In 1972 the Illinois delegation of the Daley machine to the Democratic convention was excluded by Democratic liberal delegates under the new rules adopted after 1968. The old men (who they call now "Grown-ups") like Daley, Tip O Neil, Bob Strauss, John Connaly, etc, were angry and bitter at having their power defied by the upstarts. The party defected en masse and helped elect Nixon. Many went over and just became Republicans outright. Those who remained in the party were the ancestors of the "Blue Dogs".
In his book “Man of the House,” published in 1987, Tip ONeil wrote, “Flying back from the 1972 convention I had a long talk with Bob Strauss the treasurer and future chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Senator Henry Jackson of Washington. All of us were bitter at what we had just witnessed. The convention was filled with first-time delegates, mostly women and minorities who spent the bulk of their time fighting over the various planks of the party platform.”
From that time the old racist, ethnic, money, power base of the Democratic party has been moving step by step to repudiate liberalism, the liberals, the peace movement, and everything else connected with those times, from McGovern, LBJ and back to Franklin Roosevelt.
Clinton made huge steps in that direction by getting rid of welfare as an issue (against LBJ), killing civil rights through affirmative action (against LBJ), repealing the Glass-Stegal act (against FDR), unlimited "Free Trade", coddling Wall Street, continuing military aggression and sanctions in the Balkans and Iraq, etc.
But the transformation was completed by the election of Barak Obama who disregarded and repudiated that whole time period and its accomplishments: "He [Reagan] put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating."
Now by bringing Dick Daley's son into the White House to set the tone and guard the agenda, the Old Democrats have triumphed. Its over. They have chosen whose side they are going to be on, and it is not the side of the common people. Daley is there to tell us: "You're screwed and there is nothing you can do about it."
Obama's chief of making business happy:
"THOSE WORDS of Daley--'there's nothing you can do about it'--could stand as a summary of the post-Clinton Democratic Party's defeatist approach to just about anything that might affect ordinary people, from its surrender to Bush's lies in the run up to the war in Iraq to its far-too-complacent attitude to the current jobs crisis."
