Money Well Wasted -- Liberals Sponsor Think-Tanks

WaPo reports:

At least 80 wealthy liberals have pledged to contribute $1 million or more apiece to fund a network of think tanks and advocacy groups to compete with the potent conservative infrastructure built up over the past three decades.

The money will be channeled through a new partnership called the Democracy Alliance, which was founded last spring -- the latest in a series of liberal initiatives as the Democratic Party and its allies continue to struggle with the loss of the House and the Senate in 1994 and the presidency in 2000. Many influential Democratic contributors were left angry and despairing over the party's poor showing in last year's elections, and are looking for what they hope will be more effective ways to invest their support.

Financial commitments totaling at least $80 million over the next five years generated by the Democracy Alliance in recent months -- at a time when some liberal groups, such as the George Soros-backed America Coming Together, are floundering -- suggest that the group is becoming a player in the long-term effort to reinvigorate the left. The group has a goal of raising $200 million -- a sum that would inevitably come in part at the expense of more traditional Democratic groups, although alliance officials say donors have committed to maintaining past contribution levels.

Read the whole thing here.

Once again the Left shows itself to be desperately out of touch with what is really going on in America. These guys think that the rise of talk radio, the blogosphere, and the right of center think tanks is the reason for the eclipse of the Democratic Party. But those are the symptoms, not the cause -- just the institutional manifestation of a widespread demand for institutions to express an alternative to a corrupt and increasingly irrelevant left wing establishment. The left already controls most of the commanding heights of our intellectual enterprises -- the universities, the MSM, the publishing houses, etc. They don't need more institutions. They need better ideas.

This reminds me of those feckless founders of "liberal alternatives" to talk radio who just keep failing and failing, or those executives at MSNBC who don't realize that they aren't in competition with FOX, but with NBC and the other broadcast networks. That's where their potential audience is, if they ever decide to go after it.