Bill Kristol’s Think Tank Fetish

The political operative has a talent for pseudo-intellectual hackery.

Jason Zengerle, The New Republic | Full Story | Earlier this month, a new conservative economic think tank called e21 sent a letter to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The missive bore a heavy gloss of intellectualism. Its topic was the Fed’s “large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called ‘quantitative easing’),” and it carried the signatures of numerous academics and professional economists, all of whom listed their various books (The Ascent of Money), past governmental jobs (Chairman, President’s Council of Economic Advisors; Director, Congressional Budget Office), and current institutional affiliations (Harvard, Stanford, Columbia). The worthies were writing Bernanke with a specific and technical request: to abandon the Fed’s plan to buy $600 billion in additional U.S. Treasury bonds because, they argued, the “purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.”

But, for all its intellectual and technocratic pretenses, the letter was really a political attack ad. It was written in consultation with Republican politicians, and e21 paid to have it run in both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. As the Journal reported in a separate news article, the letter was the first salvo in what a “tea-party-infused Republican party” hopes will be an anti-Fed campaign that it can wage in Congress and, possibly, against Barack Obama when he runs for reelection in 2012. Indeed, e21—the think tank that describes itself as a “nonpartisan organization dedicated to economic research and innovative public policies for the 21st century” —turns out to be nothing more than a political pressure group.

Which isn’t a surprise when you consider the man behind e21: Bill Kristol. Kristol has been hailed—and castigated—for numerous deeds over the years, from killing Hillary Clinton’s health care reform effort to pushing us into war in Iraq. He may in fact be the most talented political operative of his generation. But even more impressive than his accomplishments have been his methods, as he has developed a singular talent: cooking up conservative think tanks that churn out pseudo-intellectual arguments to serve the GOP’s immediate political interests. >>

Published 10.11.29 00:00:00 -0500 GMT | Posted by Andrew Garib on 10.11.29 | |

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