Quick, now: Who chaired the Democratic National Committee (DNC) throughout the 1960s? It was, after all, the last glory decade the Democrats have known. They enacted landmark civil-rights, economic-security, educational-opportunity, anti-poverty, and (eventually) environmental legislation. And for almost the entire duration of the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, there was just one national chairman.
Three points if you rightly guessed John Bailey, the Connecticut party boss who later became the state's governor. But you really have to know your political history, or just have a long memory, to get that one, because you can read countless histories of the '60s without coming across Bailey's name, save in those sections dealing with John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign, for which Bailey was a consigliere and an operative -- and not yet the party's national chairman. Confining yourself to just the Democratic universe, you'll come across a passel of Kennedys, a Johnson, a Humphrey, a McCarthy, a King, an X, a Daley, a Lowenstein, a Savio, a Hayden, a Reuther, a Meany, a Russell, a Mansfield, a McCormick, a Burton -- but not a Bailey. When the Democrats are a dominant party and actually doing things, the national chairman fades into the woodwork.
The chairman's long goodbye began on Jim Farley's watch, back in the Democrats' other glory decade, the 1930s. Farley had been a brilliant campaign manager for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, particularly in his role as FDR's emissary to the city and state party bosses whose language Farley talked. (Indeed, boss-talk was Farley's mother tongue.) As early as 1936, though, the Roosevelt coalition had grown to include middle-class progressives and the new industrial union movement, and Farley and his fraction -- the traditional Democratic Party -- felt somewhat shunted aside. Moreover, Farley had virtually nothing to do with the development and passage of the New Deal.
So when Democrats are in power, their chairmen tend toward invisibility; at most, they're functionaries who can make some trains run on time. But today, as you've heard, Democrats are out of power -- farther out, in fact, than they've been since the '20s. In those days, when the business of America was business, the Democrats boasted some successful businessmen -- Jouett Shouse and John J. Raskob (a major figure in the DuPont-General Motors constellation of companies) -- as national chairmen. They preached right-wing economics, but Raskob, at least, raised a lot of money for Roosevelt's '32 campaign. In 1935, however, they both turned on FDR, founding and funding the Liberty League, which raised more money against Roosevelt in 1936 than the entire Republican Party.
In recent decades, the Democrats have had more moneymen chairing the party than they have had political operatives in the post-Farley tradition. For every David Wilhelm, the Chicago-based field operative who briefly chaired the party at the start of Bill Clinton's presidency, there have been a handful of Chuck Manatts, Paul Kirks, and Terry McAuliffes, who came to prominence through their proven success at getting big-money donors to pony up. McAuliffe also proved a winner at getting record numbers of small-money donors to contribute -- a triumph for which he shares credit with the joint advent of George W. Bush and the Internet, which gave millions of Democrats the motive and the means to come to the aid of their party.
In the modern political era, have national chairmen ever really made a difference? Two, I think, have. The first was Ron Brown, who chaired the party during George Bush Senior's presidency and made a signal contribution to Clinton's election. The contribution was Paul Tully, the legendary political organizer whom Brown hired as the DNC's political director and campaign strategist. Tully broke the nation down into micro slices and promising terrains to which the nominee and the field ops devoted more attention than would otherwise have been the case; he laid the groundwork for Clinton's victory.
The second chairman who mattered was Paul Butler, who ran the party in the mid-1950s. It was a time of transition for the Democrats: The White House belonged to Dwight Eisenhower, while the Congress was controlled by southern Democrats (the moderate LBJ and Sam Rayburn, plus a gaggle of reactionary committee chairmen). But throughout the North and the West, liberals and reformers, stirred to action by Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaigns, were winning elections and beginning to move the party toward the left. Butler saw that it was important for the party to have a national image distinct from the congressional party's, which he rightly felt had little appeal outside the South. Just after Stevenson's 1956 defeat, Butler (with the backing of Chicago's enlightened boss, Jake Arvey) established the Democratic Advisory Committee (DAC), a group of up-and-coming liberals such as Thomas K. Finletter, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Hubert Humphrey, along with such veteran progressives as Herbert Lehman and Eleanor Roosevelt. Johnson and Rayburn saw the group as a challenge to their leadership and publicly shunned it. But by promoting civil-rights legislation and other ideas that were to blossom forth in the New Frontier and the Great Society, the DAC gave the party a more progressive public face. The wisdom of Butler's approach was confirmed by the Democrats' great successes in the 1958 election -- and by the fact that a very adept pol named John F. Kennedy thought it prudent to join the group in the years he was preparing to run for president.
Whatever ails the party today, it's not that the politically disparate Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi represent an ideological pole from which the party needs to distance itself. But there is, if anything, more fundamental rethinking to be done, and the new chair would do well to take a page from Butler and assemble some high-voltage ponderers. The congressional party has its hands full playing defense. The gubernatorial party -- well, there's not quite enough of a gubernatorial party just now. (Indeed, neither of the nation's two most innovative state-level Democrats, New York's Eliot Spitzer and California's Phil Angelides, are governors -- yet.) The Democrats could do worse than have some bright folks at work on, say, how to develop economic security in a global economy.
Today's candidates for DNC chair break down along sadly predictable lines: Howard Dean is the candidate of the party's activist base; Martin Frost is the candidate of the party's financial superstructure; Tim Roemer is the candidate of the party's Republican wing. (Wholly apart from his position on abortion, Roemer's opposition to much of mainstream Democratic economics almost makes him a candidate in the Raskob tradition.) None is well qualified to serve as a national spokesman for the Democrats (Dean, for one, simply shlepps too much baggage). But whichever one gets in would do well to develop and maintain the lists, work the Web site, and convene some progressives to look well down the road.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
