>>> it is a politicians dream, youve got to admit, standing at the top of this pedestal here and i have got a little step underneath to get even higher. obviously, i want to express appreciation for sesle b.demille. >> thats how you want to kick off the thanksgiving holiday, vintage romney. it was the signing of his landmark health care reform bill. 2006 was romneys last year as governor of massachusetts. he wasnt running for re-election. pretty much everything he was doing was positioning himself for a presidential run in 2008. that was going to be that signing that captured his presidential side. they had ted kennedy, the big champion of health care reform up on the stage, representatives of the massachusetts legislature health care people and some d.c. think folks. you see the guy on the left, robert moffett, ph.d. director of the center for health care policies at the top think tank in the country, the heritage foundation. governor romneys people insisted that it be reserved for that guy from the heritage foundation. he made a point to give heritage a shoutout in their speech thanking them for being the arcty conne architect of center piece of reform. it was their idea he was signing into law. in 1989, the heritage foundation had put out this policy paper. it was called assuring affordable health care for all americans. that paperback showed a new mandate, that all should purchase private insurance. in 2006, the basic heritage health care framework was established as law by a republican governor that was going to go out and run for president. romney didnt win in 2008. barack obama did. one of his first orders of business was health reform. his model was, i think you know this right now, the plan that was working in massachusetts, the romney plan, the heritage foundation plan. those subtleties may have been lost on the right. >> they were launched. the very conservative movement that had helped lay the foundation for the affordable care act has been nearly four years of all-out war on obama care. when congress was debating health care in 2009, republican senator, jim demint, predicted it would be obamas waterloo. we are going to break him on this. he hasnt stopped doing that ever since. it is a request that he has finished at the heritage foundation. the heritage foundation that demint took over was and is very different than the one that produced that health care policy paper all those years ago. it is one where the think tank wing has taken a back seat to the political action wing, something called heritage action. its heritage action with its legislative score cards serving as measurements of conservative purity that set a radical goal this year. the end of obama care through the shutting down of the federal government in the threat of a debt-ceiling default. it was the threat of landing on the wrong side of heritage and getting a bad number on the scorecard that kept all those republicans in line for so long as the government closed down, as their poll numbers dropped, as they asked themselves, why are we doing this all again, 24 years before the shutdown. it was the heritage foundation that conceived of a conservative, market friendly alternative to the canadian style health care, a concept now edged into law under the name obama care. the revolt the heritage foundation led was a revolt against its sechlt a generation after that 1989 health care paper, a group that had been the preimminent force of conservative policies has been less of a shot in the arm for the right than a shot in the foot. they give insight into the organizations decline quoting one republican staffer, bitterly noting that if nancy pelosi could wreet an anonymous check to heritage action, she would. joining us now, julia yafi. the story of heritage is interesting because in my mind they went from coming up with the idea for the affordable care act to shutting down the government over its enactment and implementation. when a lot of people think about that story, they think about jim demint but your story says it is this duo, two guys that are younger than jim demint that have taken it and turned it away from being a think tank into a pure partisan war machine. tell us who they are and how theyve done this. >> my piece focuses on michael ne. dham, 31, the ceo of heritage action. that i title is significant. he has a lieutenant, tim chapman, who is the coo. they were helped to be put in place by the chairman of the heritage foundation. a guy named saunders, a wall street banker in the 80s. when he was elected to the board in 2009, he pushed for a more aggressive approach, for heritage to take a more aggressive approach on the hill and to create a lobbying arm. by this point, michael needham had served as chief of staff to heritage foundations creator and president, edwin full ner. he had gone off to work with the julie ann any campaign. he went to stanford business school. he has a very sterling pedigree. he went to collegiate and williams. he was also a proponent of this. he was brought back to run this lobbying arm in 2010 whether it was created. because a lot of the organ organizational details were left vague, how the money was spent, who would call the shots, tim kaufman was calling the shots. they had alienated a lot of people on the hill with their aggressive, sharp elbow tactics. the elders at heritage foundation kind of woke up one day and realized that the organization has radically changed. >> thats what your piece brings out, the tension between the elders and this sort of new guard. whats interesting to me is, i think this sort of illustrates a challenge that more broadly faces the right. when you look at heritage, you can say politically, obviously, the shutdown was a disaster for the conservative movement and the republican party. traditionally, the role of heritage is this sort of role of policy ideas for the conservative movement. that might be changing. at the same time, leading this charge to defund obama care has meant a windfall in terms of grass root donations for heritage and other groups like it. how do people reconcile those two things. with the grassroots, they can turn and make an appeal and bring in big money even if they are not doing what they used to do. >> i this i the jury is still out on that. if you talk to people at heritage or people who were pretty senior there who have recently left, they would tell you the same thing. heritage action -- heritage foundation is a very old, well well-respected brand on the right, an $82 million annual budget. they burn through $82 million every year and have plenty left for the next year and the year after that. heritage action raised $5 million last year. their biggest donation was from the koch brothers for $500. everything else comes from smaller grassroots donations. we have yet to see what they did with the shutdown and bringing the u.s. to the brink of default with nothing to show for it, how that will affect the bigger donors. a lot of people on the right and business groups are angry at them. as the heritage elders are happy to point out, you cant run an $82 million organization on $25 donations. >> i think that is one of the interesting things to watch on the right now, that tension between the big money, more sort of corporate donor class and the grassroots side. julie ioffe, senior editor at the new republic. thank you for joining us tonight. >>> what happens when political partisans try to hop on the swing side and ride it to their side of the aisle? sometimes they fall off. hold on for a bumpy ride up next. you get
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 02:42:05 +0000
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