Center for American Progress

It's important for the Right to be aware of what the Left is doing.  Few, if any, on the Left are doing it better than the Center for American Progress...

[T]he Center for American Progress has become in just five years an intellectual wellspring for Democratic policy proposals, including many that are shaping the agenda of the new Obama administration.

Much as the Heritage Foundation provided intellectual heft for the Republican Party in the 1980s, CAP has been an incubator for liberal thought and helped build the platform that triumphed in the 2008 campaign.  [...]

To help promote its ideas, CAP employs 11 full-time bloggers who contribute to two Web sites, ThinkProgress and the Wonk Room; others prepare daily feeds for radio stations. The center's policy briefings are standing-room only, packed with lobbyists, advocacy-group representatives and reporters looking for insights on where the Obama administration is headed. [...]

CAP, which has 180 staffers and a $27 million budget, devotes as much as half of its resources to promoting its ideas through blogs, events, publications and media outreach. [...]

Podesta modeled the center on the Heritage Foundation, which became the go-to policy-research organization in 1981 when newly elected President Ronald Reagan embraced its conservative ideas embodied in a book called ``Mandate for Leadership.'' Heritage was just seven years old. [...]

Podesta likes to say, ``we're not a think tank, we're an action tank,'' said Dan Weiss, an environmental activist who joined CAP last year.

This is important.  The Center for American Progress has adapted and modernized some of the Right's best strategies and tactics.  They have a conceptually superior understanding of how best to do what they are doing.

• They realized that information and ideas already existed, and action - the organization and application of information - was what the Left needed.  So they created a Marketing Tank.
• They realized that a think tank was two different organizations - policy (501c3) and communications (501c4) - and those two organizations required structural separation to be most effective.  
• They realized the Permanent Campaign was reality, so they built infrastructure to construct the permanent campaign outside of actual campaigns - to ensure the permanent campaign would be both permanent and ideological (rather than merely partisan).
• They realized the internet was their most effective channel - their killer app - so they prioritized the internet as a more effective means of communicating and mobilizing people around ideas, resulting in ideas that very quickly enter the bloodstream of policymakers, the media, influentials and activists.  As John Podesta has said...

Address the issues—in real time. “When we got into this, conservatives had natural outlets on talk radio, Fox, etc. Progressives were weak at this. So we designed a suite of products—a daily e-mail, a blog, etc.—to engage with policy decisions every day.”

Get the long-term message out. “Traditional progressive research institutions devote about 5 percent of resources to outreach. We’re around 40 percent, and it’s paying off. In 2005 we put out a plan for affordable health care for everyone. Now all the Democratic presidential candidates are in favor of universal health coverage.”

Whatever you think of their agenda, it's difficult not to admire how smart the Center for American Progress has been about building an effective new machine that marries policy, communications and action.  In a town that had grown comfortable and complacent about building new political infrastructure, the Center for American Progress helped produce a revolution.

There is much to learn from that.

Michael Gerson seems to think the Fairness Doctrine is a real threat.  Steve Benen correctly calls BS on this...

He's warning Obama not to embrace a policy that he already opposes, and which Democrats have no apparent interest in pursuing.

Indeed, the timing of Gerson's column makes it look especially foolish -- today, the LA Times ran a detailed piece explaining that no one is seriously pushing the Fairness Doctrine, it has no realistic chance of passing, and "right-wing radio" is sounding a "false alarm."

The LA Times is correct.  The Left knows the Fairness Doctrine is a political loser.  It's dead.  The Center for American Progress has even said there is "no need to return to the Fairness Doctrine."   While it's mentioned now and then, there's just no chance the specific Fairness Doctrine regulation itself is coming back.  However, that's quite different from saying the Democrats are not still trying to achieve the same goals as the Fairness Doctrine.  They are.

The Center for American Progress says the Fairness Doctrine would not "address the gap between conservative and progressive talk ".  That's important.  They're not dismissing the underelying goals of government-managed fairness and opinion egalitarianism.  They're simply saying this is not the way to do it.

The roadmap to the Fairness Doctrine is laid out quite clearly in a 2007 Center For American Progress/Free Press report, entitled "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio."  In that report, they lay out how they can bring about the Fairness Doctrine through other means. 

Ultimately, these results suggest that increasing ownership diversity, both in terms of the race/ethnicity and gender of owners, as well as the number of independent local owners, will lead to more diverse programming, more choices for listeners, and more owners who are responsive to their local communities and serve the public interest.

Now, pay attention to the Center for American Progress recommendation on FCC policy for the Obama administration. 

There has been an unprecedented increase in media concentration over the past decade, which has reduced the number and quality of local voices and elevated commercial interests at the expense of the public interest. The new president and the Federal Communications Commission should restore the primacy of the public interest standard and our national commitment to diverse voices and diversity of ownership. The FCC should also prioritize including all of our rapidly diversifying population in the mainstream of the technological revolution so that women and members of minority and immigrant communities are not just consumers of technology, but also owners, producers, and creators of content, applications, and facilities.

The Left has not abandoned their desire to use government to shape the landscape of political speech.  Their policy remains an "opinion diversity mandate".  But instead of approaching as an "equal time" mandate, they are trying to implement the ends of the Fairness Doctrine through an “equal access” mandate.

The Fairness Doctrine is dead.  Long live the Fairness Doctrine.

Google Trends says the Heritage Foundation is winning the battle for traffic among prominent Think Tank websites, followed by the Cato Institute, Brookings and then the Center for American Progress. 

Note: Heritage.org traffic rose sharply immediately after the launch of the Heritage Foundry blog in early 2008.  I'm not sure how much of a causal connection there is, but it's very likely that the blog (a) improved their daily visitor traffic, (b) improved their Google visibility, and (c) led new blog readers to explore more of the Heritage site.

However, there is an interesting complexity.  The Heritage Foundation and the Center for American Progress are both 501(c)3 organizations, focusing only on policy analysis and education.  They "may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of ... activities [and] may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates."   That sharply limits their ability to use the information they collect effectively in the blogosphere or in audiences outside of policy, academic and some narrow media communities. 

However, political advocacy and campaign activity are fuel to bloggers and internet activists.  So, the Center for American Progress set up a separate 501(c)4 organization: the American Progress Action Fund.  501(c)4 organizations can engage in political advocacy and "some political activities".   The Action Fund produces the research distribution outlet, ThinkProgress.org, and the daily talking points newsletter, The Progress Report. 

Look at how Think Progress compares to the Heritage Foundation.

These, not its own legally limited website, are the communications weapons of the Center for American Progress. 

Rather than trying to consolidate power within a single bureacracy, they realized their goals required separate organizations, each specializing in one aspect of the larger goal.  They have created one organization to play in the academic and policy world and a second organization to play in the media and activist world.  

Differentiation allows specialization, and specialization allows...well, the kind of success you see above.  This allows them to pursue multiple, coordinated paths to achieve their goals.  As a result, the Center for American Progress is not so much a Think Tank as it is a Marketing Tank.

The lesson here is that, while organizations should think of information as an asset, but they should not necessarily assume they are also the best distributors of that information.  The collection and analysis of information is a task distinct from framing, synthesis and distribution of information. 

Note: the measurement tools are, of course, imperfect; consider this a best-available approximation.