Imperiled?” in Rockman and Rudalevige, Obama Legacy. 11. Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor, Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements, and the Transformation of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 40. 12. The literature on polarization is vast and growing. For helpful overviews, see Geoffrey C. Layman, Thomas M. Carsey, and Juliana Menasce Horowitz, “Party Polarization in America: Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences,” Annual Review of Political Science 9 (2006); James A. Thurber and Antoine Yoshinaka, American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and James E. Campbell, Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 13. Matthew Levendusky, The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For contrasting perspectives on polarization in the mass public, see Alan I. Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale

246

Notes to Pages 197–202

University Press, 2010); and Morris P. Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (New York: Longman, 2011). 14. Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 15. William G. Mayer, “How Parties Nominate Presidents,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Parties and Interest Groups, ed. L. Sandy Maisel and Jeffrey M. Berry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Barbara Norrander, The Imperfect Primary: Oddities, Biases, and Strengths of US Presidential Nomination Politics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 22. 16. John F. Bibby, “Party Renewal in the National Republican Party,” in Party Renewal in Amer ica: Theory and Practice, ed. Gerald M. Pomper (New York: Praeger, 1980). 17. William Crotty, Party Reform (New York: Longman, 1983), 206. 18. Philip  A. Klinkner, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956–1993 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 19. Galvin, Presidential Party Building. 20. Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 60. 21. Brian M. Conley, “The Politics of Party Renewal: The ‘Ser vice Party’ and the Origins of the Post-Goldwater Republican Right,” Studies in American Political Development 27 (2013). 22. Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), chaps. 4 and 8; Christopher Baylor, First to the Party: The Group Origins of Political Transformation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 23. Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics. 24. Republican National Committee, Growth and Opportunity Project, 2013, available at https://gop.com/growth-and-opportunity-project. 25. RNC, Growth and Opportunity Project. 26. Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics, 1. 27. Report of the Unity Reform Commission, December  8–9, 2017, available at www .democrats.org. 28. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 29. Mandate for Reform: A Report of the Commission for Party Structure and Delegate Selection to the Democratic National Committee, Box 157, Folder: Mandate for Reform, April 1970, George S. McGovern Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. 30. Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), chap. 2; Christopher G. Faricy, Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 31. E.  E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in Amer ica (Boston: Wadsworth, 1960), 34–35. 32. Kay Lehman Schlozman, Henry E. Brady, and Sidney Verba, Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the People’s Voice in the New Gilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), x. 33. On the limits of business influence in American politics, see Mark A. Smith, American Business and Political Power: Public Opinion, Elections, and Democracy (Chicago: Uni-

Notes to Pages 202–205

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versity of Chicago Press, 2000); David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in Amer ica (New York: Basic Books, 1989). For a formal presentation of the barriers to public interest-group formation, see Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). For a critique, see James  Q. Wilson, Political Organizations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 34. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1977); John D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Matt Grossman, The Not-So-Special Interests: Interest Groups, Public Representation, and American Governance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 35. Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Schlozman, Brady, and Verba, Unequal and Unrepresented, 153, table 8.1. 36. Grossman, Not-So-Special Interests. 37. Jake Rosenfeld, What Unions No Longer Do (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), chap. 7. 38. Jeffrey M. Berry, The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999); Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-TakeAll Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 39. Dara Z. Strolovich, Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 40. Lawrence R. Jacobs, “The Privileges of Access: Interest Groups and the White House,” in The Obama Presidency: Appraisals and Prospects, ed. Bert A. Rockman, Andrew Rudalevige, and Colin Campbell (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press, 2012), 150–151. 41. See Julia Azari and Seth Masket, “Is the Democratic Party Becoming Too Democratic?,” New York Times, December 11, 2017. 42. Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro, Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

INDEX

Abel, I. W., 52, 72, 106, 108 abortion rights. See reproductive freedom Abzug, Bella, 69, 81 ACORN, 167 advocacy, definition of, 16 “advocacy explosion,” 17, 18fig., 203 advocacy party, definition of, 2–3, 15–16 affirmative action: criticisms of, 100, 112, 230n12; defense of, 119; full employment policy and, 135; McGovern-Fraser Commission guidelines for, 78, 81–82, 96, 98; Mikulski Commission weakening of, 116–20; in 1972 Democratic platform, 102; Unity Out of Diversity guidelines for, 121, 124–25, 127. See also quota system Affordable Care Act (ACA), 178–79, 188 African Americans: delegate seats held by, 96–98, 97fig., 121fig.; integration into Democratic Party, 19, 35, 39–42; in Obama’s electoral coalition, 169. See also civil rights movement; race relations Agriculture Adjustment Administration, 40 Alabama, 1968 credentials challenges against, 62–63 Alcorn, Meade, 198 Alder, Thomas, 60, 70 Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), 73, 94, 137 America 2000, 164 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 182 American Dream Initiative, 240n67 American exceptionalism, 27 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 28, 31 American Federation of Labor– Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO): alliance with Democratic Party, 32–33; Car ter administration and, 146; CDM

supported by, 112; counter-reform initiatives of, 115; full employment policy endorsed by, 137–38; hostility to New Politics, 71–72, 89, 92, 106–8, 110, 222n13; Humphrey supported by, 54–55; LGBTQ rights advocacy, 182; O’Hara’s relationship with, 230n12; party platform development and, 101 American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME): Clinton’s 1992 speech to, 159; full employment policy endorsed by, 136; LGBTQ rights advocacy, 182; McGovern endorsed by, 107–8, 229n69; New Politics movement supported by, 73; reform movement supported by, 94 American Federation of Teachers, 108, 182 American Political Science Association (APSA), 43 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009), 183 Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), 43; Car ter administration and, 146; Dump Johnson movement and, 49–53; full employment policy endorsed by, 137, 141; McCarthy endorsed by, 51–53; part platform development and, 101; party charter opposed by, 105; reform initiatives of, 63, 70, 81; split within, 70 America Votes, 167 “anchoring groups,” 18–19 Andrew, Joe, 164 antilynching legislation, 38, 216n56 “antiparty,” New Politics reformers mischaracterized as, 12–13, 210n39 Ashmore, Harry, 60 Association of State Democratic Chairs (ASDC), 104, 111, 123

250

Index

asymmetric polarization, 196–201 Atlantic City convention of 1964, 42, 45, 47 Bailey, John, 57–58 Baker, Ella, 45 Barkan, Alexander, 71–72, 106–7, 113, 116, 124 Baron, Alan, 116 Battista, Andrew, 31 Bawn, Kathleen, 19 Beer, Samuel, 70, 83 Beirne, Joseph, 52, 105 Bickel, Alexander, 60, 70 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (2002), 17, 166 “black cabinet,” Roosevelt administration, 39 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, 185–86, 190 Black Panthers, 47–48 Blair, Tony, 163 Bliss, Ray, 198 Blue Dog caucus, 164 Blumenthal, Michael, 139 Boko Haram, 187 Bond, Julian, 60, 69, 75 Bradley, Bill, 166 Brand New Congress, 199–200 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 183 Brown, John, 189 Buckley v. Valeo (1976), 17 Burns, James MacGregor, 43, 83, 84, 121, 149 Bush, George H. W., 165 Bush, George W., 164, 166–67, 185, 194 Butler, Paul, 43–45 California: McGovern’s primary victory in, 91–92, 99; 1972 challenge on delegation, 98–100 campaign finance laws, 17, 193, 211n53 cap-and-trade, 183 “captured” groups. See group capture Car ter, Hodding III, 125 Car ter, Jimmy: co-opting of full employment issue, 139–46; defeat of, 147–48; full employment policy demands under, 19–20, 134–39; Meany and, 144, 237n59; nomination of, 106, 131–32, 233n2; rise in unemployment under, 133–34; stagflation under, 133–34

CDM Notes, 126 Ceaser, James, 210n39 Center for American Progress, 167 Center for Political Reform, 71 Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 60 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 167 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 167 Challenge, 135 Charter Commission, 112, 120–26 Charter Conference Clearing House, 122, 124–25 charter proposal for party structure: aims of, 82–87, 84fig., 86fig.; opposition to, 102–5 Chicago convention of 1952, 42 Chicago convention of 1968, 10, 48, 61–65 Chicago Democratic Party, 33 Chisholm, Shirley, 81, 90–91 Christian Coalition, Republican Party advocacy for, 211n53 CIO. See Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Citizens United v. FEC (2010), 17 civil rights movement: Black Lives Matter movement, 185–86, 190; Dixiecrat rebellion, 25–27, 42; employment policy and, 135; New Deal order and, 25–27, 42–47; during Obama administration, 185–86 class: class struggle, reform movement framed as, 105–9, 112, 116–20; electoral demobilization resulting from, 28; formation of, 27–28 Cleveland, Grover, 30 Clinton, Bill, 165; governance and initiatives of, 160–63, 166, 172; impeachment of, 163; 1992 presidential campaign, 148, 158–60, 165; progressive centrist politics of, 163–64; support for, 165–66; triangulation strategy of, 162–63. See also Third Way Clinton, Hillary: American Dream Initiative and, 240n67; health-care initiative of, 161; Trans-Pacific Partnership and, 189; 2008 primary campaign, 167–68, 177; 2016 presidential campaign, 1–2, 200 closed caucuses, elimination of, 78

Index Clothing and Textile Workers. See Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) coalition, Democratic, 15–16 coalition, New Deal: civil rights and, 42–47; contradictions inherent in, 39–42; federalism in, 42–47; labor-liberal alliance, 30–33; limits of, 42–47; Northern political machines, 33–35; Southern party-states, 33–35 Coalition for a Democratic Alternative, 50 Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM): affirmative action weakened by, 116–20; Charter Conference Clearing House, 122, 124–25; “Come Home, Democrats” campaign, 112–14; constitutionalization of party federalism, 120–26; founding of, 112–14; leadership of, 95; membership and supporters, 113–14; motivation of, 11, 87, 113–14; origins of, 104, 111–12; Reagan administration and, 239n28; retaking of party chair, 114–16; Task Force on Democratic Rules and Structure, 116–17 Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, 108, 135 Collins, E. K., 45–46 Collins, Leroy, 75 “Come Home, America” campaign, 91, 112 “Come Home, Democrats” campaign, 112–14 Commission on Democratic Selection of Presidential Nominees, 59–61, 64 Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection. See McGovern-Fraser Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection; Mikulski Commission Commission on Presidential Nominations, 150–52 Commission on Rules, 68–69, 72 Committee on Political Education (COPE), 144; candidate rating system, 228n61; hostility to New Politics movement, 71–72, 222n13; Jackman supported by, 94, 116; limitations of, 32; realignment strategy of, 41 Common Cause, 71, 81, 101 Communication Workers (CWA): Beirne’s resignation from, 52; full employment policy endorsed by, 136, 143, 146;

251

McGovern endorsed by, 108, 229n69; New Politics movement supported by, 73, 94, 105 Community Action Program (UAW), 73 confederal party structure, 26–27, 29 Conference for Concerned Democrats, 50 Congressional Black Caucus, 71, 91, 136 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 31–33, 41. See also American Federation of Labor– Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) Connally, John, 63 Connecticut: McCarthy’s primary campaign in, 57–59; 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 constitution, Democratic Party, 120–26 contentious institutions, political parties as, 3–7, 5fig., 9fig., 20–21, 192–94 “Contract with America” campaign, 162 Contract with the People, 139 Conyers, John, 69 counter primaries, 56 counter-reform movement, 88–89; affirmative action weakened by, 116–20; Association of State Democratic Chairs, 104; California challenge, 98–100; class struggle rhetoric of, 105–9, 112, 116–20; “Come Home, Democrats” campaign of, 112–14; constitutionalization of party federalism, 120–26; emergence of, 15, 88–89; empowered by McGovern defeat, 110–12; impact of, 126–28; labor unions and, 71–73, 92–96; party charter opposed by, 102–5; retaking of party chair, 114–16; “white ethnic strategy” in, 100. See also Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) Cousins, Norman, 43 Cowan, Geoffrey, 57, 59, 70 Crangle, Joseph, 123 credentials challenges: during 1964 Atlantic City convention, 45–49; during 1968 Chicago convention, 48, 56–58, 61–65; during 1972 Miami Beach convention, 98–100 Daily Kos, 176 Daley, Richard, 33, 99, 100, 103 Davis, Lanny, 119 Dean, Howard, 176–77, 195

