Why The Center for American Progress Rules

Any reactions from the folks at the Heritage Foundation? the AEI? the Hudson Institute?

MS_ I’m confused, what in this post or your article answers the question why CAP rules? Simply telling me runs the organization, or who funds it, or who works there doesn’t answer the question. do they rule because they provide the most cutting edge solution to the problems facing the nation today? Or do they rule because they produce quality scholarship on pressing issues? Come on MS what’s the answer.
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And by the way, your article implies that there is something wrong with their input into this government. I especially resent the statement referring to overworked reporters — does this mean that they were so overwhelmed they didn’t have time to do their own research or are you say8ng that poor quality info slipped through because reporters were to over worked to do due diligence?

About time the pendulum swung. 3 decades of insidious idealogy in lieu of truly compassionate conservatism has led to the inevitable response, and lets hope these guys wield their influence in a more inclusive, less greedy, selfish and pig-headed way, eh?

So you’re trying to say that some scary liberals are running a shadow government and that we’ll all end up either in re-education camps or working in an embryo slaughtering house? Gotcha.
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“At the same time, and largely under the radar, CAP worked furiously during the elections to deliver talking points to overworked journalists”
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Heh, overworked journalists….heh, heh. I’m sitting here wondering, with this country in 2 wars, one illegal and both seemingly unwinnable in any real way and both bankrupting us, the economy in shambles and literally facing total collapse, and with the most corrupt administration in US history heading out the door, who’ve literally robbed the treasury in broad daylight….just what the hell have you people been ‘reporting’ on that’s made you so ‘overworked’? Or more simply, if the fourth estate had dissappeared 8 years ago…would we be any worse off? And if no….what’s the point? Maybe you should put the phrase ‘for entertainment purposes only’ on the masthead.
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Have a happy Thanksgiving everyone. Seriously have one, cuz there might not be many more after this one.

You mean “overworked” journalists like this one?:

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2008/11/25/politico-lovley-toxic-stupidity/

You don’t have to work very hard to cut and paste a Marc Morano press release and tweak it into a news story.

You mean “overworked” journalists like this one?

You don’t have to work very hard to cut and paste a Marc Morano press release and tweak it into a news story.

Please, god, do not allow this group to become the new DLC.
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Just what we don’t need… Al From II: The New Generation.

I always used to think Atrios and co. made up the whole “dirty hippies” meme. Then I read this piece. “New Class?” Scientists? Teachers? Public servants? All just dirty hippies? Irving Kristol is an interesting guy.

Paul Krugman recently on Perlstein’s *Nixonland*:

Here’s what [Nixonland] *doesn’t* say, which isn’t a criticism. What happened, very crucially, was that Nixonism got institutionalized. The creation of a set of institutions – think-tanks, media organizations, all of it funded by a relatively small number of sources (it really comes down to about six angry billionaires, when all is said and done), creating a structure which perpetuates the political style and political goals that were created during these years. Rick has written a lot about the American Enterprise Institute, but not here – AEI was transformed into what we know today towards the end of the period that Rick covers here. The Heritage Foundation is founded in the last two years covered in this book. Those things create an institutional basis for maintaining this style of politics, and then what happens thereafter, is that although the objective reality of urban riots and hippies and anti-war protesters is gone, they are able to find, to conjure up the appearance of equivalents thereafter.

Unfortunately, when it’s clear the other side can’t be trusted, you have to build your own institutions to clear all the cultural smog created by the other side.

The New York Review of Books:

