As the caucuses and primaries approach, candidates will come under increasing pressure to ignore the broader electorate and appeal to the party faithful...

...A new Democratic president will have the chance to unite Americans around solutions that will make all Americans proud of their country again. For the sake of the hardworking Americans who are depending on us to fix Washington and put our country on the right track, we pray that Democrats set out to build a majority that can last.

I don't think they have to worry about the DLC having power. Wherever there is corporate-military-industrial-complex money, there is considerable power...and the Democrats will never cede all of it to the GOP. The DLC is still extremely influential, but now that influence has been driven largely underground. If you read the column, you'll see that Ford and O'Malley speak in code. Some examples:

Some liberals are so confident about Democratic prospects that they contend the centrism that vaulted Democrats to victory in the 1990s no longer matters.

What 'centrism' means here goes unstated.

The temptation to ignore the vital center is nothing new.

What is the 'vital center'? They don't say.

With an ambitious common-sense agenda, the progressive center has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win back the White House, expand its margins in Congress and build a political and governing majority that could last a generation.

No definition of the 'progressive center' is provided.

When they finally get around to defining an agenda, it lacks so much specificity that it could almost pass as Dennis Kucinich's platform.

So far, our leading presidential candidates seem to understand that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. That's why they have begun putting forward smart, New Democrat plans to cap and trade carbon emissions, give more Americans the chance to earn their way through college, achieve universal health care through shared responsibility, increase national security by rebuilding our embattled military and enable all Americans who work full time to lift themselves out of poverty.

The proof of the pudding is definitely in the eating and, in this column, the DLC isn't sharing the ingredients. If their agenda can't face the light of day, how are we to trust it?

This urgent plea to double-cross the base is transparent. The DLC agenda is not the American people's agenda and now that they cannot monopolize the media, they cannot trick the people into thinking otherwise.

I pray the candidates will tap into the latent power of the netroots and grassroots to fashion a second New Deal, a truly progressive agenda, for the 21st century. And I pray they'll leave the DLC for the historians to research.