Brookings: Where the Very Serious People Pushing Petraeus's PR Rollout Live
by: Matt Stoller
Sun Sep 09, 2007 at 11:53:39 AM EDT
We're experiencing, right now, a PR offensive this week for the surge. What's stunning is how irrelevant the surge really is to popular opinion, and yet, this farcical debate is key to policymaker attitudes. Why is this? Well, in a word, it's the think tank industrial complex. Elected officials, when they come to Washington, are often bright-eyed and confused about all the new information they encounter. And they are really busy. There are many people here who will offer them useful information, polling data, even staff, to help them in their job, and pretty soon, they begin speaking and thinking as Washington DC pundits do, disconnected from the public and in thrall to conventional wisdom crafted by elites.
Probably the most 'elite' institution in DC is the nonpartisan think tank called the Brookings Institution. The Brookings Institution is considered a 'centrist' think tank, though at various points it's dubbed 'liberal' when it suits their purposes, and it is led by Democrat and former Clinton official Strobe Talbott. Brookings sees itself as a 'nonideological' playground of ideas, where nonpartisan scholars can debate and hash out the best ideas for public officials to implement. Brookings is a key pillar of the 'think tank industrial complex', the unelected policy-making branch of government, which includes lobbyists, journalists, and a host of think tanks around town. This is where 'studies' come from upon which public officials rely to move legislation or regulations.
It is where the most serious of the very serious people live. I'm not sure if this is the case anymore, but when a 'study' came from Brookings on any policy matter in the 1980s, it carried golden credibility. Brookings is nonpartisan, non-ideological, and simply tells the truth about what is best for the country, with all the unstated elitist assumptions that implies. So it's useful to see how the institution is interacting with the policy known as the 'surge' in Iraq.
It won't surprise you that this paragon of serious non-ideological policy-making isn't handling it very well. On September 13, Talbott's organization will hold a panel of "leading Brookings experts representing a uniquely broad spectrum of views (that) will examine the implications of a pivotal Iraq progress report." The composition of the panel is, in a word, simply absurd.
more...
Edit to correct link:
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1239
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