Fun with think tank names!
Anyway, via David Nather at CQ Politics, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, formerly of the McCain campaign, wants to start a new conservative think tank.
He’s developing a proposal for a new think tank that he describes as a “Center for American Progress for the right” — a reference to the liberal think tank that has supplied staff and policy proposals to the Obama administration and developed new ways to market its ideas.
“I think there is now pretty widespread recognition that the Republican Party needs to become demographically broader, more welcoming of different ideas,” said Holtz-Eakin, who ran the Congressional Budget Office from 2003 to 2005. “And it’s time to think strategically about how to appeal more broadly outside the South.”
Liberal bloggers aren’t buying it.
Kevin Drum believes that what Holtz-Eakin really wants to build is a DLC, not a CAP.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin wants a conservative version of the Center for American Progress. But as Matt Yglesias points out, there are plenty of think tanks on the right, funded at levels beyond the left’s wildest dreams. If CAP is running rings around right-wing think tanks intellectually — which it is — it’s not due to a lack of institutions or funding.
So what’s the right’s problem? That’s easy: conservative think tanks are short of new ideas because new ideas were the last thing the billionaire funders of those institutions wanted. What they wanted, and still want, is validation of their prejudices; if someone at a right wing think tank forgets the nature of his job and actually, you know, does some independent thinking, he quickly gets fired.
In the last paragraph, Krugman’s talking about Bruce Bartlett, BTW.
Conor Clarke defends the idea:
You might say that Holtz-Eakin’s scheme is unlikely to succeed because he’ll have trouble finding enough open-minded billionaires or movement foot soldiers interested in issues beyond tax cuts. But that doesn’t make his idea a bad one! If Holtz-Eakin is saying “my movement needs a new think tank because we need to be open to new ideas,” I don’t think it’s a fair response to say, “But that’ll never work because your movement isn’t open to new ideas!”
More when I find it.
UPDATE: Via Matt Y, Tim Fernholz at Tapped
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May 29, 2009 at 8:01 pm
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