Mark Schmitt says that good policy can be smart politics — and that’s the idea behind this magazine:
To a reader, the Prospect’s “liberal fundamentalism” was straightforward and earnest, a refreshing contrast to all the tortured proposals for “how progressives can win.” Much of the debate of the early 1990s came down to the choice between strategy and policy. In 1991, Harris Wofford won a special election in Pennsylvania on a platform of universal health care. The next year, I heard him tell a group of senators, “People think I talked about health care because the polls said I should talk about health care. They didn’t. The polls said I had to talk about welfare. But I didn’t want to talk about welfare, so I talked about health care.” That was the spirit of the early Prospect: a dedication to not just winning elections but to full social and economic justice and an economy that created jobs and opportunity for an expanding middle class.