Bookshelf

When I attended a recent meeting, at the invitation of Weyrich’s staff, those giving briefings included Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, representing the Republican leadership of both chambers, as well as President Bush’s campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, and the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw. The prickly Weyrich presided with a scowl from the dais (he is now confined to a wheelchair), from which he exhorted the faithful to get their message out, using words that made him sound like some liberal’s parody of Dr. Evil.

“There are 1,500 conservative radio talk show hosts,” Weyrich boasted. “You have Fox News. You have the Internet, where all the successful sites are conservative. The ability to reach people with our point of view is like nothing we have ever seen before!”

Weyrich was 31 when he and Edwin Feulner, then serving as disgruntled aides in a Congress dominated by Democrats, founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973 with early donations from a handful of wealthy families with names like Coors and Scaife. Determined to foster conservative scholarship and get it into the hands of like-minded policy makers, Weyrich and his compatriots were driven by a single, overarching conviction that grew out of the Goldwater campaign in 1964: government needed to be stingier at home and tougher abroad.

Weyrich and Feulner were not interested in securing immediate victories for a Republican Party that seemed to have, at that time, almost no hope of controlling Congress. In fact, many of the ideas they would ultimately champion—Social Security privatization, school choice, missile defense—began well outside their party’s mainstream. They were insurgents, and they set about staging an ideological takeover of the party, a process that came to fruition sooner than they might have hoped when Ronald Reagan, a fellow outsider, was elected president in 1980.

Today the Heritage Foundation, with an annual budget of roughly $30 million, is like a university unto itself. Its eight-story building houses some 180 employees, and it just completed an addition that has, among other amenities, state-of-the-art teleconferencing, apartments for about 60 interns and a fully wired 250-seat auditorium with its own greenroom. The foundation’s in-house scholars are a constant presence on radio and cable tv. (Laura Ingraham, with one of the nation’s largest radio followings, broadcasts from a Heritage studio.)

In all, according to a study by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Heritage and other conservative think tanks—the best known being the libertarian Cato Institute and the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute—spent an estimated $1 billion promoting conservative ideas in the 1990’s. From their ranks sprang some credible academics whose think-tank writings spawned powerful careers, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former U.N. ambassador, and Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court associate justice. There also came a flood of conservative theorists—like Charles Murray, whose book “The Bell Curve” attacked assumptions about racial equality, and John Lott, who proposed that we would be safer if everyone carried a gun—whose arguments, however dubious, bled indelibly into the public debate.

The disarray Podesta faces as he tries to build a counterweight to this behemoth is not so different from the landscape Weyrich and Feulner surveyed in the 1960’s. Not only have Democrats lost their hold on Congress, but they also seem to have lost their hold on a larger vision for the country.

At least in these early stages, the 2004 presidential campaign highlights the stagnation of the Democratic idea pool. The leading candidates spend their time debating questions that were put on the agenda by Republican think tanks, like tax cuts and pre-emptive first strikes, while proposing programmatic variations on old ideas, like universal health coverage and national service—worthy notions, certainly, but no worthier than they were when Clinton put them forward 12 years ago.

Transformative agendas spring from the emotion of a national moment. The New Deal seized on the anxiety of the Depression; the so-called Reagan and Gingrich revolutions played off a growing distrust of government among a newly prosperous middle class. Given the extraordinary current moment in world affairs, the conversation among Democratic candidates thus far is as notable for what has not been offered as it is for what has: no new framework for the Middle East, no clear doctrine on when and where to undertake military or humanitarian missions. While the Democratic candidates uniformly attack Bush’s plan for “personal savings accounts” (which is another way of saying the privatization of Social Security), no one seems to have an alternative, 21st-century retirement plan that would save the nation from what looks like an inevitable fiscal crisis.

“We get so caught up as a campaign in trying to find the right position on Israel or the right position on health care that we don’t really have time to think through bigger ideas,” a senior policy adviser to one campaign told me. “We’re just not generating any exciting new vision.”

During the 35 years of dominance from F.D.R.’s New Deal through L.B.J.’s Great Society, Democrats constructed what Gary Hart, the former senator and presidential candidate, calls “an ideological cathedral”: the G.I. Bill, welfare, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, voting rights. But apart from critics like Hart and Bill Clinton, whose centrist leanings succeeded in getting the party to rethink issues like welfare reform, leading Democrats have fallen into the role of protecting their fathers’ agenda from attack rather than inventing a vision of their own. Even the Democratic Leadership Council, which served as the ideological springboard for Clinton’s agenda, has gravitated toward electoral politics and away from policy innovations.

“There have been bits and pieces of an agenda,” Hart said recently. “Somebody had an idea about health care. Somebody had an idea about education. But nobody’s pulled it all together.”

