ustxtxb_obs_1986_06_13_50_00009-00000_000.pdf

AT THE TIME the Democrats unveiled their industrial policy statement [in early 1983] almost everyone expected that either Walter Mondale or Edward Kennedy would represent the party in the next election. When Kennedy announced his withdrawal from the race, the torch fell effortlessly into Mondale’s grasp. It was widely assumed and the impression was assiduously cultivated by the Mondale camp that the agenda worked out by the Democratic business groups and the Democratic National Committee vast majority of the party and that, accordingly, the former vice president would sweep easily to the nomination. For a while during 1983, this scenario did indeed seem to be coming true. From its command post in the Washington office of Winston & Strawn, a leading international law firm headquartered in Chicago, the Mondale campaign appeared to perfectly embody the coalition Democratic business leaders were seeking to build. At its informal center was a group of veteran Democratic businessmen with glittering multinational credentials, including. C. Peter McColough of Xerox \(prominent Democratic fundraiser, member of both the Business Council and the Business Roundtable, and a director of many just retired as CEO of DuPont and co-chair of the Business Roundtable, but still active on the boards of such concerns as I.B.M., Blumenthal \(former Carter Treasury Secretary, head of Burroughs, and director of such companies as Equitable members of the Dayton family \(longtime friends of the candidate, whose huge Minneapolis based retailing concern included on its board Bruce K. MacLaury, president of the Brookings prominent investment bankers who had Adapted from Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics. 1986 by Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers. Reprinted by permission of Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. long been associated with the Democratic Party, including Roger Altman of Lehman Brothers, and Mondale’s close friend. Herbert Allen. San Francisco real estate magnate \(and Coalition for Shorenstein, Mel Swig \(the chair of prominent real estate members of the Forbes 400 “richest Americans” were also early members of the Mondale bandwagon. For more than a year, Altman, Allen, and others in this group had been working to “educate” Mondale on their business-oriented views on taxes, social spending. and other issues. Under their guidance \(and in some cases patronage, since Mondale was working for several loudly proclaimed effort to fashion a “new” more centrist, business-oriented public image. While these businessmen prepped Mondale, a small army of policy analysts occupying the multinational middle of the Democratic Party advised the campaign, including Sol Linowitz, investment banker David Aaron \(previously with Carter’s National SecuWalter Slocombe \(also formerly of the State Department and a member of the Atlantic Council of the U.S. and the sten, a strong free trade advocate and former Treasury official, whose new Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., had received a $4 million grant from the German Marshall Fund, advised the campaign on trade and monetary policies. The Mondale campaign also raised funds from all the natural opponents of Reagan policies: real estate magnates, including both Fred and Donald Trump; insurance executives, including Aetna Life’s John Filer and Connecticut General head Robert D. Kilpatrick; liberal internationalists with strong ties to Europe, including Thomas J. Watson, Jr., and the head of the German Marshall Fund; and many investment hankers, including Goldman Sachs head John L. Weinberg, Prudential-Bache chairman Harry Jacobs, William Hambrecht \(whose Hambrecht & Quist Irving Rothschild of Bear Stearns, and Peter Solomon of Lehman Brothers. Other business figures with a clear interest in arms control such as Orion Picture’s Arthur Krim \(a veteran member of the advisory committee for the embattled Arms Control and Disarma0. Andreas \(chair of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. did several members of the Rockefeller family; leading Democratic members of the Trilateral Commission \(including Owen and international lawyer Richard communications, including Capital Cities chair Thomas S. Murphy \(a business of other capital intensive internationally oriented businesses \(including at least one from Control Data, from whose board Mondale was then prudently friend John G. McMillian \(on the board of whose Northwest Energy sat James Schlesinger, another Democrat with ties to both investment banking and the Carter’s former Secretary of Defense and now a director of CBS, the Washington Post, and other multinationals, also advised Mondale informally. Over the course of 1983, many other liberal internationalist business figures who had previously backed Democrats support the campaign, including Standard Shares’ Irving Harris; Salomon Brothers’ head John Gutfreund; Bear Stearns chair Maurice Greenberg; Morgan Stanley managing partner Richard Fisher; Lehman Brothers chair Lewis Glucksman; Goldman Sachs partner Robert Rubin \(who eventually raised more than $1.8 million for the candiWolfensohn; and, of course, Felix Rohatyn. IN THE LATTER half of 1983, however, the aura of Mondale’s invincibility began to tarnish, for the coalition it was based upon was proving desperately unstable. The basic problem was twofold. First, after three years of Republican rule, the organized mass base of the campaign was literally disappearing. From the beginning, the raison d’etre of Mondale’s effort had been to find a compromise that both labor could support. That had been a guiding thought behind the party’s industrial policy proposals, and it was also the reason Mondale kept courting THE TEXAS OBSERVER 9 Mondale’s Right Turn By Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers