The Brain Mistrust

By MATT BAI
NYT

Republicans are feeling buoyant these days, having managed to cut their deficit in the Senate down to 18 seats, which means they can now be a genuine irritant to the Democrats who run the country. And yet there are still those glass-half-empty Republicans who insist on reminding their colleagues that the party is beset by serious problems. It has no discernible governing agenda, for one thing. The party’s chairman, Michael Steele, makes Howard Dean look like a model of reticence, and its most charismatic leader is a former governor of a small state — unless you count the caribou — who seems more interested in celebrity than in policy. And its establishment is under siege from furious activists who seem to regard all government as tyranny. And so this month a cadre of conservative donors and policy makers — they include the former Minnesota senator Norm Coleman and the economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin — stepped forward with an answer to all this: a brand-new think tank. Actually, the American Action Network, as Coleman described it to The Times’s Jackie Calmes, is supposed to be a “think-and-do” tank, meaning that its mission is not only to synthesize the Republican argument but to aggressively market it as well.

The model for this new group is the Center for American Progress, the Democrats’ largest such endeavor. The logic here is oddly circular. After all, the first generation of major conservative think tanks, thought incubators like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, came into being because conservatives thought they needed a counterweight to sprawling liberal foundations endowed by the Fords and the Rockefellers. By the time a group of liberal billionaires tapped John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, to establish the Center for American Progress in 2003, the reasoning was that the left needed an answer to the conservative think tanks they credited with having tilted the nation measurably to the right. And now here come the Republicans to sound the alarm again, convinced that nothing they have can possibly rival the influence of Podesta’s think tank. Such is the psychology of routed political parties, which are apt to attribute their troubles to the machinations of their adversaries rather than to their own failures or sheer misfortune, and that’s a coping mechanism that cuts across all segments of society. The world really would be using Netscape were it not for the devious manipulations of Microsoft. The Orioles would win it every year, if only the Yankees didn’t outspend the world.

(More here.)

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