Why working-class voters were supposed to pine for balanced budgets, free-trade treaties, and the rest of the items on the DLC wish-list was a mystery. The answer, it would soon become clear, was that the DLC didn’t really care all that much about working people in the first place. The aim of the group was to capture the Democratic Party for its lobbyist supporters by whatever means were at hand, and in the 1980s, claiming to represent the overlooked middle American probably seemed like a good gambit.
