Conservative
think tanks are on the march, working to tear down organized labor and
promote extreme right-wing policies in state capitols from Alaska to
Florida.
April 4, 2013 |
This
article was reported in collaboration with the Investigative Fund at
the Nation Institute, where Lee Fang is a reporting fellow. It is
adapted from his new book, The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right, which is scheduled for publication on April 24 by the New Press.
The
mood at the beginning of the meeting matched the weather: gray and
dreary. The warm-up speaker told a joke about how local Republicans
could merit placement on the endangered species list, which met with
polite laughter. Talk of the most recent presidential election elicited
audible groans.
Days after Barack Obama took the oath of office
for his second term, about 400 GOP donors gathered in a downtown San
Francisco hotel to hear Jim DeMint—who had just resigned from the Senate
to take a $1-million-a-year job as head of the Heritage
Foundation—explain the way forward.
“This is a battle we can win,
and we are winning in many places around the country,” DeMint told the
assembled donors confidently. He implored them to look beyond
Washington, DC, and see that conservatives were scoring victories in
state after state, citing the December move by Michigan Republicans to
ram through anti-union legislation, as well as similar laws passed in
Wisconsin and Indiana. Some of these victories would influence the
Beltway as well. After all, the GOP’s control of state governments
guaranteed that congressional districts were drawn in such a way that,
in the 2012 elections, Republicans retained a thirty-three-seat majority
in the House despite Democrats earning 1.3 million more votes for their
candidates.
“You may not have heard about it,” DeMint continued.
“We’ve been cultivating bright ideas, building coalitions and working
with others like the State Policy Network to make these things happen.”
SPN is a nonprofit that nurtures conservative think tanks in all fifty
states; its president, Tracie Sharp, was sitting near the front at the
event and was warmly acknowledged by the speakers several times.
By
the end of DeMint’s presentation, which was punctuated by roaring
applause, the audience—whose members included food processing tycoon
Jerry Hume and wealthy Bay Area investor Nersi Nazari—seemed decidedly
more cheerful. But DeMint’s pitch about promoting state-based political
organs in networking groups like SPN wasn’t just bluster or
salesmanship: Sharp is among the leading strategists who have made the
right’s under-the-radar resurgence possible.
Other conservative
leaders have spoken even more glowingly of the way that state-level
political investments can shape the future of conservatism. “We have, us
fellow warriors for liberty, a rendezvous with destiny,” said Henry
Olsen, an American Enterprise Institute vice president, at a meeting of
conservative think tank leaders last November at the Ritz-Carlton resort
on Amelia Island, Florida. “Reagan’s generation did too, and their task
was to plant the tree of liberty in the garden of Roosevelt. Our task
is to protect that tree against the gales and gusts of Hurricane Barack,
and to help nurture that tree so that it grows into a grove and
forest.”
At the same event, Grover Norquist proclaimed that with
SPN’s support, Republican governors might “turn their states into Texas
or Hong Kong”—laboratories of the free market. “It’s a wonderful
opportunity,” he added.
Though Democrats largely outperformed
electoral expectations at the federal level last year, Republicans made
significant gains in several states. The GOP is using this shift to
redistribute wealth by cutting taxes on the rich while raising them on
working-class citizens, largely through sales tax increases. What makes
this year different from past Republican realignments, however, is the
massive increase in funds available to conservative think tanks
operating on the state level, as well as how these groups have made the
goal of consolidating power through attacking unions and similar tactics
central to their agenda.
These media-savvy organizations—which
frequently employ former journalists to churn out position papers, news
articles, investigations and social media content with a hard-right
slant—bolster the pro-corporate lobbying efforts of the American
Legislative Exchange Council. Like ALEC, State Policy Network groups
provide an ideological veil for big businesses seeking to advance
radical deregulatory policy goals. Interviewed at the San Francisco
event this past January, SPN’s Sharp maintained that her organization is
loosely connected and has no coordinated agenda. But if the last four
years are any guide, conservative think tanks are on the march, working
from a similar script to tear down organized labor and promote extreme
right-wing policies in state capitols from Alaska to Florida.
Financial
support for SPN-affiliated think tanks has increased by tens of
millions of dollars over the last four years, disclosures show. In areas
with the most concentrated investments, particularly the Midwestern
states referred to in DeMint’s speech, budgets for state-level political
groups have doubled, outpacing their counterparts on the left. Without
control of the White House, corporations anxious to push back against
taxes and regulations, along with a cadre of wealthy right-wing donors,
have invested in these state-level think tanks, partisan media outlets,
training institutes and online advocacy efforts. Some existing
organizations have been expanded, and others founded to fill what
conservative planners viewed as a tactical void.
Americans for
Prosperity, known largely for its affiliation with the billionaire Koch
brothers and for organizing Tea Party rallies, is part of this
state-focused spending spree. The group has opened new local chapters or
more than tripled the funding for existing chapters in key states. This
increased spending has helped Americans for Prosperity recruit
conservative activists and deploy them during contentious policy
debates. Audit reports collected by the New York State Attorney
General’s office show that Americans for Prosperity went from spending
about $4.9 million on state chapter activities in 2009 to $10.6 million
in 2011, the last available disclosure. Those figures do not necessarily
account for the television, radio and Internet advertising purchased by
the group when lobbying on state policy issues (which has reportedly
reached over $4 million in places like Wisconsin), or the ubiquitous bus
tours it has sponsored around the country.
A key area of
growth among state-level conservative think tanks involves efforts to
develop nonprofit media. Founded in 2009, the Franklin Center for
Government and Public Integrity has partnered with SPN and Americans for
Prosperity to hire and train conservative reporters in nearly every
state capital. In fact, many Americans for Prosperity officials now lead
the center.
As Joe Strupp of Media Matters has reported, the
Franklin Center’s stated mission is to take advantage of cutbacks at
local papers: “Cash-strapped and under-staffed, local and regional
newspapers often can’t provide the real information that voters need to
make good decisions.” Strupp, who interviewed several local editors who
reluctantly run the center’s syndicated content, noted that some stories
covered by the group—including one claiming that a union traded free
barbecue for votes in Wisconsin—turned out to be false.
The head
of the Franklin Center, a former executive director of the North Dakota
Republican Party, boasted that by 2011, the group had hired more than
100 journalists in forty-four states—virtually all of them placed at
SPN-affiliated think tanks. In Tennessee, it hired an award-winning
journalist, Clint Brewer, for over a year, while in Hawaii and other
states, its affiliates ran multiple stories questioning Obama’s birth
certificate.
Consultants associated with State Policy Network have
also set up supposedly nonpartisan “government transparency” websites.
These sites, which neglect the topic of highly paid government
contractors while at times exaggerating the pay of public sector
employees like teachers—have recently cropped up in almost every state.
In Ohio, the Buckeye Institute, an SPN-affiliated think tank, provided
the underlying data for a database on public employee pay, which came
under criticism after the Associated Press reported that it was “riddled
with errors and omissions.”
* * *
This latest project in
conservative infrastructure building comes at a time when power is
drifting away from political parties and other long-established
organizations. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has
accelerated this trend, with new Super PACs and attack-ad nonprofits
springing up almost as fast as donors can write checks. The upgraded
state echo chambers, led by SPN think tanks, seem particularly
well-suited for this environment: they are fast-paced, Internet-savvy
and dedicated to eliminating their perceived opposition.
Months
before Scott Walker took the oath of office as Wisconsin’s forty-fifth
governor, the groundwork for his controversial “budget repair bill,”
which severely curtailed public sector collective bargaining rights, had
already been laid. The John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy,
founded in 2009 as the second SPN think tank in the state, had—along
with the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, an older state
affiliate—published several studies calling for government leaders to
tackle public sector employee bargaining. Specifically, they targeted
teacher pay and benefits as the driver of the state’s budget ills.
Unlike the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, the MacIver Institute
waged its advocacy through YouTube videos and social media, including
its own blog.
Brett Healy, president of the MacIver Institute,
explained later that it was “critically important” that the state think
tanks used “digital media” advocacy and “not the traditional research
and analysis…that we’re normally accustomed to doing.”
In January
2011, as Walker began his term, conservatives opened two new reporting
outfits in the state. The Franklin Center helped sponsor one called
Wisconsin Reporter, while American Majority, a group that helps train
conservative activists, started another called MediaTrackers.org. The
MacIver Institute bloggers, joined by these new reporting organizations,
moved quickly to frame the debate, interviewing protesters who had
gathered in Madison to try to stop the bill. The interviewers
highlighted the radicals among the group, harshly criticized child
participants and sought to rebut union arguments against the budget.
