The conservative and liberal wings of America’s political establishment will face off once again this November. But while it may seem that the parties’ campaign planks are the product of huge, internal consensus-forming efforts, many of their core ideas, especially on the right, can be traced to the efforts of a handful of farsighted individuals who worked behind the scenes for decades to build support for, and draw attention to, the issues they hold dear. In the early 1970s, alarmed by the left’s student uprisings and growing influence in academia, the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, conservative Republicans were desperate to find an effective way to advance their agendas. To build support for their ideas, leading businessmen such as Colorado brewer Joseph Coors, chemical and munitions magnate John M. Olin, Richard Mellon Scaife of the Mellon banking and oil family and Milwaukee industrialist William Brady hit upon the idea to seed and financially support a new twist on an old concept—the think tank. But while these policy research entities had been rare, and traditionally analytical rather than ideological—the Rand Corp. being the ultra-wonky archetype—this new breed, led by the influential Heritage Foundation, was designed to forward, not critique, an ideological agenda.
   
Olin was representative of the group. His response to a hippie-era student uprising at his alma mater, Cornell, was to begin funding conservative think tanks, college newspapers and magazines, including the New Criterion, the National Interest and Commentary, through his eponymous foundation. Nearly four decades later, political scientists credit the influence of these ideological think tanks for helping the neoconservatives to power. However, a greater endorsement of their influence has come from affluent liberals, who are now scrambling to learn from the right’s successes and establish their own ideological think tanks.

Sincerest Form of Flattery
Californians Deborah Rappaport and her husband, Andy Rappaport, a partner in the venture capital firm August Capital, have recently begun funding several progressive policy incubators, instead of simply writing checks to the Democratic National Committee. Of the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, Deborah says, “I would be lying if I said it didn’t take me a long time to get out of bed in the morning.” The Republican victory forced the couple to begin thinking differently. “The best lesson that people can learn in any endeavor is how to fail smart, and that’s what we’re really trying to do,” she says.

"If you believe in the notion that ideas matter—and it’s really not that ideas matter, ideas are the only things that matter—that they influence the way policymakers ultimately craft legislation and/or influence the executive branch, this is one of the most effective, intellectually honest methodologies to change the way free people govern themselves.” —Roger Hertog
Liberals will find it a challenge to respond effectively to the conservative think tank juggernaut, which benefits from decades of momentum and experience and remains exceptionally well-funded. In 2004, the four largest of the right-leaning think tanks (Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute and Manhattan Institute) amassed more than $100 million, according to their IRS filings. The largest liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress, brought in only $16.2 million.

To emulate the success of the conservative donors, liberals will also have to change their traditional aversion to ideological think tanks—advocacy think tanks, as they are sometimes known. Liberals have typically earmarked their money for specific research projects in a piecemeal fashion, and their foundation dollars have traditionally prioritized nonpartisan research over polemic work. “What you find is these nonconservative organizations have had to adapt to what funders have wanted to support,” says Andrew Rich, an associate professor of political science at the City College of New York and the author of Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise.

Nonpartisan, analytical think tanks can still flourish, make an important contribution to public discourse and have a profound influence on policy, as Michael Milken’s institute has proven (see “Michael Milken’s Middle Way,” page 68). However, as the growing interest by liberals in advocacy think tanks demonstrates, these entities are the real kingmakers in policy debates.

Despite their strong head start, conservatives are taking the new threat from liberals seriously. Dietrich Weismann, the head of New York asset management firm Weismann Associates, is also chairman of the Manhattan Institute, a 28-year-old think tank that preaches the gospel of its founder, Antony Fisher. A British fighter pilot and gentleman farmer with libertarian leanings, Fisher’s legacy boasts an annual $10 million operating budget utilized primarily to sway public opinion. Manhattan Institute Executive Vice President David DesRosiers describes his group as a “red-thinking think tank for the blue zone.” It holds panel discussions for journalists and policymakers at which its scholars argue against such policies as affirmative action and Medicare entitlements.

Weismann is seeking new supporters to counter a budding network of liberal benefactors, the Democracy Alliance, that is raising a significant amount of capital. “It is true: $80 million is a war chest to be reckoned with,” Weismann wrote in an appeal last fall to the Manhattan Institute’s 1,000 existing donors and a pool of potentials. “. . . we do need to answer their challenge. If you are giving all you can, stay the course—we are facing new challengers and losing generous benefactors. If you can give more, consider doing so . . . .”

