Word: podesta
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...Five years later, they have that, and a lot more, in the Center for American Progress (CAP), the most influential independent organization in Obama's nascent Washington. CAP was the brainchild of former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, who dutifully worked wealthy dinner parties with a simple idea: He would create a new organization, a "think tank on steroids," to help progressive ideas regain power. Tom Daschle, once the top Democrat in the Senate, got on board, calling it an "action tank." Sarah Wartell, who would become Podesta's deputy, had a more homely description: "Not your...
...helped guide Ronald Reagan's transition in 1981 has a single outside group held so much sway. Just as candidate Obama depended on CAP during the campaign for opposition research and talking points, President-elect Obama has effectively contracted out the management of his own government's formation to Podesta. "The Podesta group was formed to bring Democrats back into the presidency, that was its purpose of being," says Stephen Hess, an expert on presidential transitions at the Brookings Institution, a much more traditional think tank...
...difficult to overstate the influence in Obamaland of CAP, a group with roughly $25 million in annual funding from mostly anonymous individuals, corporations and unions. Podesta himself is leading Obama's transition effort, holding press conferences to speak for the President-elect, with an operation beneath him filled with CAP alum. The transition's operations director, the general counsel and the co-director all have come over from similar jobs at the think tank. At least six other CAP alums or board members, including Daschle and former EPA Commissioner Carol Browner, continue to advise the transition or campaign on matters...
...When Democrats first started dreaming up a powerful think tank like CAP, they studied carefully how conservative organizations like Heritage had been so successful. That would explain the fact that in January Podesta's organization plans to publish a 600-page manuscript called Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint For The 44th President that is consciously modeled on a very similar conservative document produced at the dawn of the Reagan era. That 1,000-page book written by the Heritage Foundation in 1981, Mandate For Leadership, became the blueprint for the incoming administration of Ronald Reagan. The book was placed...
...answers, I decided to check in with the Center for American Progress (CAP) - the think tank run by Obama's transition chief, John Podesta - which has drafted a green-energy stimulus plan of its own. "We identified $50 billion in programs that are ready to go immediately," says Bracken Hendricks of CAP. "The package would create 2 million jobs across the skill spectrum, from blue collar to high tech, and in almost every area of the country. There was huge congressional appetite for this even before the economic crisis...