Meanwhile,
the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity began a “Stand With
Walker” campaign in partnership with the MacIver Institute. The group
aired over $342,000 worth of advertising to support the governor’s
budget and also began a bus tour crisscrossing the state to drum up
support. A turning point came when the MacIver Institute’s bloggers
reported that a group of teachers on sick leave were being given fake
doctors’ notes by volunteer physicians among the protesters. The story
took off, garnering coverage by the local and national media; there was
so much Internet traffic to the MacIver Institute’s website that the
server crashed. “Tracie [Sharp] probably remembers the panicked phone
call that she received from me trying to figure out a patch to fix the
situation,” Healy recalled.
The Wisconsin groups went on to help
re-elect a pro-Walker State Supreme Court judge and successfully fend
off the attempt to unseat Walker himself in a recall election.
The
strategy in Wisconsin—with several think tanks and nimble media outlets
all coordinating to enact laws to weaken labor unions—also played out
in Indiana, where Republicans enacted a right-to-work law, and in Ohio,
where a bill to limit collective bargaining was passed (Ohio’s law was
subsequently repealed by referendum in 2011). Then, in December 2012,
Republicans in Michigan reversed a previous promise and enacted a
right-to-work law during the post-election lame- duck session. Happening
as it did in the cradle of private-sector union activism, this was
perhaps the crowning achievement of the state-based conservative
movement. (The Taft-Hartley Act allows states to enact right-to-work
laws, which quickly erode unions by allowing workers to benefit from
union contracts and negotiations without having to pay dues.)
While
many legislators were caught off guard by Michigan Governor Rick
Snyder’s announcement, space in the front of the capitol had been
reserved weeks in advance by Americans for Prosperity’s state chapter to
set up a booth in support of the effort. Likewise, the Mackinac Center
for Public Policy—the SPN affiliate in Michigan, with two recently
opened media outlets, Michigan Capitol Confidential and Watchdog Wire
Michigan—produced an array of content, from a Pinterest page to short
videos on why the state should change its law governing labor unions.
Labor
unions, on the other hand, spend the majority of their limited
resources on member services like bargaining; their political money is
mostly spent on candidate donations rather than the kind of
rapid-response permanent campaign now embraced by their opposition. The
only labor-backed political group that could be compared to the
SPN-affiliated Mackinac Center and its allies—an organization called
Progress Michigan, which does political research and media outreach—has
far fewer resources than its counterparts on the right. In 2010,
according to the latest available disclosure for the three groups, the
Mackinac Center and Americans for Prosperity’s state chapter outspent
Progress Michigan by $4.6 million to a little over $700,000.
MediaTrackers.org
sites and news outlets mirroring Wisconsin Reporter now exist in states
across the country, augmenting the advocacy of the expanded Americans
for Prosperity and SPN chapters. “There’s no counterweight,” says Lisa
Graves, head of the Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group in
Madison. Graves notes that Wisconsin Reporter, among the other Franklin
Center news sites set up in more than two dozen states, has acted as a
syndication service, providing right-leaning news coverage to local
media. “There’s no progressive wire service,” she adds.
Though
many of the conservative groups involved in this strategy have claimed
that their interest in promoting right-to-work laws or ending collective
bargaining is about creating jobs or cutting spending, there is
evidence to suggest that they are really seeking to eliminate unions
across the board.
“Freedom is the issue at the core of this
debate, and we want to ensure the citizens of Michigan understand this,”
said Scott Hagerstrom, Americans for Prosperity’s state leader, in a
press release following the passage of the right-to-work law. In a
meeting for activists, however, Hagerstrom described his goals
differently. “We fight these battles on taxes and regulation,” he said,
“but really, what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the
knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles.”
Speaking
at a panel discussion in Dallas a year before the right-to-work law’s
passage in Michigan, Mackinac Center president Joseph Lehman conceded
that his group’s campaign to promote government transparency through
hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests was really an effort to
hurt the unions. “The strategic idea we had in mind was defunding
unions,” he said. And while it’s too early to predict the result of the
Michigan law, new figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics
show that Wisconsin and Indiana recorded the sharpest decline in union
membership in recent history. Last year, Wisconsin’s union membership
rolls dropped by 13 percent. The only state with a higher decrease was
Indiana, which reportedly declined by 18 percent.
