I've now read in several places that John Podesta's (Bill Clinton's former Chief of Staff) glitzy new think tank, the Center for American Progress, circulated press kits to members of the media informing them of Tony Snow's negative appraisals of the Bush White House. The idea was apparently to embarrass Bush or Snow or both on the day of his hiring as White House spokesman.
The Center for American Progress (CAP) was conceived as a left-wing counter to outfits like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. It launched with a lot of fanfare and has surely offered its share of white papers, policy briefs, and expert testimonies. I sense that with the Tony Snow maneuver the CAP may have damaged its own credibility. We're talking about petty electioneering type stuff and my experience is that think tanks don't do that, not even the ones with a clear ideological bent.
S.T., Kathy, Ben, Alan, you have all done plenty of think tank time. Am I right? Is this a breach of etiquette?
5 comments:
Every place I've been at has been extremely careful to stay away from this sort of thing. However, I cannot speak for any others.
Not only have I never worked at a place that engaged in this kind of juvenile stunt, or seen or heard of it among my colleages, I never saw anyone on the other side do it either. Not even very openly left places like IPS or EPI. One more data point to confirm my theory that Bill Clinton is a perverse Midas: everyone he touches turns into a heap of manure.
That's what I thought. I've been in and around a lot of these places and cute little press kits designed to embarrass a president over the fact than an appointee disagreed with him seemed pretty unprofessional to me.
The problem here was not one of accuracy. It's quite true that Tony Snow criticized the president. I suspect that is part of why he was hired. The problem is that we have a think tank channeling Nelson from the Simpson's. Instead of making any substantive contribution, we have a think tank headed by a former White House Chief of Staff pitching rocks and snorting, "HA,HA!"
. . . And the fox looked hungrily at the grapes but could not reach them. Try as he might, he could not leap the fence, and could not get to the luscious grapes.
His face turned angry, and he snarled. "Those grapse are sour, anyway!," he growled, and he slinked away haughtily.
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