CQ WEEKLY
– IN FOCUS
Nov. 23, 2008 – 3:51 p.m.
Power Shift Could Force Think Tank to Mellow
By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff
Here’s one ready measure of the change that may be coming to Washington: The think tank that’s been run by John D. Podesta, who’s now also helping to direct the Obama transition, recently released a 56-chapter manual for liberal governance. The enormous book, by the five-year-old Center for American Progress, “Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President,” covers everything from environmental policy to national security to health care.
It also carries a not-so-subtle message for the Washington commentariat: For all of the establishment’s talk about the need to court consensus in governing what remains of the center-right nation, powerful forces will be at work pushing the ideas of the left on the new Democratic president and the more Democratic Congress elected this month.
|
||
|
The book also pays conspicuous homage to one of the center’s founding ambitions: to serve as the liberal version of the Heritage Foundation. That conservative think tank’s prominence soared after it published its own detailed handbook for the new Republican president and the more Republican Congress elected in 1980. “Mandate for Leadership” was widely credited with shaping much of the agenda for the early Reagan administration.
“There’s a lot of pent-up desire and enthusiasm” among liberals, said Michele Jolin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which has often been referred to as something of a government in exile during the Bush years. The group, she said, “was created to help develop a progressive agenda, to formulate ideas, to push them in whatever forum we can and to get them enacted.”
But developing agendas and turning them into federal law or regulation are entirely different propositions, as an inexhaustible roster of experts and members of Congress and past administration officials can attest. So although the American Progress group appears as well-positioned as any advocacy group to shape the thinking and the priorities of the Obama years, it may well have to downshift from campaign attack mode, observers say, and start making calculations on when it might bend on an issue for the sake of getting at least some of its aspirations realized. That, of course, is the very sort of insider centrism that the center and its allies have made a point of scorning during the Bush years.
“They’ve been the attack dog,” Lee Edwards, a Heritage fellow who in 1997 wrote “The Power of Ideas,” an authorized history of the conservative group’s influence, said of Heritage’s liberal rival. “They have to decide now: Do they want to be a lap dog for a Democratic president or a watchdog to keep the Obama administration honest?”
Center of Influence
No one at the Center for American Progress — which is increasingly known around town by the acronym CAP — would phrase things that way, of course. But the group, which employs some 180 fellows and other staff members and has an annual budget of about $26 million, is already straddling the gap between criticizing the powerful and holding power. Several people who have been in top positions at CAP are now working on Barack Obama ’s presidential transition team and so are well-positioned to begin influencing the new administration’s policies from within. They include Cassandra Q. Butts, who became the center’s domestic policy czar after a long stint working for Richard A. Gephardt and is now the transition’s general counsel, and Melody C. Barnes, a veteran Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer who was a CAP executive vice president and is now helping direct the mini-transitions under way in each federal agency.
But first among them is Podesta, who was the fourth and final White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton and has taken a leave from his position as the president and chief executive of the center to be one of three overall directors of the transition. He has pledged to return to the think tank after the inauguration and presumably will have a relatively direct line to the Oval Office after that. He did not respond to interview requests for this story.
But Jim McGann, director of the Program on Think Tanks and Civil Societies at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, expects the chaos of a presidential transition will almost certainly benefit Podesta and the center’s other insiders. “Obama doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for his administration to be fully in place,” McGann said. “He has to rely on steady hands and bright people, and the center provides that.”
On the other hand, the center has not shied away from taking sides in some of the high-profile Democratic Party fights that have come into the open since Election Day — especially in its best-known public forum, a daily e-mail known as the Progress Report, which delivers talking points and links to news stories to thousands of people inside the Beltway. After using the e-mail to vigorously promote liberal ideas during the fall campaign, the center has lately set about using its daily missive to rebut what it calls the “center-right myth” and to trumpet “the progressive mandate” of the election.
The Progress Report also hasn’t shied away from congressional politics. It openly favored California’s Henry A. Waxman in his successful quest to wrest chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee from Michigan’s John D. Dingell . And it slammed Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman as a turncoat just as Democratic senators were starting to deliberate whether the Connecticut independent should be denied his Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairmanship as punishment for backing Republican John McCain for president and criticizing Obama’s qualifications for the job. That stance, it would seem, marks the first defeat for the group in the Obama age, since the Senate Democrats — at the president-elect’s request — decided last week not to touch Lieberman’s chairmanship.
Power Shift Could Force Think Tank to Mellow
Position of Strength
The center does enjoy one big advantage over much of the rest of the think tank world: a steady stream of funding. Unlike groups that struggle to raise money for their programming and accept much of it on the condition that it be used for specific projects, Podesta enjoys relative freedom in forming the center’s agenda, thanks to the generosity of a handful of liberal philanthropists who provided much of its seed capital, including investor George Soros and Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance.