* * *
In
their aggressive effort take out the opposition, SPN and its allies have
at times used unscrupulous tactics. A MediaTrackers.org story late in
the campaign last November claimed that the husband of Mark Pocan, a
Democratic candidate for Congress, “threatened and harassed” a
Republican volunteer named Kyle Wood over text messages. Wood, who also
claimed he was beaten in his apartment for not supporting Pocan, later
recanted his entire story as a hoax. But the MediaTrackers.org reporter
never viewed the alleged text messages before spreading the claim.
MediaTrackers.org’s
founder, Drew Ryun, the son of former Republican Congressman Jim Ryun,
calls his group an “attack bloc component.” As he explained at an event
with Sharp: “For so long, we as a conservative movement have thought
good ideas will win the day. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Ryun added that public opinion could be shaped with technology like
“search engine optimization” as well as with ”a little bit of pushing
back and punching back.”
Before Ryun started working at
MediaTrackers.org, his group American Majority had been training Tea
Party activists to manipulate the rating systems on sites like Rotten
Tomatoes and Amazon and create lower ratings for left-leaning movies and
books. “Literally 80 percent of the books I put a star on, I don’t
read,” said a staff member at an American Majority training session.
“That’s how you control the online dialogue.”
And before State
Policy Network focused its attention in 2011 on eliminating unions, the
group helped propel the campaign against the low-income advocacy group
ACORN. In 2008, one of its affiliates filed a racketeering suit against
ACORN, alleging it was a criminal gang designed to commit voter fraud in
Ohio—though no evidence existed of any illicit voting.
After
James O’Keefe’s edited tapes of ACORN brought the organization to its
knees the following year, the conservative videographer was invited to
speak at multiple events held by these state-level think tanks. And when
O’Keefe was caught tampering with wires in Senator Mary Landrieu’s
office some months later, it was revealed that he’d plotted the idea at
the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, SPN’s Louisiana think tank,
where he was scheduled to give a talk on “Exposing Truth: Undercover
Video, New Media and Creativity.” Indeed, the Pelican Institute’s Robert
Flanagan was one of his accomplices, dressing up as a telephone
repairman in order to enter Landrieu’s office.
* * *
Consider
these organizations as the spokes on a wheel. When a group of
for-profit education companies sought legislation allowing online
charter schools greater access to taxpayer dollars, it hired dozens of
state lobbyists from coast to coast. In addition, however, the
virtual-school companies tapped SPN to provide academic studies, talking
heads for the local media, flip-cam-equipped journalists to quiz
critics, and busloads of activists at state capitols.
Lobbyists
with the school companies—including K12 Inc. and Connections
Academy—drafted the legislation through ALEC. The State Policy Network
groups acted, in essence, as ALEC’s public relations team to promote the
laws. And it worked: by the end of 2011, sixteen states had passed laws
expanding virtual education. The flow of campaign dollars and
closed-door influence peddling still happened, as in any traditional
corporate campaign to pass major legislation. The difference in this
case, however, was a well-oiled operation that could deliver the
appearance of a groundswell in demand for proprietary online charter
schools, when little public support existed. Worse, the lobbying by
SPN-affiliated think tanks overshadowed serious questions about these
charter-school businesses, which despite their soaring profit margins
have been roundly criticized for abysmal test scores and high dropout
rates. Together, these new state-level groups have remade the political
map, providing ideological cover for extreme conservative policies once
thought of as politically toxic.
State Policy Network’s
organizations have also operated as fronts for corporations seeking to
cloak their business interests under an ideological veneer. The
Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy, a Pennsylvania-based
affiliate of SPN that is pushing to pass right-to-work legislation, is
financed in part by the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association, a
lobbying group that represents US Steel, Hershey Foods, Sun Oil and many
smaller firms. The lobbying group even provides office space for the
Commonwealth Foundation and its media outlet, Pennsylvania Independent.
The foundation has surged in size, with its budget climbing from
$890,000 in 2008 to $1.95 million in 2011, the last available figure.
The head of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association, Frederick
Anton, has pushed right-to-work legislation for years. But this time,
he’s being aided by grassroots organizers from Americans for Prosperity,
as well as the media work of Pennsylvania Independent.
* * *
The
pattern seen in the online education debate has been duplicated to pass
corporate tax cuts, reductions to health and education programs, a
rollback in state environmental laws, and other corporate and
conservative priorities. In places like Minnesota and Louisiana, the
playbook has been deployed to provide telecom companies with a greater
monopoly by pushing to outlaw municipal fiber-optic broadband networks, a
faster, cheaper alternative for consumers. (Notably, Comcast and Time
Warner Cable helped sponsor the last State Policy Network retreat.)