252

Index

Decter, Midge, 113, 114 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 183 Defense of Marriage Act (1996), 163, 183 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 185 Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), 185 delegate selection process: Commission on Democratic Selection of Presidential Nominees, 59–61; credentials challenges to, 45–49, 56–58, 61–65, 98–100; history of, 29–30; loyalty oath in, 42; party insurgent challenges to, 53–59; racial discrimination in, 45–47; superdelegates, 150–52 delegate selection reforms. See Hunt Commission on Presidential Nominations; New Politics movement; party crisis of 1968 demand-side historical developments, 16 Democracy 76 network, 137, 140. See also Democratic Agenda Democratic Advisory Council (DAC), 44–45 Democratic Advisory Council of Elected Officials (DACEO), 121, 126 Democratic Agenda, 140–45 Democratic Alliance, 167 The Democratic Choice, 60–61, 63, 70, 76, 77 Democratic Governors Conference, 112, 124 Democratic Issues Convention, 132–34 Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), 158–60; as agent of party transformation, 165–69; DLC-PPI policy advocacy network, 159, 163–65, 170; emergence of, 147–49; governance and initiatives of, 160–63; institutional strategy of, 152–54; legacy of, 164–65; policy agenda and vision of, 158; programmatic strategy of, 154–58; progressive centrist politics of, 163–64; superdelegates and, 149–52; Third Way perspective, 158–60, 163, 165–69. See also New Democrats Democratic National Committee (DNC): American Dream Initiative, 240n67; Andrew’s leadership of, 164; Bailey’s leadership of, 57; Colored Division of, 39; Dean’s leadership of, 177; Democratic Advisory Council, 44–45; O’Brien’s leadership of, 68, 79–80, 114–15;

O’Hara-Fraser charter proposal for, 85, 84fig., 102–5; Strauss’s leadership of, 115–16, 119, 122–26; Westwood’s leadership of, 114–19 Democratic National Convention: of 1952, 42; of 1948, 25–27, 42; of 1972, 96–108, 97fig.; of 1968, 10, 48, 61–65; of 1964, 42, 45–48; of 1936, 39; O’Hara-Fraser charter proposal for, 82–87, 84fig., 86fig.; superdelegates at, 150–52; two-thirds supermajority rule, 38–39; of 2008, 168. See also party crisis of 1968 Democratic Planning Group, 116 democratic socialism, 1, 8, 137, 200 Democrats All, 119–20 Denver convention of 2008, 168 Derian, Patricia, 123 Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, 184–85 Dixiecrat Party, formation of, 25–27, 42 DLC-PPI policy advocacy network, 159, 163–65, 170 Dodds, Bill, 73, 83, 119 dollar-gold convertibility, elimination of, 134 Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, 183 Downs, Anthony, 3–7 Dubinsky, David, 52 Duffey, Joseph, 57–58, 76 Dump Johnson movement: labor-liberal alliance fractured by, 51–53; origins of, 49–52 Dutton, Frederick, 60, 70 Duverger, Maurice, 27 dynamic contention, 15, 18fig. Education and Training Unit, 84fig., 85 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 43, 198 Eizenstat, Stuart, 138, 140 electoral demobilization, 28 electoral outcomes, interpretation of, 8 Electrical Workers. See International Union of Electricians; United Electrical Workers Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), 188 Employment Act (1946), 136 End Poverty in California (EPIC) Party, 31 entrepreneurial party change process, 7–15, 9fig. environmentalism, during Obama administration, 183–84

Index “equal division” mandate, 150–51, 239n3 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 101, 186 Erwin, Frank, 63 exceptionalism, 27 executive action, 173–74 executive-centered partisanship, 194–96 extended party networks, 4 externally mobilized parties, 27 Face the Nation, 107 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), 32, 38 Farenthold, Frances, 119 Farley, James, 38 farmer militias, 27 Federal Economic Relief, 38 federalism: constitutionalization of, 111, 120–26; in New Deal Democratic Party, 42–47 federal minimum wage, 188 Ferraro, Geraldine, 151, 186 filibuster, 132, 161, 188 Finley, Murray, 136 Fishman, Al, 75 Fishman, Sam, 73 527 organizations, 17 Foley, Thomas, 113, 122 Ford, Gerald, 179 Fowler, Donald, 104 Fraser, Arvonne, 81 Fraser, Donald, 60, 70, 79, 83, 103, 114, 143. See also McGovern-Fraser Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection Fraser, Douglas, 143 Freedom Summer project, 45–46, 49 Friedan, Betty, 81 Friedman, Milton, 138 From, Al, 151, 162, 165, 168, 239n3 Frost, David, 55 Frymer, Paul, 19 Fulbright, J. William, 49 Full Employment Action Council (FEAC), 136–37, 141 full employment policy: demands for, 134–39; during Roosevelt administration, 134; White House co-opting of, 19–20, 132, 139–46 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 50, 51, 135 Galvin, Daniel, 142, 164, 194

