Here’s Tom Friedman:

That is why I was heartened to see the liberal Center for American Progress stating last week that, while the stimulus is vital to rescuing our economy, the size of projected budget deficits demand that we also start thinking about broad-based tax increases and reductions in some spending and entitlement programs supported by liberals.

And here’s Marc Ambinder:

Among the D[emocracy] A[alliance]‘s success stories: it has contributed to CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has used its money to harass Democrats and Republicans with ethics issues and whose investigation of contractors in Afghanistan have led to a review of State Department policies. Media Matters, a liberal press watchdog group, is bigger today than it was before the election. DA also helped fund the Center for American Progress, the uber-progressive think and action tank. Membership costs $55,000 for the first year and at least $30,000 per year after that.

And Michelle Malkin:

CAP is a lead organization in the Health Care for America Now coalition, the so-called “grassroots” lobbying group for Obama’s health care takeover legislation run out of 1825 K Street in Washington, D.C., with a $40 million budget. CAP is also the parent group of Think Progress, the far-left website leading the smear campaign against fiscally conservative activists who protested at congressional town halls this summer. And several CAP alumni are now leading the Obamacare push at the Department of Health and Human Services, including special HHS assistant Michael Halle and HHS Director Jeanne Lambrew, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who worked on health policy in the Clinton administration.

Apparently Halle was a CAP intern in 2007. So you can see everyone should apply to the program, since it’s apparently a one-way ticket to running the country.

The political system enters a period of infinite regress:

In the wake of another chastening set of GOP defeats at the polls, Holtz-Eakin is now setting out to address those problems head-on. He’s developing a proposal for a new think tank that he describes as a “Center for American Progress for the right” — a reference to the liberal think tank that has supplied staff and policy proposals to the Obama administration and developed new ways to market its ideas. [...]

The irony, of course, is that the Center for American Progress itself was developed as a liberal answer to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has been a source of Republican policy ideas for decades. But Holtz-Eakin says established think tanks of the right, like Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute, were “not helpful” during the McCain campaign because they weren’t politically engaged or innovative in their media strategies.

That’s why Holtz-Eakin says he now looks to the Center for American Progress as a model. The center, headed by former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta, combined a battery of domestic and foreign policy proposals with outreach innovations, such as hosting film screenings around the country and collecting e-mail addresses of people who sign up for the screenings.

This seems pretty misguided to me. In particular, DHE needs to think harder about the fact that there are already well-resourced conservative think tanks with plenty of capabilities. Before CAP came on the scene, there really wasn’t a “Heritage of the left.” On the right, Heritage and AEI already exist. The problem they face is that the conservative movement, as presently constituted, is not prepared to accept anything other than “tax cuts” as a solution to anything. Consequently, they’re not really even prepared to accept the premise that other problems exist. Tax cuts can’t solve climate change, so there must be no such thing! Tax cuts can’t curb inequality, so there must not be a problem with growing inequality.

If you’re a white guy looking to vent about how Puerto Rican women growing up poor in the Bronx get unfair advantages in life, the conservative movement has a lot to offer you. But otherwise there’s nothing there policywise. That’s not, however, because there are no organizations out there capable of developing or marketing policy. It’s because the movement has become unremittingly hostile to constructive policymaking. Everybody’s too busy cowering in fear from Rush Limbaugh to come up with anything.

Speaking of astroturf organizing, Jon Henke has a curious post up accusing my ThinkProgress colleagues of hypocrisy for using the term “astroturf” in a disparaging way:

The Center for American Progress & Think Progress, of all groups, should know better than to use the word “astroturf” against funded, ideological 501c(4) organizations that are trying to organize activists. Especially considering how many funded, ideological 501c(4) organizations they have trying to organize activists.

I don’t understand how this argument is supposed to work. CAP & CAPAF aren’t astroturf outfits because we’re not pretending to be a grassroots organization. The Tea Party “movement” is a sham because it’s pretending to be a spontaneous grassroots movement. Obviously, ThinkProgress is not a spontaneous grassroots movement. It’s a hierarchical organization that describes itself as “a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund” that “seeks to provide a forum that advances progressive ideas and policies.”

Baron YoungSmith remarks on the fact that the very same neoconservatives who argued themselves hoarse that the election of Barack Obama would lead to imminent dhimmitude at the hands of a Sino-Islamo-Fascisto-Cuban alliance are now seeming remarkably supportive of an Obama policy agenda whose content—take troops out of Iraq and put a smaller number of troops into Afghanistan while not acting like a jerk on the world stage—is exactly the same as the one they hated during the campaign.

