Michael Scherer has a good piece today on the importance of the Center for American Progress, which he calls "the most influential independent organization in Obama's nascent Washington." Matt Yglesias, looking at Obama's smooth transition, notes that lots of the ideas track closely with James Pfiffner's arguments from The Strategic Presidency: Hitting the Ground Running
*, and Pfiffner has appeared at *, and Pfiffner has appeared at CAP-sponsored events on presidential transitions, and CAP's president, John Podesta, is running transition. Put more simply: All roads lead to CAP. But in a sense, all roads lead not to CAP, but to the Clinton administration. For much of its lifespan, CAP was understood as the Clinton administration-in-exile. And that seemed true. But after Obama defeated Clinton in the primaries, it became clear that CAP was simply the Democratic executive branch establishment-in-exile. The transition has thus far been orderly in large part because Clinton's was so disorderly, and those lessons were learned. It has been so focused on appointing staffers with deep Washington experience because their absence is understood to have harmed the Clinton administration's first few years, and those lessons were learned. In certain ways, the genius of CAP was making sure that all the experience and seasoning and talent from the eight years of the Clinton administration did not scatter to the four winds on January 20th, 2001. This was, incidentally, not an advantage Clinton had in 1992. The last Democratic administration had been Carter's, and it was twelve years before. It had ended after one term of failure. And Clinton did everything he could to avoid its taint. Clinton's administration, conversely, had a chaotic start, but by the close of the second term, had matured into a skilled and professional operation. Podesta's genius was, fundamentally, managerial: CAP hasn't done much to change the policy debate (the exception possibly being Larry Korb's "Phased Redeployment" strategy from 2005)**, but it's done an enormous amount to ensure that Democrats retained a professional governance class, and wouldn't have to rebuild the next administration from scratch. * As Eric Rauchway points out over e-mail, hitting the ground running actually slows you down. ** I don't want to take anything away from CAP's communications team here. Projects like Think Progress, the Wonk Room, the Progress Report, and all the rest played a huge role in the last election. What Jen Palmieri and Faiz Shakir and Amanda Terkel and James Kvaal and Matt Duss and the rest of the team did has been crucially important, and is a much more relevant model to the Obama White House's communications apparatus than anything from the Clinton era. On the communications side, CAP hasn't just preserved, they've innovated.
