Winning Now Some Public-Policy Problems Can’T Wait a Genera- Tion

5 Winning Now Some public-policy problems can’t wait a generation. They require fast action, with time horizons measured in months, years, or election cycles rather than decades. Can philanthropy contribute to these sorts of issues? Back in 1955, Dwight Macdonald argued that most public-policy philanthropy was too sluggish to be consequential in pressing cases. “A philanthropoid would deal with the problem of a man trapped in a burning house by subsidizing a study of combustion,” 66 he wrote. In 2015, though, there are many philanthropists who are itchy to send in firefighters. They have little interest in funding long-term studies or nurturing slow-growing careers. These donors are looking for fast-moving action organizations who know how to turn on a hose. In 1993, Bill Kristol (Irving’s son) founded an action organization that defeated President Clinton’s national health-care plan, a signal accomplishment of the decade. Kristol’s work was not an Olin-style culture-changing marathon, but rather a current-events sprint. There are times, when stakes are high and timetables short, where that is the only way to proceed. Public-policy success or failure must come in months or weeks. This is tricky work. It requires clever strategies, strong messages, and slick communications. But it can pay off in very consequential ways: blocking or creating legislation, birthing a new social movement, nudging an entire state into a different political position, reviving a downtrodden interest or forgotten issue. In 1992, Democrat Bill Clinton had won a three-way Presidential race with 43 percent of the vote. Perhaps overestimating his mandate, he launched in his first year a mammoth effort to create a new federal health-care regimen. The venture was led by First Lady Hillary Clinton, and the health-care plan she helped construct came to be known as “ HillaryCare.” It was a massive government intervention that critics skewered as a federal takeover of one seventh of the U.S. economy. Bill Kristol had been hired by the Bradley Foundation in the early 1990s to think through the future of conservative politics and policy, in the wake of electoral defeat and intellectual exhaustion. It was a task straight from the philanthropic playbook for long-term cultural transfor- mation. But after the Clintons signaled their ambition to remake health care, Kristol set up a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit called the Project for the Republican Future. His new goal was to help the GOP develop a reform agenda on a briefer timeline. “The name ‘Project’ was purposeful,” said Kristol. “We wanted to signal to donors that we weren’t starting an institution. We were short term.” The initial board included Michael Joyce of the Bradley Foundation and New York financiers Virginia James and Thomas Rhodes. “I made clear to everyone that this was a moment of opportunity, and supporting us was like placing a bet,” said Kristol. “Everything was speculative.” As HillaryCare gained momentum and importance, the group zeroed in on stopping the legislation. Their main weapon was the fax machine— Agenda Setting 67 WINNING NOW then a leading technology. Every day or so, as the debate grew hotter, they dispatched to journalists, politicians, and interested parties a steady stream of inside-the-Beltway memos deconstructing the Clinton effort. The first memo was dated December 3, 1993. At a time when many Republicans were dispirited and ready to capitulate, the Project encouraged them to stiffen their spines. It was pointed out that a large majority of Americans were satisfied with their own health-care coverage. Readers were urged to reject the President’s assertion that weaknesses in the existing system required a wholesale reinvention of U.S. health care, overseen by bureaucrats in Washington. The slogan was simple: “There is no health-care crisis.” Within months, the debate over health-care reform shifted dramati- cally, as conservatives began to adopt the rhetoric of Kristol and company. Organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Christian Coalition launched efforts to defeat HillaryCare. The Health Through their combination of public-policy philanthropy and traditional campaign contributions, the Gang of Four built a well-oiled machine whose central purpose was to persuade voters not to vote for conservative candidates. Insurance Association of America ran a multimillion-dollar television ad campaign featuring a middle-class couple worried by the implications of national health care. In the end HillaryCare flopped, and set the stage for the elections of 1994, where Republicans captured not just the Senate but also the House of Representatives for the first time in decades. “Nearly a full year before Republicans would unite behind the ‘Contract with America,’ Kristol provided the rationale and the steel for them to achieve their aims of winning control of Congress and becoming America’s majority party,” wrote Washington Post reporters Haynes