When
the Free State Foundation, a Maryland affiliate of SPN, testified in
Congress in opposition to so-called net neutrality rules, which prevent
Internet providers from setting discriminatory download and upload
speeds based on content, the National Cable and Telecom Association
quietly provided the small think tank with a grant of $85,000.
In
2010, when the Texas Public Policy Foundation filed similar comments to
the FCC in opposition to net neutrality, the think tank received
$76,500 from AT&T and $34,950 from Verizon, according to a leaked
donor list.
Meanwhile, several family foundations financed by
Koch Industries—a firm that produces chemicals and transportation
infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing (better known as fracking) and
horizontal drilling for oil and natural gas—have helped with State
Policy Network’s expansion. In turn, SPN think tanks from New York to
California have attacked bills intended to create state-level
regulations over fracking.
* * *
State Policy Network was
founded on March 24, 1992, in South Carolina by Thomas Roe, a wealthy
businessman, Reagan adviser and leader of the South Carolina Policy
Council, a state think tank modeled after the Heritage Foundation. Now
headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, SPN began as an effort to mobilize
more than twenty state think tanks. Political Research Associates, a
left-leaning investigative team, reported that the group quickly became a
“government-in-waiting” for the wave of Republican governors elected in
1994. As SPN affiliates proposed broad tax cuts and privatization
schemes, the Republican governors frequently hired policy professionals
from the think tanks to help enact those ideas.
Though backed by
some of the largest Republican donors in the country, including the
Coors family and Richard Mellon Scaife, SPN also thrived in the 1990s by
assisting the tobacco industry in packaging its resistance to tobacco
taxes and health regulations as part of a “freedom agenda” for
conservatives.
Sharp herself gained experience working at this
nexus of influence. Records stored with the University of California,
San Francisco, reveal that Philip Morris not only gave generous
financial donations to SPN affiliates, but was heavily involved in
drafting and disseminating content for the think tanks. Before assuming
her current position, Sharp served as executive director of the Cascade
Institute, a State Policy Network affiliate in Oregon. The UCSF archive
shows that during her tenure, the Cascade Institute corresponded with
Philip Morris’s state lobbyist in Salem on promoting opposition to
tobacco taxes, including one instance where Cascade published an opinion
piece by a doctor. The doctor’s column, which was faxed to the Philip
Morris representative, warned that high cigarette taxes could lead to
“drive-by shootings and mob-style assassinations—turf wars—over the
control of black market cigarette sales.”
At a 2001 meeting for
SPN, Sharp invited Joshua Slavitt, Philip Morris’s director of external
affairs, to give a talk. “I know that many of you have worked with
Philip Morris,” Slavitt said, according to a prepared text, adding: “It
won’t surprise you that we believe it is in our enlightened
self-interest to be part of the policy discussions that ultimately shape
the environment in which we do business.” He ended his speech with
specific recommendations for SPN leaders in requesting corporate
contributions.
A look at the donors to the Texas Public Policy
Foundation, the SPN affiliate in Austin, provides a rare window
illustrating how these think tanks operate today. The evidence shows
that the Big Tobacco–era strategy has been embraced by other large
corporations.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose leaders
recently stirred up controversy for surreptitiously lobbying on behalf
of the government of Malaysia, received the bulk of its money from more
than seventy-five business interests, including firms like
ConocoPhillips, Boeing, TXU Energy, ExxonMobil, AEP Texas and Devon
Energy. The largest company on the donor list, Koch Industries, gave
$159,834 through its Austin lobbyist, J. William Oswald, in addition to a
$69,788 donation from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, a Koch family
foundation run in part by Richard Fink, another executive with Koch’s
lobbying operation. As The Texas Observer noted, the Texas Public Policy
Foundation has focused much of its advocacy on issues pertaining to its
corporate benefactors, including energy deregulation and opposition to
Environmental Protection Agency rules to curb mercury, smog and carbon
pollution.
