Rob Levine
August 9, 2000

Commentary: 'American Experiment' gets free ride from uncritical media

Reprinted with the permission of Mpls Star-Tribune

Ten years ago, the Minneapolis Star Tribune greeted the creation of a new, conservative think tank called the Center of the American Experiment (CAE) with an editorial titled "Welcome a conservative policy forum." The newspaper and other established media, notably Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) and KTCA-TV (now TPT), opened up their news pages, opinion pages and public airwaves to often unmediated speeches, conferences and position papers produced by the center.

Since then the Star Tribune has published more than 300 stories or opinion pieces by and about the CAE, yet focused almost no attention either on its institutional connections or funding, despite repeated red flags presented by the center's behavior.

Because of its tax-exempt status, the center, in theory, is not allowed to intervene in campaigns, nor underwrite the activities of a political party. According to IRS rules, organizations that engage in such activities may be subjected to financial penalties and/or revocation of their 501(c)(3) status.

An example of a breach of such rules, and the first clue that more investigation of the center was needed, came in its first year of operation. In 1990, Mitch Pearlstein, the center's creator and president, illegally donated tax-exempt funds to the Senate campaign of Republican Rudy Boschwitz and to the state Republican Party, one of the few financial acts of the center ever reported by the Star Tribune.

That, however, was just the beginning of the center's relationship to the Republican Party. Over the years the center has hosted numerous journalists, theorists and politicians of the national Republican Party, forged close ties with the Minnesota Republican Party and, perhaps most significantly, turned out to be a valuable cog in the national conservative-Republican movement.

These ties have become more pronounced as the years have gone by. In the beginning, most of the center's events were symposia or panel discussions. Recently, however, it has sponsored more one-person presentations, generally with Republican celebrity figures, such as the one last November with former Independent Prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

Visitors like Starr or former Rep. Vin Weber often refer to themselves and their audiences as Republicans when they speak at the center. In December 1992, Star Tribune reporter Dane Smith wrote about a Weber speech at the center: "Rep. Vin Weber, one of the nation's foremost conservative Republican strategists, told a gathering of his comrades .... " The transcript of the event confirms Weber's introduction: "Let me talk a little bit about where I think we are as a movement, which is inextricably, in my mind -- not in the minds of everybody here, but in mine -- linked with where we are as a Republican Party."

The Center has played host to many other Republican strategists, such as Marvin Olasky, the godfather of so-called compassionate conservatism, and David Horowitz, the lapsed leftist and now subsidized rightist, who runs a Web site called Political War that advises Republicans on how to win elections. Mainstream media outlets have reported that Republican George W. Bush is one of many Horowitz adherents, and Olasky himself is one of Bush's chief domestic-policy advisers.

Here in Minnesota, the past three chairmen of the state Republican Party have been inextricably intertwined in the center's affairs. One, Chris Georgacas, directed the largest project in the center's history, the "Minnesota Policy Blueprint," a prescriptive book modeled on the Heritage Foundation's "Mandate for Leadership" series, that attempts to tell Minnesotans how their state should be run. The people and positions of the policy blueprint and those of the Minnesota Republican Party are virtually indistinguishable.

In fact, the roster of people who wrote the blueprint reads like a list of the state Republican apparat. At least 44 of about 110 are either current or former Republican officeholders, current or former Republican office seekers, Republican bureaucrats (campaign chairmen, lawyers, etc.), or Republican financiers. All 19 committee heads, and the two directors of the project, were Republicans as well. Many others represent the traditional allies of Republicans, including representatives and lobbyists for organizations such as the Minnesota Business Partnership, Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, Minnesota Association of Realtors and other captains of industry.

Observers of the center may have noticed its close relations with Republicans. More revealing is its tight relationship to the broader national conservative movement. At the beginning of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Hillary Rodham Clinton charged that there was a "vast, right-wing conspiracy" against her husband. Her charge was wrong to one extent: The movement against her husband was not a conspiracy, because of that word's connotations of secrecy; rather, it is a social and economic movement, directed and funded on an ongoing basis by a small but wealthy group of individuals and philanthropies. It is a movement that the center is deeply involved in.

The prime funders of this movement are the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, Wis.; the John M. Olin Foundation of New York; the Scaife foundations of Pittsburgh, Pa., and nine other right-wing foundations. Although the CAE has officially received only $175,000 from the Bradley and Olin foundations, it receives significantly more from the movement in the form of subsidized content for its presentations.

A partial list of the foundation-subsidized speakers and players from the center reads like a Who's Who of America's conservative movement, and includes such familiar names as William Bennett, Robert Bork, William F. Buckley, Linda Chavez, Ward Connerly and Kenneth Starr. Some, like Bork, are on the permanent payroll of these foundations.

Many times these people participate or speak at the center for a reduced fee, or for free, as was the case when the scientific racist Charles Murray, writer of the widely discredited tome, "The Bell Curve," came through town. Without the people, institutions and tax-exempt funding of the movement, the center's roster would be barren indeed.

This sharing goes the other way, too. For example, the CAE has a sister institution called the Heartland Institute, another 501(c)(3), based in Chicago, which has its own periodical called Intellectual Ammunition. Last year, Intellectual Ammunition ran a cover story written by none other than the center's own Pearlstein, which was in turn a summation of the policy blueprint. This is one of many examples where CAE-produced content has appeared in publications produced by other members of the subsidized conservative movement.

In fact, the movement has created some of its own institutions to aid in just this sort of coordination of everything from the actual giving of the philanthropies (the Philanthropy Roundtable) to the work of state and regional-based think tanks (the State Policy Network) to the work of the movement's legislators (the American Legislative Exchange Council). The "resources" page of the center's Web site lists much of the movement.

There are too many disconcerting activities of the center, and the movement it is part of, to cover in one article. Cursor.org, the local media-criticism Web site I edit, has launched a new site, called Media Transparency (www.MediaTransparency.org), that attempts to document the grant making of the 12 largest conservative foundations, complete with articles about the recipient organizations and people, feature stories about topics contained in the grants, and links to other Web sites around the world that shed light on this movement.

Media Transparency is in some sense a reaction to the Twin Cities media's passive and accepting treatment of the presentations of the center, its uncritical dissemination of CAE content and its failure to take a hard look at the center's activities. Just recently, for example, MPR broadcast an hourlong speech by Robert Novak, who gave advice to Republicans on how they can win the upcoming election. Last month, an experienced Star Tribune journalist allowed the subsidized conservative pundit William F. Buckley, who had been invited to speak at the center, to pour factually erroneous Republican hyperbole directly onto the news pages.

My hope is that in the future, armed with the knowledge of what the center really is, the media of this town will be more vigilant and discerning about both the unmediated reproduction of its presentations and the overall coverage of its activities.

At the very least, perhaps articles and broadcast reports about the center should contain the following tagline: The Center of the American Experiment is a 501(c)(3) organization, and as such is not legally allowed to intervene in political campaigns, nor underwrite the activities of a political party.