It’s important to understand that this isn’t a softening of neocon madness, it’s exactly what they did in the 1990s. After spending the George H.W. Bush administration in their customary role as the “totally insane” faction of conservative movement foreign policy thinking (key episodes being the insistence that Bush should have marched on Baghdad and commenced an occupation of Iraq, and the 1992 defense planning guidance draft) they spent the 1990s being the less partisan faction of the movement with regard to Clinton’s foreign policy. Basically any president sometimes orders military action somewhere, and whenever Clinton did so neocons would applaud and call politely for even more forceful action while criticizing those Republicans who asked questions. By making themselves useful to Clinton and his supporters, while maintaining an appropriate level of critical distance, the neocons were able to elevate their status within the conservative coalition and emerge as a more influential faction in the W. Bush administration than they’d been in the H.W. Bush or Reagan administration.

Going back to these tactics is integral to neocon plans to regain power. And I think it’s working. When PNAC 2.0 was launched, John Nagl head of CNAS spoke at the debut event, and Fred Kagan is speaking at CAP today. Neocons are out of power, but they’re not being banished to the fringes of the discussion, key progressives groups have made them the preferred interlocutors on high-profile issues. In the domestic political context, in other words, neocons very clearly appreciate the tactical and strategic utility of sometimes being nice, of accommodating the interests of others, and of strategic restraint. If only they could figure out a way to apply these lessons to foreign policy.

Jonathan Cohn spills the beans on Barack Obama’s health care team:

Today the Obama transition office will announce its health care policy team. As expected, Tom Daschle will be leading it. According to sources closes to the transition, he’ll be joined by a set of analysts including Lauren Aronson, Mark Childress, Dora Hughes, and Jeanne Lambrew. Harvard economist David Cutler will be serving as a part-time, outside advisor, reprising a role he served during the campaign. Among the other outside advisers are Jonathan Blum, Rahul Rajkumar, Terrell McSweeny, and Jenny Backus. [...]

The team is heavy on people who know a thing or two about moving plans through Congress. Take Aronson. Her most recent job was in Rahm Emanuel’s office. There, she advised him on floor strategy; she also was a liason to other members and outside stakeholders. Before that, she worked for Chris Jennings, a former Clinton staffer who is one of the best known health care advisers in town. So, like Daschle’s appointment, the naming of this team suggests that Obama is serious about pursuing health care reform.

I think this barely counts as transition gossip, since it doesn’t even include titles. Meanwhile, Jeanne Lambrew is a CAP Senior Fellow further reenforcing the point that each and every person working here is now incredibly important and influential. If you’re interested in the question of how and/or why the incoming administration will push for health care reform despite the economic crisis, you should read her testimony on “Health Policy and the Economic Crisis” which I imagine is a subject she’ll have occasion to revisit.

Travel to Europe’s small countries always offers one an intriguing glimpse of the world’s linguistic future — English spoken universally, but not quite right (admittedly, it’s an unfortunate coincidence that the world’s lingua franca is also the language that features the greatest proliferation of irregularities and so forth). Nestlé headquarters was full of promotional copy that didn’t scan right to a native speaker. Sometimes, they seemed to be working of a very literal translation from French. But then there was this:

I think I’d like to make that this blog’s new slogan. Creating magical enjoyment you feel good about since 2002.

Jon Henke has a smart post at The Next Right about CAP/CAPAF and the role these institutions have played in the progressive revival.

One word of caution I would offer, however, to people looking at building the next set of conservative institutions is that while it’s always good to learn from precedent, it’s not smart to slavishly imitate what exists. Insofar as CAP’s been successful, it’s been successful because it’s been responsive to the specific situation and filled roles on the progressive side that needed filling. The “gaps” on the right are in different places. In particular, the communications spaces aren’t remotely close to mirror-images of each other. Conservatives have both the luxury and the burden of operating with big, entrenched, profitable conservative media institutions like Fox News and the talk radio universe. I’m not sure what the specific implications of that are, but it does mean that if you’re thinking about creating and marketing new conservative ideas, you’re talking about operating under very different circumstances.

As you may have heard, anyone who works for the Center for American Progress is now an incredibly influential person in American politics. That means me! If you’re not convinced yet, read this (“Podesta nonprofit to take center stage”) from Politico and this (“Soros-Funded Democratic Idea Factory Becomes Obama Policy Font”) from Bloomberg. Folks looking to curry favor with the incoming administration are encouraged to get in touch and offer me junkets and/or free meals here in DC.