The most effective of these advocacy think tanks would burn through that war chest in a couple of years—hence the need for constant fund-raising. In 1971, Joseph Coors seeded the precursor to the Heritage Foundation with only $250,000. (In 2004, Heritage brought in $46.9 million.) Today, James McGann, director of the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank, explains donors should expect to spend at least $750,000 per year to fund a think tank focused on one issue, factoring in the cost of office space, an administrator and grants to keep several research fellows working full time.

Right Makes Might
Roger Hertog, former chairman of the Manhattan Institute, is the epitome of the conservative benefactor who bases his politics on conservative intellectualism and moves patiently and strategically to create, support and distribute his ideas. The vice chairman of investment firm AllianceBernstein, Hertog has given large amounts of money to the Manhattan Institute over the past two decades.

“If you believe in the notion that ideas matter—and it’s really not that ideas matter, ideas are the only things that matter—that they influence the way policymakers ultimately craft legislation and/or influence the executive branch, this is one of the most effective, intellectually honest methodologies to change the way free people govern themselves,” Hertog says.

For decades, wealthy conservatives and libertarians have funded advocacy think tanks that have influenced generations of lawmakers and supported the rise of the neoconservatives. In recent years, their liberal foils have caught on and are working to emulate their tactics, hoping to shift the nation’s political debate toward the left. The growing conflict promises to be an expensive war.
Hertog, who also gives to the American Enterprise Institute, is part-owner and chairman of the New Republic, sits on the publication committee of Commentary Magazine and is an investor in the New York Sun, cautions that patience is a necessary trait when funding policy revolutions. He never asks how long an idea will take to gain traction, but rather how robust is the idea. He studies the quality of the concepts, how well they hold up under attack and how well they can be communicated to a larger audience. “After you do that, it still doesn’t ensure success, because then these ideas get thrown out in the political arena,” he explains. “It may not be expedient for this idea, or some politician may not want to embrace it for his own short-term political reasons. It may take more time. That’s the nature of this stuff; that’s been the whole history of almost all ideas.”

According to Rich’s research, conservatives have traditionally channeled their dollars toward research that supports a specific social, economic or political agenda. They are far more supportive of advocacy think tanks than are liberals, Rich says. Moreover, conservatives have established more foundations with the specific purpose of funding think tanks.

Conservative benefactors tend to provide more operating support for their favorite organizations; this enables them to respond quickly to current events with pointed analysis and to woo legislators, rather than expend resources continually searching for more capital. Conservative think tanks also place a greater emphasis on hiring executive staff members and administrators who are ideologically aligned with their missions and who have public affairs experience, according to a recent survey Rich conducted.

From its beginnings, the Heritage Foundation’s efforts reflected a clearly partisan agenda. As its website says, Heritage is devoted to “principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values and a strong national defense.” Along with Coors, Heritage enjoyed support from libertarian-leaning benefactors such as Olin, Scaife and Brady.

Their investments have been rewarded. Heritage has developed such close ties to Capitol Hill and such a fine-tuned operation that its scholars can deliver their position briefs to legislators just prior to a House or Senate session on the issue at hand, in time for lawmakers to review them and enter the session with Heritage’s analysis top of mind.

Indeed, McGann credits Heritage with driving a move away from think tanks that are academically grounded to policy-oriented groups. Before Heritage, he notes, “The orientation for many years was: We have ideas, [so] policymakers will beat a path to our door to get our ideas. The reality is that is not the case.”

Among the early conservative think tank champions, Olin also supported the Hoover Institution, Hudson Institute and American Enterprise Institute, all through the family foundation that he formed in 1953. He was meticulous about the type of research his foundation funded. He was horrified to see the Ford Foundation, over the course of many years, drift toward grants that supported leftist causes. To avoid ideological drift with his own legacy, Olin designed his foundation to be self-terminating—its assets would be exhausted one generation after his own. Before Olin died in 1982, he hand-selected successors to oversee it. James Piereson, a former political science professor who exited what he describes as “leftist-leaning academia” to climb the ladder at the Olin Foundation, was theexecutive director who steered the endowment through its final year, 2005, in accordance with Olin’s wishes.

Piereson is one of a small, somewhat tight-knit group of individuals leading established conservative think tanks today. His colleague, Kim Dennis, who was picked by 80-year-old Dan Searle to run his foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, says, “They talk about the vast right-wing conspiracy, but the truth is, you probably keep seeing the same names over and over again.” Piereson has joined the board of Searle’s trust, where he will help decide which projects are funded. The strategy, as with Olin’s, is to spend a large amount of money over a short period to achieve the greatest impact.