And like Heritage, CAP adopted the “advocacy tank” approach early — establishing a lobbying arm and dedicating nearly half the center’s revenues to communications — to ensure that the center’s policy wonks would be heard in Washington. Since 2004, the center has spent $1.2 million on lobbying and this year hired its first outside lobbyist, Chris Schloesser, a former legislative director for Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
Coming of age in the Internet era, the group elected early on to harness the power of the Web and blog-style commentary to influence power brokers and grass roots alike. In spreading its message online, the center has no peer among Washington think tanks, observers say. “They are on the front edge of fulfilling what’s possible with technology and policy work,” said Andrew Rich, a professor of political science at the City College of New York.
That blog-driven style of debate — combined with the need to frequently update the center’s Web content — has fueled a steady stream of angry salvos at the Bush White House. Readers confining their Iraq news consumption to the Progress Report, for example, would have little awareness that the “surge” policy of sending more troops into the country in 2007 has had a positive effect in reducing violence in Iraq. The center has instead focused on the continuing struggle to reconcile Iraqi political factions.
The center has routinely portrayed natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods as evidence of cataclysmic climate change and every new business collapse as proof of the failure of the GOP’s laissez-faire economic policies. The center has portrayed social conservatives like the segregationists of old; most recently, the Progress Report tarred proponents of Proposition 8, the successful California ballot initiative preventing legal recognition of same-sex marriages in the state, as “bigoted.”
The Progress Report has also freely trained its wrath on the media — and even media watchdog outfits such as the political site FactCheck.org, which had questioned the center’s analysis about how McCain would pay for his health care plan. “They are very clear about having a point of view and not being afraid to express it,” Lee Edwards said.
In contrast to more cerebral think tanks, the center sees the world clearly in bright shades of black and white, said Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning policy shop. “They are addressing immediate policy issues and are not neutral in the war of ideas.” At the same time, she said, “they are less committed to dispassionate scholarship.”
The center has a few fellows with Republican ties on its payroll, but they are figures the conservative movement regards as apostates, such as Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant Defense secretary under Ronald Reagan who’s now a critic of President Bush’s Iraq policy. Its roster is stacked with leading lights of liberalism, such as Morton Halperin, former head of the Washington office of Soros’ Open Society Policy Center, and Clinton administration veterans including Gene Sperling, who was a top economic adviser, and Maria Echaveste, who was a deputy chief of staff. Still, that fairly disciplined ideological profile could work to the center’s advantage, some observers note: Podesta is “well on his way” to instituting a Heritage-style policy shop for progressives, Edwards said.
Getting the Message Right
But sharing a broad structural profile with a group such as Heritage is no guarantee of success in the muddy battlegrounds of Capitol Hill and the White House.
Although it’s true that the past eight years of working in opposition to the White House have united the Democratic Party and turned liberals into loyal Democrats, City College’s Rich said, progressives don’t yet share a clear or unified proactive agenda. And the center’s book, with its exhaustive list of proposals, still doesn’t fit the bill, Rich said. A progressive philosophy “has to go beyond policy proposals to something about how we understand the role for government,” he said — an elusive goal for the kind of fractious, coalition-style politics that Democrats have traditionally specialized in.
What’s more, as Obama and his inner circle well know, any faint leftward step made in the early days of their tenure will come in for intensive scrutiny as a telltale sign of the sort of liberal overreach that some critics say accounts for the major policy and political setbacks of the early Clinton presidency.
Power Shift Could Force Think Tank to Mellow
At the same time, while Reagan made no secret of his alliance with the conservative wing of his party, Obama has shown a pragmatic streak that has at times alienated liberals. He has come out in support of merit pay for teachers — a highly unpopular proposal for a key Democratic interest group, the teachers unions — and this year he voted to enact a law that permits warrantless surveillance of foreign targets communicating with people in the United States.
Still, CAP isn’t about to sacrifice its toehold in the Obama White House to publicize any policy differences with the incoming president — not yet, anyway. The center’s Jolin called her colleagues “forward-looking and optimistic” as they prepare for the next legislative season. And at this point, she believes all signs point to a progressive Obama administration: “Much of what Obama stood for, we’ve agreed with,” she said. “I don’t see a lot of separation.”
FOR FURTHER READING: Lieberman, p. 3155; Waxman, p. 3148; Obama’s challenges, p. 2960; labor’s agenda, p. 2556; surveillance law (PL 110-261), p. 1900; liberal groups’ agenda, p. 1520.
POST A COMMENT
Oops! The following errors must be addressed: