In tracking the extraordinary expansion of progressive infrastructure since 2004, Jeanne Cummings of The Politico has the right story, but I'm not sure she's really nailed the details. CAP, for instance has some centrality, but what's particularly interesting about the think tank is that though it was founded as an intellectual counterweight to the Heritage Foundation, it quickly evolved into a very different, and arguably much more effective, beast. CAP's straight think tank division has had some notable successes -- in particular the "phased redeployment" strategy that Democrats adopted in 2006 -- but broadly speaking, has not exerted a powerful policy pull. Indeed, Cummings credits them with formulating the basic health care structure that the presidential Democrats eventually adopted, but this is false: The original CAP plan, now long since deleted from their site, had a value-added tax, and no public plan, and an income cap. The eventual structure adopted by the Democrats was closer to what Jacob Hacker, with the backing of Campaign for America's Future and the Economic Policy Institute, proposed, and beyond that, to what many health experts have been advocating for years. Even so, CAP has been a startling success. But it's been the growth of their advocacy and communications division -- Think Progress, the Wonk Room, the Progress Report, Campus Progress, and the various other ventures they've supported our founded -- that has really transformed what could have been a staid holding pen for out-of-work undersecretaries into a vibrant progressive institution with both feet firmly in the 21st Century. Meanwhile, Drew Westen, who Cummings marks as a leader, is doing some consulting but isn't actually that influential. Someday, a conservative -- or maybe even liberal -- Rick Perlstein will write a Before the Storm-type book about this period, and it will be interesting. What it will find is that in 2004, Democrats decided they needed an infrastructure of their own, and tried to ape what the Right had built. And they failed. But as the money sloshed through the activist organizations and donors grew comfortable with the wages of experimentation, an alternative structure arose that wasn't much like what the Right had built at all -- it was more digital, and crowdsourced, and enamored with "fact checking" -- but proved effective all the same.