Searle, now retired from public life, ran G.D. Searle & Co., a pharmaceutical company that produced Dramamine and aspartame. He plans to dedicate $300 million to his foundation, earmarked to support think tanks, with the stipulation that it all be spent over the next 20 years.

Left to their Devices
Melvyn Weiss is one of the relatively few prominent liberals who realize that public displays of righteous indignation are no substitute for a steady barrage of well-supported ideas and policy recommendations. Weiss is a founding partner in the law firm of Milberg Weiss, famous for its class-action suits. He recalls a meeting with Don Fowler, then head of the Democratic National Committee, during the early days of the Clinton administration. They discussed ways to counter the strength of the right-wing think tanks. Weiss says that Fowler pointed out that it takes tens of millions of dollars and as much as 15 to 20 years to really make a significant impact with new ideas. 

“Wealthy liberals tend to be, most of them, newly wealthy, and they’re used to having more spontaneous results—a quicker reaction to whatever they do,” Weiss says. “So it’s a process to train ourselves for the longer term.” Much of the capital behind liberal think tanks does appear to flow from the technology and entertainment industries and other sources of new wealth.

In the past few years, Weiss has become an energetic backer of the New York-based Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. Founded in 1961 by Harry Wachtel, a lawyer and advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., Drum Major was left moribund after King’s death. Wachtel’s son William, also a lawyer, decided to revive the organization in 1999, reshaping it as a progressive think tank that strives to remain nonpartisan.

“One of the things I really like about Drum Major is that it doesn’t really have as much of a political agenda as it does an agenda to come up with ideas that work,” Weiss says. “So it doesn’t make any difference if you’re a Republican or a Democrat—if you see an idea that works, you can embrace it. We don’t want people not to embrace it because it’s stigmatized in their mind with an affiliation with a particular party.” It seems unlikely that conservatives will embrace ideas originating from groups like Drum Major, but it remains to be seen how influential they will become.

In California, the Rappaports have set up their own LLC, Skyline Public Works, as a funding vehicle. They support the Center for American Progress, as well as the New Progressive Coalition, a research clearinghouse that uses the Web to connect progressive investors (who pay a small fee to register) with organizations that post funding proposals and budgets. Since 2004, they have given roughly $12 million to progressive activists.

Deborah Rappaport likes to refer to these groups as “do tanks,” preferring to nurture the liberal grassroots rather than funding theoretical research. Last year, for example, they gave $350,000 to the Progressive Legislative Action Network, whose aim is to enact liberal legislation in all 50 states by providing research directly to progressive legislators, many of whom do not employ in-house staff to conduct such analyses. The Rappaports also support the Roosevelt Institution, which calls itself the first student think tank. Launched in 2005, Roosevelt has united some 5,000 policy-minded students on several hundred campuses.

Andrei Cherny, a former senior aide to both John Kerry and Al Gore, is also watering the grassroots. He seeks funding for a quarterly publication, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, with an operating budget of less than $1 million. He hopes to add fuel to the Democratic platform the way conservative journals supported by the likes of Olin have helped boost the case for supply-side economics, faith-based organizations and the privatization of Social Security. “We have policies from here to kingdom come; what we don’t have are the big ideas, and that’s the difference,” Cherny says.

But perhaps the best chance liberals have of creating a new policy incubator to rival the likes of Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute rests with Rob Stein. Like Cherny, he is eagerly working to emulate the conservative model, creating the intricate web of connections that his rivals in the ideological war have spun by folding journals and think tanks into well-oiled influence machines. Stein, the founder of the Democracy Alliance that has the Manhattan Institute’s Weismann so worried, is a former private equity investor with the Women’s Growth Capital Fund and was a Clinton-era Commerce Department official. The 2004 elections also spurred him to action. He took to the road to convince affluent liberals such as George Soros and Peter Lewis that conservative advocacy think tanks enjoyed a funding advantage of roughly two to one over liberal groups.

Stein says that he has recruited donors to make minimum grants of $200,000 per year for at least five years. The Democracy Alliance will recommend funding opportunities to its members and use their money to build think tanks and advocacy groups. The donor grants add up to a promise of at least $90 million, or $10 million more than Weismann estimated. But despite Stein’s success, even the most optimistic liberals realize that they and their allies have years of fund-raising and infrastructure-building work ahead before they can hope to match the influence of the conservative advocacy think tanks. What lies ahead is a battle of not only ideas, but of wealth. 

Elizabeth Harris is a staff writer for Worth.