Bush Policy Wonks Will Move Markets – and the Economy
January 15, 2001

by Curtis Lang & Jim Ridgeway		print version
		print version (graphics)

No one expects Dubya to put on his thinking cap, network with policy wonks and forge a set of priorities for his new administration that will rock our collective world. That was Bill Clinton's modus operandi.

Ideas for Bush policies will be coming from a handful of big think tanks in Washington. As in the Reagan era, the most important is the Heritage Foundation, which since 1980 has published an elaborate Mandate for Leadership book every four years that sets forth the conservative agenda. Now the project is even larger and laid out on the  group's Web site .

Heritage's sister think tank, the American Enterprise Institute , is really more like an assisted living facility for pro-business members of former administrations than a hotbed of new-wave conservative innovation. AEI poses as conservative, but it is  dominated by old cold war neoconservative theorists, many of them former left-wingers who saw the light and went over to the other side.

Then there's the Libertarian Cato Institute, which is too far out to be closely connected with any administration.

All these groups host non-stop seminars and discussion groups to hash out policy, and Heritage has what amounts to a lobby staff that works with members of Congress in developing policy. Heritage also has encouraged the founding of other foundations around the country to work at the state level, developing policy and pushing forward right wing politics.

Of these three, Heritage is most important, having developed the conservative line on Social Security, welfare reform, health insurance, housing, welfare and the Internet. Even more important, Heritage has worked hard over the last four years to pull together ideologically warring Christian fundamentalists with Libertarian economists.

Cato, which has been growing rapidly and has a very high cool quotient, is home base for Libertarian economics, the backbone of the turn-of-the-century conservative movement.

Key areas these conservative think tanks have honed include: