Political Pariahs

"Some people say we've lost our standing," former Representative Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee, chairman of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), lamented at his organization's annual meeting in Nashville on July 30. "But if there ever was a time when the country needed the DLC... it's now." The statement was defensive but accurate. The DLC, which helped provide the intellectual ballast and political strategy for Bill Clinton's presidency, seems to have fallen on hard times, at least in the élite precincts of the national political cacophony. A New York Times Op-Ed piece declared the group "radioactive" within the Democratic Party....