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Donks open new unthink-tank
EFL.
A new left-wing think tank — the Center for American Progress — unveiled itself Tuesday as the Democratic vaccine to what center supporters say is a plague of conservatism now dominating America. "We think the debate has been unbalanced in the country," center president John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton, told Fox News.
just before his lips fell off
"The conservative movement has really built up an infrastructure of not just ideas, but the ability to kind of get out there and do the kind of hard communications work to sell to the American public," he added. The center made its debut sponsoring a conference along with the Century Foundation, which has been around since 1919. Among the headliners was Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark. Clark, who is almost as new to the presidential trail as the center is to Washington, explained why both decided they had to get into the act. "Going forward, we will need new labels and new ideas. Many of them will be created right here at the Center for American Progress," Clark said from New Hampshire in a speech beamed into the conference via satellite.
Then he changed his mind and said he was against it. But then he changed it back again...
But conservatives say labels won’t stick when they have nothing on which to back themselves up. Think tanks earn their credibility by being able "to deliver accurate timely information" to policy and lawmakers that will help them "understand where they may be going wrong and hopefully allow them to go in the right directions on a whole range of very important policies," said Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation.
Accurate? The Donks aren’t willing to be honest if it’ll hurt them.
"[Credibility] is something that this think tank can’t just assume is going to come its way by some kind of virtue of entitlement. You have to earn that," Franc said. Podesta said his group is in the business of "thinking through those new ideas, doing the long-term policy analysis," but it also plans to focus its attention on explaining to the public through direct communications "where we think conservative policies are taking the country off in the wrong direction." Podesta insists that conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation don’t have better ideas, but are merely better at marketing. He said he is confident his center can take over the marketplace of ideas with notable innovations such as a big media staff that will push the center’s thoughts onto the Internet, television and radio.

The conservative (and libertarian) think tanks were a counterweight to the liberal think tanks, if I remember correctly. The liberal think tanks thereupon tanked, because the conservatives (neo- and otherwise) and the libertarians were outperforming them. One of the prerequisites for running a think tank is that there has to be a certain amount of actual thought going on, rather than a mere continuous adjustment of poltical tactics. To gain a reputation, the think tank's output should ideally be predictive — if this, this, and this are the conditions that apply, then this should be the outcome. Nobody's perfect, but the libs aren't noted for being particularly accurate. Their conclusions do avoid hitting the PC buzz buttons, though. That might be because the confuse "predictive" with "predictable."

Posted by: Atrus 2003-10-29
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=20521