These were the years, too, of Dick Cheney’s close association with the American Enterprise Institute and its offspring, the Project for the New American Century. The parent think tank, once an ordinary home for postwar business conservatism, had mutated, under the guidance of Irving Kristol, into the most lavish and energetic of the quasi-academic lobbies of neoconservative doctrine. The AEI, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, had been transformed into an institute for the promotion of laissez-faire economics, militarized foreign policy, and the dismantling of the welfare state. It differed from, say, the Rand Corporation in eschewing any claim to impartiality of analysis. It was polemical and took confrontational positions that were disseminated early in the lectures and seminars open to resident fellows. The AEI differed, also, from an older centrist policy outfit like the Brookings Institution in having superior access to the mass media, thanks to careful self-advertisement and the coaching that its representatives often received from editors and agents such as Adam Bellow and Lynn Chu. A more-in-sorrow style was favored in discussing the grim necessity, for example, of increasing America’s nuclear stockpile or stopping the “culture of poverty” in the black community by cutting off federal programs.
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Cheney was only the forward edge of a policy long in the works, which had been announced almost in public in the turn-of-the-century strategy document Rebuilding America’s Defenses: the most substantial work commissioned by the Project for the New American Century. Like the authors of that treatise—among them Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, William Kristol, Frederick Kagan, and Stephen Cambone—and like the adepts of American hegemony at the AEI, Cheney, before he took office as vice-president, had concluded that there were no necessary limits on US domination of the world. This conviction hardened during the Clinton years—a window of time, as neoconservatives sometimes say, in which America could have asserted far more control than it did, and with a freer military hand. Cheney’s institutional prowess and his readiness to execute policies long in the making point to a larger pattern that James Mann wrote well about in Rise of the Vulcans…
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With the peculiar tightness of its loyalties and the convenience of its immunities, neoconservatism in the United States now has something of the consistency of an alternative culture. Its success in penetrating the mainstream culture is evident in the pundit shows on most of the networks and cable TV, and in the columns of The Washington Post and The New York Times. In the years between 1983 and 1986, and again, more potently, in 2001–2006, the neoconservatives went far to dislocate the boundaries of respectable opinion in America. The idea that wars are to be avoided except in cases of self-defense suffered an eclipse from which it has not yet returned, largely owing to the persistence of respected opinion makers in urging the spread of freedom and markets by force of arms. More particularly, and to confine ourselves to recent events, the nomination of Samuel Alito and the drafting and legitimation of the “surge” strategy by Retired General Jack Keane and Frederick Kagan of the AEI could not have succeeded as they did without the early and organized advocacy of the neoconservative camp.
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How did they get so close to Dick Cheney? The answer lies in the fact that Cheney has an inquisitive mind, but from the accidents of his career and placement, he was for a long time a thinker deprived of intellectual society. Neoconservatism, as it developed in the 1980s, came to have its own heroes (Robert Bork), its canon of revered texts (Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind), and a set of prejudices delivered in a reasonable tone: hostile to individual liberty, appreciative of modern technology, friendly to religion as a guide to morals and an engine of state power. It was, to repeat, a substitute culture of satisfying density. The AEI along with journals like Commentary and, more recently, The Weekly Standard offer, for those who take the full course, a total environment, an idiom of managerial-intellectual judgment that blends the rapidity of journalism with the weightier pretensions of an academy.
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In the Washington of the 1980s, the elder Kristols and the Cheneys were rising together, and they became close friends. This alliance easily passed to the younger generation: William Kristol in 2003 boasted to David Carr of the The New York Times (“White House Listens When Weekly Speaks”) that “Dick Cheney does send over someone to pick up 30 copies of [The Weekly Standard] every Monday”—a statement that remains the best clue we have to the number of persons who work for the vice-president. The self-confidence of this substitute culture fortified Cheney’s sense that he had always already heard the relevant views, and that he had come into contact with the best minds…

Those minds were a disaster. So you have to set something up to counter their off-kilter version of the truth.

(Sorry, kinda heavy reading for an evening before a holiday…)

Mike
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I think that you missed a fairly large piece of this story: Think Progress. If you go back to the debut of the Think Progress site, it was on the night of the SOTU speech.
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Immediately, CAP had woven it’s factual base into the blgosphere for wide distribution. Moreover, that site had the best, and mos professional debut of any site I have seen before or since. Not only was it well designed, it wasn’t over designed. It was clearly designed with respect for the people who would be coming there, and for the first time in the blogosphere, you could see the penetration of the of that edge, across the middle of the talking points of the DC establishment, and to the otherside of the community.
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This model of edge-to-center, center to edge, and FINALLY, edge to edge communications, was something that the blogosphere had been trying to help the Washington establishment CAP types understand the dynamics of for about three years. The learning curve was incredibly steep.

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John Podesta was one of the few to recognize the power of what was possible, and the only one with the connections and the managerial competence to make this happen. What made it from a think tank to an action tank, was the Think Progress piece. That is what put their work into real time. And in the end, it made them the online, never-ending, go-to, war room, facts-at-you-fingertips that the left blogosphere was looking for. And it was there, in real time, and it was done well, and by very, very competent people. Nobody could call CAP a bunch of DF Hippies.
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That’s why CAP became powerful. And I think you missed that part of the story, Mike. Which is too bad, because I think that was the real part that made the change possible. John Podesta changed the speed at which information could move through the dissemination process. And in doing so, he changed elements of the process itself. Edge to center, center to edge, and edge to edge communications empowered three distinctly different groups of people, and instead of having and arithmetic effect, the force of change became a geometric one.

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