The Texas donor list also reveals that Sharp has
played a larger role in directly financing the expansion of her
affiliates than was previously known. Public disclosures indicate that
SPN distributed only $19,500 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in
2010. That modest amount, which is similar in size to grants given to
other state think tanks, suggests that many of the groups do not rely on
a central source of cash. But the leaked document shows Sharp as the
contact for a donation of $300,000 from the “State Think Tank Fund,” as
well as $195,000 from the “Government Transparency Fund” and $49,306
from SPN itself—a discrepancy of $524,806 compared with the disclosed
grant. Neither the State Think Tank Fund nor the Government Transparency
Fund appears on Guidestar.com or the Foundation Center, repositories
for nonprofit and foundation disclosures.
Like many SPN
affiliates, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has seen its budget
steadily rise. In 2011, the group brought in $5.5 million in
contributions, $2.4 million more than it raised in 2008. How the other
state think tanks in SPN’s orbit are funded largely remains a mystery,
since they, like many overtly political nonprofits, do not disclose
their donors. A recent investigation by the Center for Public Integrity
shows that Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that caters to wealthy
individuals, has provided much of the funding for the recent expansion
in state think tanks backed by the Franklin Center and SPN.
Under
Sharp’s leadership, State Policy Network has grown, opening new think
tanks (now numbering fifty-nine) and forging close relations with ALEC,
which brings together conservative state lawmakers and corporate
lobbyists to draft “model legislation.” In 2009, ALEC gave Sharp an
award to thank her for “getting SPN members more involved” with the
organization. “This special acknowledgement belongs to those who have
put in dedicated time and energy through ALEC,” said Sharp, who accepted
the award onstage with lobbyists from Verizon and Altria.
While
progressive donors have also sought to fund targeted think tank and
state media outlets in certain states—namely Colorado and, reportedly,
Texas—there is no comparison in terms of size and scope, or in the
underhanded tactics embraced by their ideological opponents.
Brian
Rothenberg, head of ProgressOhio, notes that while family foundations
exist on the right and the left, corporate money has flowed almost
exclusively to conservative think tanks. “Especially after Citizens
United,” he says, “the right is inherently better funded than the left.”
In 2011, during the effort to repeal Governor John Kasich’s collective
bargaining law, unions still provided less than 20 percent of
ProgressOhio’s budget.
As far as local labor activists like Brett
Banditelli (who also produces the Rick Smith radio show in Harrisburg)
are concerned, their side is already overwhelmed. The Franklin Center’s
Pennsylvania Independent “doesn’t have much readership, but does an
incredible job of setting the tone on attacks on unions before the
attacks come,” says Banditelli, who notes the Legislature might first go
after union pensions before changing any membership or collective
bargaining rules. Banditelli says labor has been slow to adapt to the
changing media environment, and teachers and workers now stand
defenseless.
Also, Republicans who were newly elected in 2012
seem intent on consolidating power. Missouri’s GOP state legislators
have contemplated using their supermajority to enact right-to-work
legislation. The Advance Arkansas Institute, the SPN affiliate in Little
Rock, produced content pushing for the strict voter ID laws recently
passed by the legislature—which became Republican this year for the
first time since Reconstruction.
Similarly, the Americans for
Prosperity chapter in Kansas has pushed an effort to undercut paycheck
dues to public sector unions this year, while the John W. Pope Civitas
Institute, a North Carolina think tank, has rolled out attacks against
Democratic efforts to reform the state’s infamously gerrymandered
congressional lines.
Tim Phillips, the national head of Americans
for Prosperity and a close adviser to David Koch, has been clear about
his intention to make the most out of the Republicans’ state-level
gains. Speaking at a recent press conference in Indianapolis, he
declared: “We see a debate going on at the state level that is really
going to define the nation.”
Meanwhile, at another Heritage
Foundation gathering, Sharp and her colleagues said that their new
strategy had been inspired in part by a Malcolm Gladwell article in The
New Yorker called “How David Beats Goliath.” The piece, which details
the ways that underdogs can win playing by their own rules, offers
anecdotes on how insurgents have defeated well-equipped armies by
harassing and weakening their opponents. It also describes how a
computer scientist won a naval warfare simulation by spending his
fictional trillion-dollar budget almost entirely on PT boats.
Referring
to the Gladwell article, Sharp said PT boats are “an apt metaphor” for
her network of groups because “they’re fast and maneuverable. A team of
PT boats working strategically can defeat much larger and less
maneuverable vessels—such as huge chunks of unions.”
In his
blog,
appearing regularly at TheNation.com, Lee Fang investigates the
intersection of politics, lobbying and public policy. His latest
dispatch: “
Microsoft Helps Sponsor CPAC's Anti-Gay Conference.”
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