I’ll get behind Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination, but I hope she doesn’t. Why? Because she, unlike Edwards or Obama, is deeply associated with the inaptly named “Democratic Leadership Council,” or DLC.

The DLC is not the Democratic Party. It’s a separate organization, run by a group of people who wrongly see themselves as leaders of an effort to “modernize” Democratic politics. Up until the 2006 election, they had tremendous influence on the direction and campaign strategies of Democratic politicans and candidates. They steered our party the wrong way in every election since 1994.

The DLC was useful once, back in the early 1990’s. But ten years later and they’re woefully out of touch. Just look at this comment made last April by Harold Ford, homophobe and new Chairman of the DLC:

“we should all remember that the DLC played an instrumental role in giving Bill Clinton - then an Arkansas governor - a policy platform to campaign on and from in 1991.”

That’s the problem in a nutshell.

The DLC is stuck in 1991, seeing every election through an aged and dusty lens. They fail to recognize the changes in the GOP and in the American electorate in the intervening period. After helping bring us victory in 1992, their myopia brought us a nearly unbroken string of election disasters starting with the unimaginable loss of the House of Representatives in 1994, the razor thin Gore victory in 2000 (stolen by the Supreme Court), and a nearly hegemonic GOP by 2004.

Following the DLC’s playbook, we lost an election in 2004 that should have been ours by a landslide.

It’s hard to imagine it now, but until very recently the DLC was convinced that the Democratic party would suffer terribly if Democratic politicians and candidates spoke out publicly against the war in Iraq. The DLC considered it dangerous for democrats to be seen as “anti-war.” In their minds, being anti-war means hippies, marijuana, flower children, and John Lennon. Bad images that they thought would be off-putting for the rest of the country. “Too liberal,” they said.

The GOP has been governing solely to their base for the last six years, maybe longer. Under the DLC’s direction, the Democratic Party has done the opposite. Embarrassed by, ignoring, and discounting the base. This was slowly driving the party into the ground, creating a party that stands for nothing at worst, or “Republican Lite” at best.

The Party largely followed the DLC’s deadly advice on the Iraq war until John Murtha, Howard Dean and a few other started ignoring the DLC’s advice. And guess what happened? We started winning.

The 2006 election was the first moment in a decade where the Party slipped from the DLC’s death grip.

Try and forget for a moment how morally wrong the DLC’s advice was on the war. Ignore temporarily how wrong and harmful it was to the country and the world for so many Democrats to sit quietly while Bush steered the country into disaster. With that out of your mind, focus on the how absurdly wrong the DLC was in their claim that being “anti-war” would cause the democrats to lose elections. In other words, not only was their advice immoral and damaging, it actually hurt the party at the ballot box. They can’t even do Machiavellian politics right.

Just look at how a confident Bob Shrum, Democratic political adviser, recalls his profoundly dim-witted and Machiavellian advice to then-Senator John Edwards to vote for the Iraq war:

“…But Edwards didn’t want to look “liberal” and out of the mainstream; he was, after all, the southern candidate and thought of himself as Clintonesque. He valued the advice and prized the support of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council…” [source: TMP memo emphasis added]

By any objective measure, this was horrible advice. In sum: Support the war because you don’t want to look like a sissy and because you want the support of the DLC.

It’s hard to imagine that any Democrat would still listen to the DLC. Yet some Democrats do. Hillary Clinton does. This is the main reason why I won’t — I can’t — vote for her in the primary.

The 2006 election was the first nail in the DLC’s coffin. If Hillary Clinton wins, she’s going to pry open that coffin and bring all of her DLC advisers and policy people back into the White House and back to the top of Party leadership, where they can start messing things up again. We need a candidate that repudiate the DLC’s backward ways, and move the Party — and the country — forward.