The Atlantic’s Molly Ball quotes PPI President Will Marshall while discussing what Republicans can learn from the Democrat’s revival:
The DLC had initially pursued a “big tent” strategy aimed at winning over Democrats from across the political spectrum. But as Kenneth S. Baer recounts in his book on the council, Reinventing Democrats, the group found itself not standing for anything in particular. The DLC eventually embraced a more confrontational strategy, denouncing the party’s ways at meetings across the country. The process was ugly, the sort of spectacle parties generally go to great lengths to avoid. But these New Democrats, as they called themselves, were serious about change. “Our goal was not to unify the party but to expand it,” Al From, the founder of the DLC (which closed down in 2011), told me recently.
Along the way, the DLC tried and discarded other strategies. One was working within the Democratic National Committee. “National committees are consumed by fund-raising, campaigns, and electoral mechanics—they don’t really do doctrine,” Will Marshall, the president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank founded by the DLC in 1989, said. “We needed an external perch from which to critique and change an organization in decline.”
Read the rest of the article at The Atlantic.