253

Gans, Curtis, 49–51, 69–70 Gay Activist Alliance, 101 Georgia, 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 ghettoization, 35 “ghost parties,” 29 Gingrich, Newt, 162, 164 Glazer, Nathan, 113 “going public” strategy, 173–74 Goldwater, Barry, 46, 198 Gompers, Samuel, 107 Gore, Al, 148, 159, 163–66, 177, 183 governance, party. See party governance governors, attendance at Democratic National Convention, 97–98 Granum, Rex, 144 Graphic Arts International Union, 108 Great Recession, 169, 189 greenhouse gas regulation, 184 Greenstone, J. David, 32 Grossman, Matt, 196–201 group capture, 17, 19, 127, 146, 182, 190 group-control thesis, 16–19 group influence, limits of, 131–32; full employment policy demands, 132–39; New Democrats movement and, 159; White House co-opting of full employment issue, 139–46 Growth and Opportunity Project report, 199 growth machines, Northern political machines as, 34 Guinier, Lani, 161 Hague, Frank, 33 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 45, 81 Harrington, Michael, 69, 137, 139, 141, 200 Harris, Fred, 68–70, 72, 74, 80 hate crime legislation, 183 Hawkins, Augustus, 135, 137, 143. See also Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act (1978) Hays, Wayne, 103 health-care initiatives: during Clinton administration, 161; during Obama administration, 178–79, 188 Heersink, Boris, 20 Heilbroner, Robert, 135 Helms amendment, 187 Henry, Aaron, 70

254

Index

Hispanic vote, in Obama’s electoral coalition, 169 historical institutionalist approach to party governance, 6–7 Holder, Eric, 185–86 “hollow parties,” 16–17, 18fig., 112 Hoover, Herbert, 37 Hopkins, David, 197 Hotel Workers, McGovern endorsed by, 108 House Democratic Caucus: attendance at Democratic National Convention, 97–98; NAFTA opposed by, 161; party discipline by, 46; party reform and, 118, 124, 151, 153 Hughes, Harold, 60, 64, 70, 75. See also Hughes Commission Hughes Commission, 60, 64, 70, 77. See also The Democratic Choice Human Rights Campaign, 182 Humphrey, Hubert, 43, 134; death of, 141–42; McGovern and, 90–91; Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenge and, 46; 1972 nomination campaign, 90–92, 105–6; 1968 nomination campaign, 48–49, 54, 61–65; Philadelphia convention speech, 25–26; pro-labor record, 228n61; support for, 58–59, 71, 99; unity-through-reform agenda of, 67–73. See also HumphreyHawkins Full Employment Act (1978) Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act (1978), 132; support for, 134–39; White House revisions to, 139–46 Hunt, James, 150 Hunt Commission on Presidential Nominations, 150–52 Hurricane Katrina, 167 IAM (International Association of Machinists), 73, 94, 108, 136, 229n69 ideological patronage, 4 Illinois, 1972 challenge on delegation, 99–100 immigration rights, during Obama administration, 184–85 income inequality, 189, 201, 204 Indiana: McCarthy’s primary campaign in, 58; 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 inequality: income/wealth, 189, 201, 204; representational, 201–4 inflation, 1970s rise in, 133–34

Initiative Committee for Economic Planning (ICEP), 135–37 insurgent candidates: impact of, 90; Kennedy, Robert, 50, 53–57; McCarthy, Eugene, 10, 43, 48, 51–53, 57–59 integrative process, party reform envisioned as, 67 interest groups: anchoring groups, 18–19; competition among, 6; group capture, 17, 19, 127, 146, 182, 190; group-control thesis, 17–21; politician-group relations, 3–4, 16–20; representational inequality among, 201–4. See also individual groups internally mobilized parties, 27–28 International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), 52 International Union of Electricians, 108 Internet, political advocacy through, 176–81 intraparty contention. See contentious institutions, political parties as Iraq War, 166–67 Jackson, Andrew, 28 Jackson, Henry: counter-reform initiatives of, 101, 113, 115; 1972 nomination campaign, 90–91, 94, 95, 106; support for, 99 Jackson, Jesse, 99, 100 Jacobs, Lawrence, 203 Jeffrey, Mildred, 81 Jim Crow order, 7, 25, 28, 35–40 Job Guarantee Office, 136 Johnson, Lyndon: COPE rating, 228n61; Dump Johnson movement, 49–53; electoral mandate of, 47, 172; prepresidential political career, 43–46, 217n84; retirement from politics, 53, 65; Strauss and, 115; support for, 58; War on Poverty, 135 Judis, John, 161 Justice Democrats, 200 Kampelman, Max, 64, 113, 239n28 Katznelson, Ira, 37 Kemble, Penn, 113, 119 Kennedy, Robert: assassination of, 61, 69; 1968 nomination campaign, 10, 48–50, 54–57, 90; support for, 53, 55 Kennedy, Ted, 141, 146, 188 Kern, Helmuth, 221n69

Index Kernell, Samuel, 173 Kerry, John, 169, 177 Key, V. O., 26, 36 Keyserling, Leon, 52, 135 Keystone XL oil pipeline, 183–84 Kimball, Doris, 60 King, Coretta Scott, 137 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 45, 49, 61 Kirkland, Lane, 32–33, 55, 107 Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 113, 239n28 Klinkner, Philip, 197 Knights of Labor, 28 Kroll, Jack, 41 Labor Coalition Clearinghouse, 138 Labor Management Relations Act (1947), 41, 101, 216n69 labor unions: declining membership of, 187; delegate seats held by, 96, 226n24; Dump Johnson movement and, 51–53; full employment policy and, 137–38, 143–44; hostility to New Politics, 71–73, 92–96; Labor Coalition Clearinghouse, 138; labor-left and New Politics, 71–72, 94–96; labor-liberal alliance, 30–33, 49–53; during New Deal Democratic Party, 37–38, 41–42; during Obama administration, 187–89; platform development and, 101. See also individual unions Leontief, Wassily, 135 LGBTQ rights, 7, 160–61, 182–83, 190 Lichtenstein, Nelson, 37 Lieberman, Joseph, 162 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (2009), 186 Long, Gillis, 151 Long, Huey, 31 Louisiana, 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 Lowenstein, Allard: Dump Johnson movement, 49–53; New Democratic Coalition, 69–70 loyalty oath, 42 Lynch, Loretta, 186 Machinists. See IAM (International Association of Machinists) Manatt, Charles, 150 Mandate for Change, 160 Mandate for Reform, 77–78 marijuana, legalization of, 227n35

255

marriage equality, 182–83 Marshall, Ray, 139, 162, 239n3 Martin Luther King Center for Social Change, 137 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009), 183 McAuliffe, Terry, 166 McCain-Feingold act. See Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (2002) McCarthy, Eugene: ADA membership of, 43; 1972 nomination campaign, 90; 1968 nomination campaign, 10, 48–53, 57–59, 90; support for, 51–53, 218n16 McGovern, George: “Come Home, America” theme, 91, 112; defeat of, 11, 15, 110; Humphrey and, 90–91; labor and, 106–7, 108–9, 228n61; 1972 presidential campaign, 14–15, 89–92, 98–100, 227n35; on party reform, 66, 73–74; postconvention revolt against, 105–7; skepticism of Vietnam War, 49; Stop McGovern coalition against, 98–100, 105–7; support for, 63–64, 136; Westwood and, 115. See also McGovern-Fraser Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection McGovern-Fraser Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection: charter proposal for national party structure, 82–87, 84fig., 86fig., 102–5; formation of, 68–69, 79; impact of, 66–67; implementation of reforms, 59, 78–83; labor and, 71–72, 94–96; legacy of, 204–5; Mandate for Reform, 77–78; mischaracterizations of, 12–13, 210n39; opposition to, 14–15, 88–89, 102–5; scope and vision of, 73–77; unity-through-reform agenda of, 10–12, 67–73, 80. See also counter-reform movement; New Politics movement McGovernism, 113–14 “McGovern’s revenge,” 169 Meany, George: Car ter and, 144, 237n59; hostility to New Politics movement, 71–72, 93–96, 110; Humphrey and, 55; O’Brien and, 226n24; opposition to McGovern candidacy, 106–7, 228n61 Meat Cutters Union, 108, 221n69 Media Matters, 167 Membership and Finance Council, 84fig., 85 Memphis midterm policy conference (1978), 132, 139, 145

256

Index

Miami Beach convention of 1972: Credentials Committee and challenges at, 98–100; delegate demographics at, 96–98, 97fig., 226n24; Platform Committee and extension of programmatic rights, 100–102; Rules Committee and party charter, 102–5 Michigan: McCarthy’s primary campaign in, 58; 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 Mickey, Robert, 36 midterm policy conference: charter proposal for, 84fig.; limitations on, 122–23; of 1978, 132, 139, 141, 145 Mikulski, Barbara, 116. See also Mikulski Commission Mikulski Commission, 112, 116–20 militias, 27 Milkis, Sidney, 173, 194, 196 minimum wage, 188 Minnesota: McCarthy’s primary campaign in, 58; 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 Mississippi, 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), 45–46, 50, 70, 90 Mitchell, Arthur W., 39 Mollenkopf, John, 34 Mondale, Walter, 133, 139, 152 Morris, Dick, 162–63 Moses, Bob, 45 movement party, Republican Party as, 197–99, 211n53 MoveOn.org, 176, 178, 199 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 113 Muravchik, Joshua, 104, 113, 124 Muskie, Edmund, 90–91, 99, 105–6 Nation, 51, 71 National Action Network, 185 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 38, 182, 185 National Conference on Democratic Party Organization and Policy, 121 National Council of La Raza, 184 National Education Association, 73, 95, 182 National Executive Committee, 84fig., 85, 86fig. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 182

National Gay Rights Lobby, 182 National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), 31, 38 National Labor Relations Act (1935), 31, 38 National Labor Relations Board, 188 National Organization for Women (NOW), 48, 69, 137, 146, 182, 186–87 national policy conference, 84, 84fig., 86fig., 102–5 National Recovery Administration, 40 National Rifle Association, Republican Party advocacy for, 211n53 National Student Association, 50 National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), 186; affirmative action defended by, 119; challenge against South Carolina delegation, 99; “equal division” mandate and, 150–51, 239n3; McGovern and, 115; party platform development and, 101; reform movement supported by, 71, 81–82, 91 netroots activism, 176–81 Netroots Nation, 176 network-centered party governance, 4 Neustadt, Richard, 100–101 New Class discourse, 105–9, 112, 116–20 New Deal Democratic Party: civil rights in, 42–47; confederal structure of, 26–27, 29; contradictions inherent in, 10, 39–42; Dixiecrat rebellion, 25–27, 42; electoral mandate of, 30; federalism in, 42–47; full employment policy in, 134; labor-liberal alliance in, 30–33; limits of, 42–47; Northern political machines in, 33–35; preemptive presidents in, 195; Southern party-states in, 33–35 New Democrat, 71 New Democratic Coalition (NDC), 69–70, 101, 163–64, 167 New Democrat Network (NDN), 163, 164 New Democrats: as agent of party transformation, 165–69; decline of, 165–69; DLC-PPI policy advocacy network, 159, 163–65, 170; emergence of, 147–49; governance and initiatives of, 160–63; inability to transform party, 169–70; institutional strategy of, 152–54; legacy of, 164–65; 1992 presidential campaign and, 158–60; policy agenda and vision of, 158; programmatic strategy of, 154–58;

Index progressive centrist politics of, 163–64; superdelegates and, 149–52, 200; Third Way perspective, 158–60, 163. See also Clinton, Bill Newfield, Jack, 118 New Gilded Age, 201 New Jersey political machine, 33 New Politics Institute, 164 New Politics movement: alleged elitist class dynamics of, 105–9, 112, 116–20; charter proposal for national party structure, 82–87, 84fig., 86fig., 102–5; defeat of, 110–11; full employment policy in, 134–39; goals of, 67; impact of, 96–98; implementation of reforms, 78–83; labor and, 71–72, 94–96; Mandate for Reform, 77–78; media access, 71; mischaracterizations of, 12–13, 210n39; Obama administration compared to, 190–91; para-party networks in, 71; party-building orientation of, 12–14; scope and vision of, 73–77; unity-through-reform agenda of, 10–12, 67–73. See also counter-reform movement; McGovern-Fraser Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection New Republic, 51, 71, 95 New Right, 198 Newsweek, 52 New York: McCarthy’s primary campaign in, 58; 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 New York Times: “Come Home, Democrats” campaign in, 112–14; coverage of McCarthy candidacy, 51, 52–53 Nixon, Richard: COPE rating, 228n61; dollar-gold convertibility eliminated by, 134; election victory of, 65, 110 Nixon Democrats, 165 North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), 159, 161, 167–68 North Carolina, 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 Northern political machines, 33–35 Obama, Barack: as advocate-in-chief, 7, 171–74; African American civil rights and, 185–86; bottom-up advocacy politics under, 181–82; Democratic Leadership Council and, 164; electoral coalition of, 169; environmentalism and, 183–84;