Podesta, the latest to try, exudes a quiet confidence as he sits in a corner office of the think tank’s 15th Street building. Cautious and shrewd, he retains the authoritative air of a chief of staff (“You mind if I read while we do this?” he asked me before one interview, looking down over his glasses), presiding over a mixed crew of casually dressed former White House aides and new college grads in jackets and ties. Podesta has hired about 30 people so far and plans to double that number, although he’s not yet sure precisely what they will all be doing. “I’m looking for opportunity,” he said when we first sat down in June, “as opposed to having a business plan that you execute, you know, Step 1 and then Step 2 and then Step 3.”

Podesta stressed that the think tank was not an organ of the Democratic Party. Rather, he pledged that American Progress would offer its voice and ideas to any policy maker or party that would have them. It was obvious that he wanted the center to be seen as an insurgent force in politics, beholden to no one, although it was difficult to imagine who besides the Democrats would stand to benefit from a revitalized liberal agenda. (Presumably Podesta isn’t raising $50 million in order to take over the Green Party.)

In the months that followed, as I talked with Podesta regularly, I came to understand that he was, in fact, caught between powerful forces in his own party, an exceptionally deft navigator trying to steer his way through treacherous crosscurrents. On the one hand, there is the party’s struggle between elements of the left and center—the battle personified by Howard Dean and Moveon.org on one side and Joe Lieberman and the D.L.C. on the other—from which Podesta has vowed to remain aloof. “I’m trying to be ecumenical on the center-left thing,” Podesta said. “When you’ve got such a radical direction of the country on the right, that’s where our fight should be, and not with each other.”

The other conflict, and the one that involves Podesta and American Progress more directly, is between those who believe the party can “message” its way out of exile and those who believe it will have to innovate its way out. It is a difference of opinion that divides Podesta’s potential financial backers, powerful allies and even some of those working for him. And it could, if left unresolved, leave American Progress as confused about its own mission as Democrats seem to be about theirs.

Most Democratic insiders, like those assembled in the living room where I watched Podesta make his pitch, will insist that the party’s main problem has been its inability to be heard. And this, they say, points to a lack of institutional voices. The Brookings Institution, a moderate think tank that is every bit as sprawling as Heritage and is supposed to be its counterbalance, is neither ideological nor self-promotional enough to push back against the right. The Democratic National Committee’s idea of debating the opposition is to produce and post on its Web site a painfully slow and nonsensical animated video of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as Frankenstein and Igor. With no one coordinating the message, liberals rely on an array of single-issue groups—environmental, abortion rights, civil rights—who pursue disparate agendas, and not always effectively.

The need to imitate the tactics and the discipline of the right wing is now discussed obsessively at liberal and leftist strategy sessions and dinner parties, and leading Democrats see Podesta’s think tank as a command center for a new left-wing conspiracy—a progressive group that is, for once, both well financed and willing to get as mean as the opposition. Among them is Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader and the highest-ranking Democrat in the land, who has been known to complain bitterly about the influence of right-wing commentators. Daschle was among a small group who plotted with Podesta for more than a year to establish American Progress.

“They have a dozen think tanks, and we have none,” Daschle said during a conversation in his Capitol office. “We don’t come close to matching their firepower in the media.”

When I asked if the Democrats might also be struggling for lack of compelling new ideas, Daschle shook his head.

“I don’t worry,” Daschle said. “The recent polling data suggests that with all of this imbalance and all of this reach and all of this power that the right has today—in media, in think tanks and on the radio and with the White House—with all of that, on many of the issues the American people care the most about, Democrats are now leading. It’s very encouraging to us.”

It is not so encouraging, however, to some other Democrats, who say that asking voters how they feel about the party on a bunch of individual positions—deficit spending, a patients’ bill of rights—is not the same thing as having a coherent idea of where you want to take the country 10 or 20 years from now. They want Podesta’s group to function not simply as a tv booking agency but also as the kind of idea factory that Heritage, Cato and A.E.I. were in the 1970’s, pumping out provocative new proposals that could eventually define in the public mind what it means to be progressive.

Senator Hillary Clinton is one of them. “We do have to do a better job to compete in the arena with the ideas we already have,” she told me. “But it’s also clear to me that we need some new intellectual capital. There has to be some thought given as to how we build the 21st-century policies that reflect the Democratic Party’s values.”

Even inside the offices of American Progress, there are divergent views about how to divide resources between doing battle and doing research. I mentioned to Laura Nichols, Podesta’s senior vice president for communications, that one staff member had suggested there was no need “to reinvent the wheel” of Democratic thought.

“I think we do need to reinvent the wheel,” said Nichols, who until recently shaped the party’s message as one of Dick Gephardt’s top aides on Capitol Hill. “Being able to duke this out on the cables every day is not going to solve your problem of what the long-term progressive vision is.

“This is what I did for 10 years: ‘Where’s our bumper sticker? What’s our slogan? Where’s our bullet point?’ There is no magic bullet here. We’re just going to have to do the hard work.”

Podesta seems to agree. “In my view, the ideas are most important,” he said. At a meeting of liberal interest groups, most of whom were chiefly concerned with message, Podesta put it this way: “We’re constantly operating on the way Bush has set the table and on the way conservatives have set the table. We need to reset that table, and the only way to do that is to start with the substance.”