NYT article on John Podesta and the “Center for American Progress”
[I’ve been hearing about John Podesta and the “Center for American Progress” for a while from my friends at the Commonweal Institute. Looks like they’re finally read to go live on October 20th. The article’s central point about the conflict between the demands of serving the status quo establishment and the need to possibly attack and shake up that establishment is very pointed. I think this is one reason that the Green Party has seen what success it has to date: freedom to operate, to attack sacred cows, to shake things up. -Thomas]
Notion Building
By MATT BAI
Published: October 12, 2003
Exiled from power, the stalwarts of the Democratic Party’s Washington establishment plot their return at dinner parties in the capital’s tonier neighborhoods. On a recent evening, I attended one of these meetings in a spacious living room in suburban Maryland, where about 50 former ambassadors and administration officials, mostly from the Clinton era, have been gathering regularly to grill the party’s presidential candidates. I was invited to attend on the condition that I not identify the host, the guests or the precise location.
The featured speaker this time was not a candidate for office or even a politician. It was John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton’s last White House chief of staff and who is considered one of the party’s sharpest and toughest operatives. Podesta is a 54-year-old marathon runner with an intense, angular face that seems to suggest he is always calculating something you would never be able to grasp. He is also the leader and architect of a new liberal think tank in Washington known as the Center for American Progress. His goal is to build an organization to rethink the very idea of liberalism, a reproduction in mirror image of the conservative think tanks that have dominated the country’s political dialogue for a generation.
Many such left-leaning ventures have been tried over the years and have failed to wield much influence, but Podesta’s effort seems different, not only because of his considerable personal stature within the party but also because rage at the Bush administration has galvanized Democrats.
