“For 13 years, I’ve been trying to move the Democratic Party off the course it’s been on,” he told the Wilmington Morning News a year after Reagan’s reelection. “I said what nobody else was saying: That interest groups had a stranglehold on us, and, number two, there’s a whole generation of Americans ready to move…. Now everybody says those things.”31
Other Democrats were toting the same line. “We’ve got to propose innovative solutions to problems and get away from government intervention,” said Dave Nagle, chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, in the wake of the loss. “We have to recast the old values, sort of begin to find a national vision,” Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt told CBS Morning News as he sat shoulder to shoulder with Biden, explaining that that “vision” included “fiscal responsibility” and “the budget.” “I think Democrats lost the middle class,” Biden added, “as a consequence of forgetting the middle class doesn’t belong to any particular interest group.” 32
Biden had been complaining about these “interest groups” and “special interests,” typically contrasted with his beloved “middle class,” for about as long as he’d been complaining about the party’s direction.
But who exactly were these shadowy entities? Franklin Roosevelt, too, had attacked “special groups” and “special interests” in the 1930s. But while Roosevelt meant the “unscrupulous money changers” and the anti–New Deal “minority in business and finance” whose minions “swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington,” Biden meant something very different.33
“Minorities and other vested interests are sick and tired of hollow promises,” he had said in 1971 after his very first win. Seven years later, he would bellow at these “interest groups” who refused to do away with government programs that benefited them; he now blamed these groups for the runaway spending he sought to control. Now, as he toured the country preaching his vision, Biden urged Democrats to proclaim that special interest groups came second to the national interest. In Alabama, his denunciation of such interests (“warmly received,” wrote the Wilmington Morning News) was followed by his insistence that the state had confronted and largely worked out its racist demons.
Elsewhere, as in Delaware, he softened these attacks. “All the talk about us having to shed ourselves of control of special interests misses the point,” he told seven hundred of the state’s Democrats. “In fact, we don’t have a problem with labor. We need labor…. I’m proud to be in a party that has garnered the support of the majority of black Americans.”34
In other words, whether defending or attacking them—and by this point, it was almost always the latter—“special interests” were the diverse constituencies that had flocked to the Democrats: union members, African Americans, feminist women, gays, environmentalists, and any others whose image didn’t square with the “middle-class guy” Biden and others increasingly viewed as the typical voter. With two simple words, their participation in the political process and struggle for the rights and welfare of themselves and others like them had been cast as suspect, even corrupting.
Where once the tyranny of “special interests” meant the control of government by big business and the super-rich, it now referred to the ordinary Americans the New Deal had sought to protect from those same powerful entities. The Democrats’ new priority would instead be Biden’s “middle-class guy,” at least as they imagined him: socially conservative, suspicious of government and taxes, and otherwise curiously aligned with the political desires of the country’s most powerful interests.35
And he was Southern. Biden had been urging Democrats to look to the South for ideas and presidential material since the 1970s, allying himself with Jimmy Carter and encouraging conservative South Carolina senator Fritz Hollings to run for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. The party’s successive electoral collapses had won the Democratic leadership to Biden’s side. “Unless we … have the South with us, we will not control the national agenda,” he said. “For the first time, New York Democrats and California Democrats and Illinois Democrats are all saying that we must have a presidential candidate in 1988 who will appeal to the South.”36
Biden wasn’t wrong: the “solid South” had indeed been pivotal to Democratic victories for generations, thanks to the party’s virulent support for slavery and white supremacy. When Democrats began embracing civil rights under Roosevelt, the South’s outsize power would remain a brake on progressive change for decades, thwarting civil rights legislation and weakening New Deal measures.
Like Biden, Roosevelt had understood the South’s electoral importance. He’d tried to politically reshape it in his own image and push the region to “a more intelligent form of Democracy,” but he failed to dislodge the right-wing Southern elite, despite his and the New Deal’s popularity there. The South would remain an anti-union, economically conservative political backwater. Biden’s effort to win it back could have revived Roosevelt’s effort, capitalizing on new civil rights protections and Democratic popularity among black voters to run a populist campaign that brought blacks and poor whites together through their shared economic interests. Instead, Biden made clear he desired not to bring the South to where Democrats stood, but vice versa. “The party has lost its way,” Biden told Democrats in North Carolina. “You have been where the Democratic Party was and now the Democratic Party must be where you are.”37
Instrumental to this was the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), an unofficial party organization founded after Mondale’s loss to push the Democrats rightward. Its founder, Al From, had been the executive director of the House Democratic Caucus in 1981, when it had put out a statement of “Democratic Economic Principles” that pledged fealty to Reagan’s agenda. Made up of governors and congressmen—almost all of them white men and mostly hailing from the West and especially the South—the DLC hoped to give the latter region greater influence in the party. This all came at the same time as a small group of the party’s fundraisers, including Goldman Sachs executive Robert Rubin, similarly decided to make the Democrats into a centrist, business-friendly force. 38
Biden was a natural fit with the group. In fact, From and Biden’s pollster friend Pat Caddell had already unsuccessfully tried to get him to jump into the 1984 race as the standard-bearer for their preferred policies. They polled the appeal of a made-up “Mr. Smith” who resembled Biden against the other candidates and planned to use the results to pressure House Democrats to abandon Mondale. Though he had declined to run then, Biden was now, in From’s words, one of the DLC’s “leaders,” and with a wide-open 1988 contest in mind, he embarked on a tour across the South with the DLC, lecturing Democrats that they needed to change.39
Calling North Carolina the “conscience of the South,” Biden “most persistently pursued a southern theme in his remarks” at one event, despite being the only speaker not from the South, noted a bemused local columnist. In Virginia, he professed the party would be “much better off” if its conservative Democratic senator Chuck Robb, the chairman of the DLC, ran for president. In Alabama, Sen. Howell Heflin praised Biden for his fiscal conservatism and for being sympathetic to the South’s “traditions and values”; returning the favor, Biden told the crowd “a black man has a better chance in Birmingham than in Philadelphia or New York.” He cut from his speech the usual lines about his fictive civil rights activism and a reference to Birmingham Police Commissioner “Bull” Connor’s use of dogs against black protesters. Conservative columnist Dick Williams of Georgia, who boasted of breaking a union at a television station as a young man, put Biden among the party’s “best and brightest” ahead of his appearance there.40
Anti-unionism was central to the ideology of the DLC and the “New Democrats,” as they came to be called, and despite the critical role organized labor had played