257

executive actions, 173–74, 195–96; immigration rights and, 184–85; labor rights and, 187–89; LGBTQ rights and, 182–83; New Politics movement compared to, 190–91; OFA entities orga nized by, 178–81, 190; Office of Public Engagement, 179–80; promotion of presidential power, 189–91; rhetoric of, 174–75; Roosevelt compared to, 181; top-down advocacy politics of, 175–81; 2008 presidential campaign, 167–68, 177–78; “We Can’t Wait” campaign, 196; women’s rights and, 186–87 Obama for America (OFA), 177–81 O’Brien, Lawrence: labor and, 92–95, 226n24; political career of, 53–55, 68, 79–80, 114–15; unity-through-reform agenda of, 68–73, 80, 83, 221n69 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 200 Occupy Wall Street movement, 189 officeholders: attendance at Democratic National Convention, 97–98; delegate status of, 96–98, 150–51; intraparty contention and, 3–7; politician-group relations, 16–20 Office of Public Engagement (OPE), 179–80, 190 Office of Public Liaison, 179 O’Grady, Eugene, 76 O’Hara, James, 62, 69, 72, 103, 113–14, 118, 230n12. See also Democratic Party charter proposal O’Hara Commission, 68–69 Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, 73, 94, 108, 136 Oklahoma, 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 oligarchy, 5–6, 38 O’Neill, Tip, 138 Operation Dixie, 41 orga nized labor. See labor unions Organizing for Action (OFA 3.0), 179–81, 190 Organizing for America (OFA 2.0), 178 The Other Amer ica (Harrington), 137 Our Revolution, 199–200 overtime pay protections, 188 partisan polarization. See polarization party asymmetry, 15–16 party crisis, party change and, 9–10, 9fig.

258

Index

party crisis of 1968: Chicago convention of 1968, 61–65; Commission on Democratic Selection of Presidential Nominees, 59–61; diagnosis of, 67–73; Dump Johnson movement, 49–53; fracturing of labor-liberal alliance in, 51–53; Kennedy campaign, 50, 53, 54–57; McCarthy campaign, 10, 48, 57–59; origins of, 47–49; unity-through-reform agenda following, 67–73, 80. See also insurgent candidates party elite. See officeholders party governance: contentious parties framework of, 3–7, 5fig.; debate surrounding, 1–2, 192–94; historical institutionalist approach to, 3–4, 6–7; network-centered approach to, 4; by New Democrats, 160–63; oligarchy in, 5–6 party-group relations, 3–7, 17–21 party insurgents. See insurgent candidates party legitimacy, undermining of, 204–5 party officials. See officeholders “party predator” pattern, 175 patronage, 4, 16, 28–29, 33–36, 42, 213n11 Pennsylvania: McCarthy’s primary campaign in, 58–59; 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 People’s Party, 28 Perle, Richard, 113 Perot, Ross, 160, 165 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996), 241n75 Peterson, Donald O., 69 Philadelphia convention of 1936, 39 Philadelphia convention of 1948, 25–27, 42 Phillips, Channing, 75 Planned Parenthood, 187 Platform Committee, 100–102, 138, 227n36 Plotke, David, 14 Podhoretz, Norman, 113 polarization: asymmetric, 196–201; drivers of, 7; executive-centered partisanship and, 194–96; New Democrats response to, 166; triangulation strategy and, 162–63; Trump’s exploitation of, 199 political action committees (PACs), 17, 32, 41 political machines, 33–35 political party development: class formation and, 27–28; externally mobilized parties,

27; internally mobilized parties, 27–28; patronage in, 28–29, 213n11 political party governance: confederal party structure and, 26–27, 29; contentious parties framework of, 3–7, 192–94; dynamics of contention inherent in, 3–7; historical institutionalist approach to, 3–4, 6–7; network-centered approach to, 4; oligarchy in, 5–6; party-group relations in, 17–21; public debate surrounding, 1–2 politicians. See officeholders Polsby, Nelson, 113 Powell, Jody, 141 preemptive presidents, 195 Presidential Committee on Civil Rights, 25 presidential unilateralism, 194–96 Pressley, Ayanna, 200 “pressure of legitimacy,” 54–57 price stability, as priority of Car ter administration, 138 private campaign financing, 6 process-tracing model, 11–12 Prodi, Romano, 163 programmatic rights, extension of, 100–102 programmatic strategy, 154–58 Progressivism, 30 Quiet Revolution (Shafer), 14 quota system. See affirmative action race relations: Jim Crow order, 7, 25, 28, 35–40; New Deal and war time policies for, 39–42; in northern political machines, 35; racialized unemployment, 134–35; in southern Democratic party-states, 35–39. See also civil rights movement Rae, Nicol, 26 Rainbow Coalition, Clinton’s 1992 speech to, 159 Randolph, A. Philip, 135, 181 Ranney, Austin, 70, 83, 113, 114, 230n10 Rauh, Joseph, 45, 50, 51, 62 Rayburn, Sam, 43, 44, 115 Reagan, Ronald, 146, 152, 194, 199, 239n28 Reagan Democrats, 165, 239n28 The Real Majority (Scammon and Wattenberg), 111

Index Reconstruction: Democratic resistance to, 35–36; Republican leadership of, 30 regional committee organizations, 85–86, 86fig. religious right, Republican integration of, 198 representational inequality, 201–4 reproductive freedom, 7, 106, 155, 161, 186–87, 227n35 Republican Party: as movement party, 197–99, 211n53; programmatic and orga nizational reforms of, 197–99; Reconstruction led by, 30; transformation of, 1, 7–8 Reston, James, 52 Retail Clerks, 108 Reuther, Victor, 52 Reuther, Walter, 41, 46, 48, 52, 69, 95–96 “right to work.” See full employment policy Robinson, Cleveland, 135 Roche, John, 45, 52, 106 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 44 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: dependence on southern Democratic party-states, 37–39, 216n56; electoral mandate of, 30; full employment policy under, 134; Obama compared to, 181; opposition to, 31, 35; Second Bill of Rights proposed by, 102; Truman and, 25 Roosevelt, Theodore, 189 Rosenblatt, Peter, 107 Rosenfeld, Sam, 14, 16 Royko, Mike, 100 Rules Commission, 83 Rules Committee: at 1968 Chicago convention, 63–64; at 1972 Miami Beach convention, 102–5 Run for Something, 199 Rustin, Bayard, 52, 111, 113 Sanders, Bernie, 1–2, 189, 199, 200, 204 Sanford, Terry, 120. See also Sanford Commission Sanford Commission, 112, 120–26 Scammon, Richard, 111 Schattschneider, E. E., 5, 29, 43, 202, 204 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 49, 71 Schlesinger, Stephen, 71 Schlozman, Daniel, 16 Schrade, Paul, 69, 75, 107

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Schultze, Charles, 139 Segal, Eli, 60, 70, 100 Senators, attendance at Democratic National Convention, 97–98 Shafer, Byron, 14, 152 Shanker, Albert, 113 Shapp, Milton, 124 Sharpe, M. E., 135 Sharpton, Al, 185 Shifter, Richard, 239n28 Sinclair, Upton, 31 Singer, William, 99 Sister Souljah, Clinton’s disparagement of, 159 Skowronek, Stephen, 29, 195 slum-clearance programs, 35 Smith, Al, 30, 77 Smith, Ellison DuRant “Cotton Ed,” 39 Social Security, 32, 38, 167 Social Security Act (1935), 32, 38 Sorensen, Theodore, 56, 75 Sotomayor, Sonia, 178 southern Democratic party-states, 33–35 Sparkman, John, 42 Special Equal Rights Committee (SERC), 46, 56 “special interests,” New Democrats pushback on, 159 Spock, Benjamin, 49 Staebler, Neil, 83, 85 stagflation, 133–34 Standby Jobs Corps, 136 “Statement of Political Purpose” (NDC), 69 state reform commissions, 80–81 States’ Rights Democratic Party, 25–27 states’ rights doctrine: Dixiecrat rebellion and, 25–27, 42; southern Democratic defense of, 36–39 Steelworkers Union, 52, 72, 106, 108 Steinem, Gloria, 81 Sterns, Richard, 90 Stevenson, Adlai, 42–44 Stop McGovern coalition: California challenge, 98–100; class struggle rhetoric of, 105–9, 112, 116–20 Strauss, Robert, 115–16, 122–26 strikes of 1933–1934, 31 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 60 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 49

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Stulberg, Louis, 52 suburbanization, 35 suffrage, class formation and, 27–28 Sugrue, Thomas J., 39 superdelegates, 149–52, 200 Super PACs, 17 supply-side historical developments, 17 Swing Left, 200 “The System” (Cowan), 57

United Electrical Workers, 73, 95, 136 United Farm Workers, 73, 94, 101 unit rule, 56, 58, 64 Unity Out of Diversity, 124–25 Unity Reform Commission, 200 unity-through-reform agenda, 10–12, 67–73, 80 urban renewal programs, 35

Taft, Robert, 37 Taft-Hartley Act (1947), 41, 101, 216n69 Tammany Hall, 33–34 Tauscher, Ellen, 167 Tea Party movement, 171–74, 188 Telecommunications Act, 143, 146 Tennessee, 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 Texas, 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 Third Way: challenges to, 199; decline of, 165–69; origins of, 158–60; progressive centrist politics of, 163. See also New Democrats Tlaib, Rashida, 200 Towards Fairness and Unity for ’76, 117–18 trade unions. See labor unions Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 189 triangulation, 162–63 Troubled Asset Relief Program, 183 Truman, Harry, 25, 42, 44, 52 Trump, Donald, 1, 199, 204 Tweed, William M. (“Boss”), 34 two-thirds supermajority rule, 38–39 Tyler, Gus, 52

Van Buren, Martin, 28 Vance, Robert, 123 Vietnam War, antiwar movement against: Dump Johnson campaign, 49–53; New Politics movement and, 13; rise of, 47–49 Village Voice, 118 Violence Against Women Act, 186 voter choice: ambiguity surrounding, 8, 16; party elites’ role in shaping, 3–4 Voting Rights Act (1965), 62, 220n55

unemployment rate, 133–35. See also full employment policy unilateralism, presidential, 194–96 unions. See labor unions United Auto Workers (UAW): affirmative action defended by, 119; Americans for Democratic Action supported by, 52; Car ter and, 146, 233n2; Clinton’s 1992 speech to, 159; full employment policy endorsed by, 135–37, 141, 143; McGovern endorsed by, 108; New Politics movement supported by, 72–73; political influence of, 94; reform movement supported by, 79, 95; Reuther’s leadership of, 41, 48, 69, 95–96

Wade, Richard, 70 Wagner Act (1935), 31, 188, 216n69 Wallace, George, 65, 90–91, 94, 99 Wallace, Henry, 25 War on Poverty, 49, 135 War on Terror, 166–67 Warren, Elizabeth, 199 Washington Post, “Come Home, Democrats” campaign in, 112–14 Washington State: McCarthy’s primary campaign in, 58; 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 Wattenberg, Ben, 95, 101, 106, 111, 113–14, 239n28. See also Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) wealth inequality. See income inequality “We Can’t Wait” campaign, 196 Weir, Margaret, 142 Weiss, Nancy, 35 welfare reform, 160–63 Western Europe, party development in, 27, 28–29 Westwood, Jean, 115–16 Wexler, Anne, 60, 64, 70, 78, 81, 83, 149 White, John, 142 White, Theodore, 63, 65 White, Walter, 38 “white ethnic strategy,” 100

