Notion Building
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By MATT BAI
The New York Times Magazine
Published: October 12, 2003
nytimes.com
Exiled from power, the stalwarts of the Democratic Party's Washington establishment plot their return at dinner parties in the capital's tonier neighborhoods. On a recent evening, I attended one of these meetings in a spacious living room in suburban Maryland, where about 50 former ambassadors and administration officials, mostly from the Clinton era, have been gathering regularly to grill the party's presidential candidates. I was invited to attend on the condition that I not identify the host, the guests or the precise location.
The featured speaker this time was not a candidate for office or even a politician. It was John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton's last White House chief of staff and who is considered one of the party's sharpest and toughest operatives. Podesta is a 54-year-old marathon runner with an intense, angular face that seems to suggest he is always calculating something you would never be able to grasp. He is also the leader and architect of a new liberal think tank in Washington known as the Center for American Progress. His goal is to build an organization to rethink the very idea of liberalism, a reproduction in mirror image of the conservative think tanks that have dominated the country's political dialogue for a generation.
Many such left-leaning ventures have been tried over the years and have failed to wield much influence, but Podesta's effort seems different, not only because of his considerable personal stature within the party but also because rage at the Bush administration has galvanized Democrats.
''The rise of the machinery of ideas on the right has been impressive,'' Podesta told the gathering, to nods of assent. ''People have noticed it, and we have talked about it. But we haven't really found the vehicles to compete with what's coming at us.''
Going back to Barry Goldwater, Podesta said, conservatives ''built up institutions with a lot of influence, a lot of ideas. And they generated a lot of money to get out those ideas. It didn't happen by accident. And I think it's had a substantial effect on why we have a conservative party that controls the White House and the Congress and is making substantial efforts to control the judiciary.''
Podesta laid out his plan for what he likes to call a ''think tank on steroids.'' Emulating those conservative institutions, he said, a message-oriented war room will send out a daily briefing to refute the positions and arguments of the right. An aggressive media department will book liberal thinkers on cable TV. There will be an ''edgy'' Web site and a policy shop to formulate strong positions on foreign and domestic issues. In addition, Podesta explained how he would recruit hundreds of fellows and scholars -- some in residence and others spread around the country -- to research and promote new progressive policy ideas. American Progress is slated to operate with a $10 million budget next year, raised from big donors like the financier George Soros.
''The question I'm asked most often is, When are we getting our eight words?'' Podesta said. Conservatives, he went on, ''have their eight words in a bumper sticker: 'Less government. Lower taxes. Less welfare. And so on.' Where's our eight-word bumper sticker? Well, it's harder for us, because we believe in a lot more things.'' The Center for American Progress, Podesta said, was concerned with articulating these principles carefully, over time, rather than rushing out an agenda to help win an election in 2004. ''We're trying to build an idea base for the longer term,'' he said, to bring about ''an enduring progressive majority.''
There was genuine excitement in the room. ''This is the first thing I've heard that gives me hope in a very long time,'' one woman said. The audience, however, had varying notions of what a think tank should do. Most of the questioners seemed to assume as a matter of faith that the liberal message would naturally triumph in America if not for Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a president who, they insist, has lied. One guest urged Podesta to concentrate on briefing liberal TV guests before they appeared on talk shows; another thought Democrats were losing because they used the wrong language.
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Podesta gently reminded his audience that a think tank was for developing new policy solutions, not simply repackaging old ones. ''We've got to fill the intellectual pail a little,'' he cautioned, before worrying too much about how those ideas should be conveyed.
This is precisely the challenge facing Podesta. Just about every leading Democrat in Washington agrees that the party could use a new Big Idea, something to compete with the current conservative agenda of slashing programs and toppling rogue regimes. But what kind of idea? Is it as simple as an image makeover? Is it a left-leaning TV network to fight back against a right-tilted media? Or does the party need a new and bolder policy agenda, even if it means years wandering in the wilderness to find it?
If the history of conservative think tanks is any indication, it might take a real outsider, someone contemptuous of the Democratic establishment, to settle these questions. Can John Podesta, a paragon of the party, find the answers?
Sometimes called the godfather of the conservative movement, Paul M. Weyrich holds a weekly strategy session for 50 or so activists at the offices of his Free Congress Foundation near the Capitol. When Podesta dreams at night, this is the kind of meeting he envisions holding with his left-wing allies: an army of well-financed, loyal ideologues, each occupying a place in the power structure and with enough reach to turn ideas into policy.
When I attended a recent meeting, at the invitation of Weyrich's staff, those giving briefings included Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, representing the Republican leadership of both chambers, as well as President Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, and the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw. The prickly Weyrich presided with a scowl from the dais (he is now confined to a wheelchair), from which he exhorted the faithful to get their message out, using words that made him sound like some liberal's parody of Dr. Evil.
''There are 1,500 conservative radio talk show hosts,'' Weyrich boasted. ''You have Fox News. You have the Internet, where all the successful sites are conservative. The ability to reach people with our point of view is like nothing we have ever seen before!''
Weyrich was 31 when he and Edwin Feulner, then serving as disgruntled aides in a Congress dominated by Democrats, founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973 with early donations from a handful of wealthy families with names like Coors and Scaife. Determined to foster conservative scholarship and get it into the hands of like-minded policy makers, Weyrich and his compatriots were driven by a single, overarching conviction that grew out of the Goldwater campaign in 1964: government needed to be stingier at home and tougher abroad.
Weyrich and Feulner were not interested in securing immediate victories for a Republican Party that seemed to have, at that time, almost no hope of controlling Congress. In fact, many of the ideas they would ultimately champion -- Social Security privatization, school choice, missile defense -- began well outside their party's mainstream. They were insurgents, and they set about staging an ideological takeover of the party, a process that came to fruition sooner than they might have hoped when Ronald Reagan, a fellow outsider, was elected president in 1980.
Today the Heritage Foundation, with an annual budget of roughly $30 million, is like a university unto itself. Its eight-story building houses some 180 employees, and it just completed an addition that has, among other amenities, state-of-the-art teleconferencing, apartments for about 60 interns and a fully wired 250-seat auditorium with its own greenroom. The foundation's in-house scholars are a constant presence on radio and cable TV. (Laura Ingraham, with one of the nation's largest radio followings, broadcasts from a Heritage studio.)
In all, according to a study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Heritage and other conservative think tanks -- the best known being the libertarian Cato Institute and the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute -- spent an estimated $1 billion promoting conservative ideas in the 1990's. From their ranks sprang some credible academics whose think-tank writings spawned powerful careers, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former U.N. ambassador, and Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court associate justice. There also came a flood of conservative theorists -- like Charles Murray, whose book ''The Bell Curve'' attacked assumptions about racial equality, and John Lott, who proposed that we would be safer if everyone carried a gun -- whose arguments, however dubious, bled indelibly into the public debate.
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The disarray Podesta faces as he tries to build a counterweight to this behemoth is not so different from the landscape Weyrich and Feulner surveyed in the 1960's. Not only have Democrats lost their hold on Congress, but they also seem to have lost their hold on a larger vision for the country.
At least in these early stages, the 2004 presidential campaign highlights the stagnation of the Democratic idea pool. The leading candidates spend their time debating questions that were put on the agenda by Republican think tanks, like tax cuts and pre-emptive first strikes, while proposing programmatic variations on old ideas, like universal health coverage and national service -- worthy notions, certainly, but no worthier than they were when Clinton put them forward 12 years ago.
Transformative agendas spring from the emotion of a national moment. The New Deal seized on the anxiety of the Depression; the so-called Reagan and Gingrich revolutions played off a growing distrust of government among a newly prosperous middle class. Given the extraordinary current moment in world affairs, the conversation among Democratic candidates thus far is as notable for what has not been offered as it is for what has: no new framework for the Middle East, no clear doctrine on when and where to undertake military or humanitarian missions. While the Democratic candidates uniformly attack Bush's plan for ''personal savings accounts'' (which is another way of saying the privatization of Social Security), no one seems to have an alternative, 21st-century retirement plan that would save the nation from what looks like an inevitable fiscal crisis.
''We get so caught up as a campaign in trying to find the right position on Israel or the right position on health care that we don't really have time to think through bigger ideas,'' a senior policy adviser to one campaign told me. ''We're just not generating any exciting new vision.''
During the 35 years of dominance from F.D.R.'s New Deal through L.B.J.'s Great Society, Democrats constructed what Gary Hart, the former senator and presidential candidate, calls ''an ideological cathedral'': the G.I. Bill, welfare, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, voting rights. But apart from critics like Hart and Bill Clinton, whose centrist leanings succeeded in getting the party to rethink issues like welfare reform, leading Democrats have fallen into the role of protecting their fathers' agenda from attack rather than inventing a vision of their own. Even the Democratic Leadership Council, which served as the ideological springboard for Clinton's agenda, has gravitated toward electoral politics and away from policy innovations.
''There have been bits and pieces of an agenda,'' Hart said recently. ''Somebody had an idea about health care. Somebody had an idea about education. But nobody's pulled it all together.''
Podesta, the latest to try, exudes a quiet confidence as he sits in a corner office of the think tank's 15th Street building. Cautious and shrewd, he retains the authoritative air of a chief of staff (''You mind if I read while we do this?'' he asked me before one interview, looking down over his glasses), presiding over a mixed crew of casually dressed former White House aides and new college grads in jackets and ties. Podesta has hired about 30 people so far and plans to double that number, although he's not yet sure precisely what they will all be doing. ''I'm looking for opportunity,'' he said when we first sat down in June, ''as opposed to having a business plan that you execute, you know, Step 1 and then Step 2 and then Step 3.''
Podesta stressed that the think tank was not an organ of the Democratic Party. Rather, he pledged that American Progress would offer its voice and ideas to any policy maker or party that would have them. It was obvious that he wanted the center to be seen as an insurgent force in politics, beholden to no one, although it was difficult to imagine who besides the Democrats would stand to benefit from a revitalized liberal agenda. (Presumably Podesta isn't raising $50 million in order to take over the Green Party.)
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