Inside Obama's Idea Factory in Washington
By Michael Scherer / Washington Friday, Nov. 21, 2008
Amid their self-congratulatory celebrations of the past few weeks, it's easy to forget that Democrats were in a state of absolute despair not so long ago. At the dawn of 2003, the House, the Senate and the White House lay in Republican hands, while the Supreme Court threatened to tilt further to the right. Rep. Tom Delay, then the Republican majority leader, was overheard calling out, while smoking a cigar in a government building, "I am the federal government."
If liberals had any hopes of being able to make the same claims in the near future, they knew they needed to be more like conservatives. Wealthy Democrats wanted to have ideological rabble rousers like Rush Limbaugh and activist breeding grounds like the College Republicans to create a new generation of shock troops. But most of all, to have a real shot at regaining control of Washington, they wanted to plot an intellectual coup, spearheaded by an aggressive idea factory like the Heritage Foundation.
Five years later, they have that, and a lot more, in the Center for American Progress (CAP), the most influential independent organization in Obama's nascent Washington. CAP was the brainchild of former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, who dutifully worked wealthy dinner parties with a simple idea: He would create a new organization, a "think tank on steroids," to help progressive ideas regain power. Tom Daschle, once the top Democrat in the Senate, got on board, calling it an "action tank." Sarah Wartell, who would become Podesta's deputy, had a more homely description: "Not your grandmother's think tank."
And not since the Heritage Foundation helped guide Ronald Reagan's transition in 1981 has a single outside group held so much sway. Just as candidate Obama depended on CAP during the campaign for opposition research and talking points, President-elect Obama has effectively contracted out the management of his own government's formation to Podesta. "The Podesta group was formed to bring Democrats back into the presidency, that was its purpose of being," says Stephen Hess, an expert on presidential transitions at the Brookings Institution, a much more traditional think tank.
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http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1861305,00.html