Think tank

Three years ago, in the wake of the 2004 election, we all had a sense that something was wrong with our democracy.

After Barry Goldwater's ignominous defeat in 1964 the conservatives had gotten organized and by 1980 were on the warpath. Since that day, it seemed, progressives had been stumbling around blindly -- either trying to obfuscate the debate, looking like wusses, or eagerly helping conservatives to undo all the progress of a fifty-year national consensus Roosevelt had begun with the New Deal.

In those heady days, Howard Dean had showed grassroots activism could counter the traditional conservative individual-donor advantage, the Rappaports were getting folks together and Rob Stein was on the road with his famous powerpoint, the Center for American Progress was forming, and works like Don't Think of an Elephant and the Death of Environmentalism essay were making the case that single-issue advocacy wasn't enough to fundamentally shift American values. Words like infrastructure, values, ideas, media, and think tanks were the bread and butter of the progressive lexicon.

At the time, I had just returned from leading a group of 135 Stanford students to knock on doors and turn out John Kerry voters in Nevada. After catching up on some long-overdue homework in a diner in Las Vegas on November 3, I returned back to my dorm room in Crothers Hall -- literally in the phallic shadow of Hoover tower -- to think about what was next.

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At the base of that tower is a plaque explaining that it is the only federal monument to president Herbert Hoover. Small wonder. Though Hoover's ideas -- that Americans would be better without "communistic" programs like like Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the FDIC -- had been seen as widely discredited by the 1932 election and the subsequent success of the New Deal, in that one lonely tower the spark had apparently been kept alive. Now, re-popularized by organizations like the Hoover Institution, we saw plausible efforts to take apart Social Security and gut the Securities and Exchange Commission.

If organizations like Hoover had restored the dream of a do-nothing government presiding over the economic ruin of middle class America, it was clear that we needed a "Roosevelt Institution" to bring back America's problem-solving spirit.