In the Tanks for the Democrats
Back from the political wilderness, left-leaning thinkers are having their day
Democratic policy wonks just can't seem to publish fast enough these days. Early this year, the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, put out its Agenda for Shared Prosperity, a broad economics blueprint developed by some 50 economists that tackles everything from healthcare to retirement security to trade.
At the urging of Senate Democrats, a team of business leaders last fall developed a plan—the Horizon Project—to bolster America's competitiveness. The centrist Third Way group published a national security strategy titled "Beyond Bush." And the middle-of-the-road Democratic Leadership Council is planning an "Ideas Primary," a series of forums nationwide to hash out policy ideas likely to be debated in the 2008 presidential race.
The Democratic idea world is abuzz. "This is a time for bold and new ideas," says Bob Borosage, codirector of the Campaign for America's Future, a mostly left-wing think tank that opened new offices as a liberal beachhead on K Street, Washington's traditional home to high-priced lobbyists.
Democratic wonks and their wealthy backers are out of the wilderness. With the party back in power on Capitol Hill and an open field of presidential candidates to influence, they're racing to get their ideas out in white papers, newspaper op-eds, and conferences. Some hope for immediate legislation, others for a chance to shape the eventual Democratic nominee's platform. But the window of opportunity may be narrow; it's just a matter of months before the presidential candidates harden their positions and start reducing them to digestible sound bites.
Firepower. For the past six years of the Bush presidency—and some argue for even decades before—progressives have lacked the intellectual firepower to take on the conservative right. "Conservatives kind of dominated from the 1970s through 2000," says John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton and now head of the four-year-old Center for American Progress, one of the best funded of the leftist think tanks.
The right is dominated by well-funded organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, all of which have their own gleaming buildings in Washington; most of the Democratic groups have only their own floors. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, claimed total assets of $159 million in 2005. "The other guys," Podesta says, "fight to win, and we needed someone in the ring with them."
A handful of big-ticket Democratic donors has worked largely under the radar since 2004 to organize the "Democracy Alliance," which is financing progressive groups; it has spent several million dollars so far. "Democrats have become reawakened to the need to get out there and compete in the arena of ideas," says Bernard Schwartz, a longtime Democratic fundraiser and contributor to several progressive think tanks and projects. Leo Hindery, a former CEO of the YES Network and AT&T Broadband, ran the Horizon Project, which developed "medium term" recommendations on trade, education, healthcare, and infrastructure, directed primarily at Congress.
Still, says Simon Rosenberg, a former Clinton hand and staffer at the Democratic National Committee, who now leads the centrist NDN group, "we are grossly mismatched."
But with Democrats in control of the House and Senate for the first time in 12 years, Democratic think tanks have a bevy of front-burner issues that they're optimistic about, including immigration reform legislation, changes to No Child Left Behind, and broad competitiveness concepts. If those ideas do lead to legislation, they may help voters identify what Democrats stand for. So far, says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, voters increasingly see Democrats as representing a "new direction," but what that means exactly still needs to be "filled in with specifics."
Some of the broader policy debates may not lead to legislation immediately, and these groups aren't in sync on everything. But several of them agree that wage growth in recent years has generally not kept pace with productivity gains and would like to see that situation addressed.
Progressives like Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute and Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future also see the healthcare debate moving away from incremental changes, especially in coverage for children, to a broad discussion of universal coverage. (Mishel's and Borosage's think tanks, for example, both embrace a policy developed by Yale University Prof. Jacob Hacker to allow nonelderly Americans who lack good employer-based coverage to buy into a Medicare-like public plan.)
But there are fault lines too in the Democratic idea world, most obviously on trade policy. More leftist Democrats argue that the Clinton-era globalization policy of free trade hasn't worked and needs significant revision. "The progressive side feels more and more emboldened," says Borosage, in taking on the dominant economic policy of the party under Clinton's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.
Economic populists, as the progressives are known, argue for tougher labor and environmental standards on trade agreements and for more investment in technologies that generate domestic manufacturing jobs. Rubin and others have set up the Hamilton Project, which argues for sustaining free trade but is also discussing programs like wage insurance and additional training for workers who lose their jobs.
Some of these larger debates in the party will very likely take years to hash out, not months, and whoever winds up as the Democratic nominee will have the biggest role in shaping those outcomes. For the moment, though, the idea world is churning out reams of paper with new entries. "I would expect this flurry to continue for another six months," says William Galston of the Brookings Institution. After that, the stage shifts to the presidential race.
With James Pethokoukis
This story appears in the April 9, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.