Johnson and David Broder. All of this grew out of a $1.3 million investment in the Project for the Republican Future, made at a time when that future seemed 68 grim. Irving Kristol had advised the Olin Foundation on a long-term strategy to build a counterintelligentsia. Now his son, Bill, was acting as a member of this very counterintelligentsia, and winning a near- term political victory. The prospect of nationalized health care was pushed off for almost two decades. And Kristol and his associates, as promised, closed shop. The project was a short-lived, single-purpose enterprise. “When we dissolved in 1995, we returned what was left in our bank account to donors, on a prorated basis,” said Kristol. The reason conservatives found themselves needing to defeat a proposal for nationalized health care was because several years ear- lier Bill Clinton had benefited from a different creative application of philanthropy to public policy. In 1985, in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s landslide re-election, moderate Democrats decided that their party needed to move away from doctrinaire liberalism and toward the center. Democrat fundraisers like William Crotty, Peter Kelly, and Charles Manatt helped former Congressional staffer Al From launch a new 501(c)(4) called the Democratic Leadership Council. Soon, the DLC was hosting private retreats for donors and politicians seeking to refresh the party of FDR. Just as Kristol’s Project for the Republican Future initially met with skepticism from a GOP establishment worried about a possible rival to the national party, the DLC was seen by some as a competitor to the Democratic National Committee. In 1988, though, Democrats lost their third Presidential election in a row, and a growing number of activists saw the DLC as an effective ally in an urgent revival mission. One admir- er was Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas. He tied himself tightly to the group that promised to create a generation of “New Democrats.” In 1989, the DLC formed the Progressive Policy Institute, a 501(c)(3) think tank charged with developing new policies that the Leadership Council could organize people around. The goal, according to From and his collaborator Will Marshall, was to design “an intellectual counterforce that can fashion progressive alternatives” to right-of-center policies. Wall Street magnate Michael Steinhardt served as PPI’s board chair- man, and pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cause. As a nonpartisan group, PPI developed and promoted policy ideas that any public official could adopt—though the idea, of course, was to push ones that would help the DLC and its New Democrats become a governing majority. By 1992, this “pint-sized think tank” with a budget of just Agenda Setting 69 WINNING NOW $700,000 had “become a wing of Clinton’s campaign” for President, reported the National Journal. Once in the White House, Clinton filled positions in his adminis- tration with officials plucked from the DLC/PPI orbit. They organized many of the Clinton Presidency’s genuine accomplishments, such as trade liberalization and welfare reform. The debacle over HillaryCare, by contrast, never was associated in a significant way with the DLC or PPI. Through the 1990s, New Democrats grabbed the reins away from many of the liberals in their own party. They did not hold on perma- nently, however. During the Presidency of George W. Bush, liberals roared back to life, culminating in the election of Barack Obama. By 2011, the DLC had dissolved, donating its archive to the Clinton Foun- dation. The Progressive Policy Institute survives as a small group far from the limelight. Just as the rise of the New Democrats depended heavily on philanthropy to engineer their achievements in public policy, so did the liberal resurgence. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Colorado. In 2004, Colorado was a solidly Republican state, with the governor, both U.S. senators, and five of its seven members of the House belonging to the GOP. That same year, Colorado gave its electoral votes in the Presidential election to Bush. By the time of the 2008 elections, however, the politics of the state had been turned upside-down. After all the ballots had been counted, the governor, both U.S. senators, and five of seven House members were Democrats, plus Obama carried the state. It was a full-fledged flip. National political trends explained some of this movement, as the whole country had shifted in a liberal direction. The largest part of this dramatic shift, however, could be ascribed to a group of liberal philanthropists who set out to remake Colorado politics through a mix of public-policy giving and campaign donations. The so-called Gang of Four consisted of Rutt Bridges, a venture capitalist; Tim Gill, founder of the software firm Quark; Jared Polis, an Internet businessman who would win election to Congress as a Democrat in 2008; and Pat Stryker, the heiress of a medical-equipment company.

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