Index White House Council on Women and Girls, 187 white vote: class formation and, 27–28; New Democrats courting of, 165–66; in Obama’s electoral coalition, 169; in southern Democratic party-states, 25, 36–39 Wilson, James Q., 17 Wilson, Woodrow, 30 Wisconsin, 1972 challenge on delegation, 62–63 women’s rights: National Organization for Women, 48, 69, 137, 146, 182, 186–87; during Obama administration, 186–87; women as percentage of delegates, 96–98,

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97fig., 121fig., 150. See also National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) Woodcock, Leonard, 119, 233n2 Works Progress Administration, 35, 38 World War II, mobilization for, 39–42 Wurf, Jerry, 95, 107–8 York, John Warren, 196 Young, Coleman, 144 Young People’s Socialist League, 69 youth, as percentage of delegates, 96, 97fig., 121fig. Zika virus, 187

ACKNOWL EDGMENTS

While I am sure it must have looked as though I wrote this book myself, hunched up over my computer, surrounded by piles of books and articles, sequestered in my office or at the far end of the sofa, I know better. This book would have never seen the light of day had it not been for the many individuals and institutions that have supported and encouraged me throughout its many years of creation. First, the book was shepherded through its initial stages of development by my PhD supervisor and mentor, Leo Panitch, who taught me above all that real solidarity means asking the tough questions of those whom you are most inclined to support. My interest in historical institutionalism and contentious politics was piqued and nurtured by Steve Hellman and Dennis Pilon, who always generously gave their time to me and my many questions. A number of colleagues and members of the wider professional community offered their advice and help on the ideas in this book. I want to extend a special thanks to Gwen Alphonso, Julia Azari, Richard Bensel, Marisa Chappell, Tony Chen, Dan Galvin, Lily Geismer, Marjorie Hershey, Rob Lieberman, Joe Lowndes, Rob Mickey, Adolph Reed, Elizabeth Sanders, Eric Schickler, Byron Shafer, Stephen Skowronek, Tim Weaver, and Christina Wolbrecht. David Plotke generously shared with me some chapters from an unpublished manuscript, and Bruce Miroff read an early draft of this work and offered very helpful advice. I have been very fortunate to arrive on the academic scene amid a revival of interest in American party development, and I am grateful to be a part of a cohort of junior scholars who share similar scholarly interests, political passions, and a collaborative spirit. Most of the ideas in this book were developed in dialogue with their inspiring work. Specifically, I’d like to thank Chris Baylor, Boris Heersink, Jessica Hejny, Kate Krimmel, Sam Rosenfold, and Danny Schlozman. I also want to thank my colleagues in the Politics Department at Mount Holyoke College for their warm reception and for the advice and

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encouragement they have continued to offer me in the years since arriving. Maggie Rockhill and Molly Schiffer served as exceptionally talented and precocious research assistants during the manuscript’s final preparation, serving as invaluable sources of intellectual insight and genuine collaboration. (Thanks for the title, Molly!) The editorial help of Peter Agree, Christine Dahlin, Erica Ginsburg, Bob Lockhart, Lily Palladino, Rick Valelly, and two anonymous reviewers for the University of Pennsylvania Press vastly improved the substance and style of the book. Moreover, Peter, Bob, and Rick provided unwavering support and enthusiasm for the project and demonstrated the utmost patience with me throughout. I also owe a special thanks to Cambridge University Press and the University of Chicago Press for allowing me to reprint with permission materials first published in Studies in American Political Development and Polity, respectively. And many thanks go to Erika Millen for her indexing services. Generous support for archival research was provided by a Moody Grant from the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, a dissertation grant from Harvard University’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, and research and travel funding from Mount Holyoke’s Office of the Dean of Faculty as well as York University’s Faculty of Graduate Studies. I owe a great debt to the many research librarians and staff who made my archival experience fruitful and productive. In particular I want to thank those who assisted me at the Seely J. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University; the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan; the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston; the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas; the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison; the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul; the Tamiment Library at New York University; the Special Collections Library at the University of Maryland; the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the National Archives in Washington, DC. I want to thank the National Women’s Political Caucus, the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education, and the Democratic National Committee for granting me special access to their archives. And very special thanks to Geoffrey Cowan, Donald Fowler, Arvonne Fraser, Donald Fraser, and Walter Mondale for speaking with me and patiently guiding me down memory lane. In the years I have spent completing this book, I have been fortunate to have a network of friends and family who sustained me through the difficult

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parts and celebrated with me during the good parts. My Torontonians— Riiko Bedford, Sara Bernardo, Nicole Bernhardt, Kim Carty, Tom Cheney, Bob Froese, Paul Gray, Jordan House, Janaya Letkeman, Steve Maher, and Sarah Ovens—have proved to be the most supportive group of friends anyone could ask for, even if we are now scattered across North America. Bonds made during my undergraduate years at the Evergreen State College with Jenine Adam, Thomas Herndon, Alan Nasser, and Ellis Scharfenaker have continued to be a source of inspiration and strength. I owe so much to my family. Sadly, my stepmother, a constant source of loving support in my educational pursuits, was not able to see those pursuits come to fruition. However, this book bears the mark of the positive influence she left behind. The members of both my immediate and wider family have been there for me throughout, providing encouragement and temporary respite from the project when necessary. I am lucky to have such a large family tree. I hope they excuse me for not naming them all individually. I owe the most to my wife, Ashlee Wactor. Ashlee has been on the frontlines of my long engagement with this book, joining me to celebrate my triumphs and consoling me during the inevitable frustrations. She has borne the brunt of the burdens of having a political scientist for a husband, and I will spend the rest of my life making it up to her. As a first act of gratitude, I dedicate this book to her.