Democratic Diva

04 Mar 2010 07:15 pm
Posted by: Donna

That’s what you’d think from reading the Republic piece on the Center for Arizona Policy today.

“There was concern about how public policy impacts families,” said Cathi Herrod, who joined the group a couple of years later and is now president. “We were seeing a need to have someone on-site at the Legislature on behalf of family issues.”

The group started out slowly. Herrod said that although there were legislators who supported the center’s agenda, it wasn’t a priority at that time. In recent years, that mentality has begun to change, she said, both in the Legislature and among voters.

“Increasingly, people are understanding that what happens down here impacts their daily lives,” she said.

Aw shucks.

CAP may have started as a small, independent outfit, but very soon after its formation it was known to be affiliated with Focus on the Family, the extremely influential national Religious Right organization. Here’s a Public Eye report from back in 1999 that lists CAP as a FOF state partner organization. It’s hardly a hidden association; there are links to FOF and its subsidiaries all over CAP’s website. Yet CAP presents itself to the mainstream public as a local grassroots effort dedicated to the interests of Arizona families. Hogwash. CAP’s legislative agenda is identical to those of “Family Policy” groups in practically every other state. The hideous bill that requires the publication of personal information of abortion patients is exactly the same as the one passed by the Oklahoma state legislature last year. Yet news outlets in Arizona ignore all that and takes CAP at its word that its mission is independent and local, when in fact it is carrying out the national agenda of reactionary theocrats.

And let’s talk about our other “local think tank”, Goldwater Institute, for a sec. The Public Eye identified GI as an affiliate of the State Policy Network.

Founded in 1992, the State Policy Network
(SPN) evolved from the now defunct Madison Group, a network of
conservative organizations created in the aftermath of a 1986 meeting at the Madison Hotel in Washington, DC. The State Policy Network is based in Ft. Wayne, Indiana and serves as a coordination agency for
37 state-level think tanks in 30 states.

Although corporate money and executives are the dominant presence in these think tanks, they nevertheless do not solely promote business interests. The tendency is to focus on conservative/libertarian campaigns, from welfare reform to school privatization.
According to Byron Lamm, the longtime Executive Director of the State
Policy Network, all the think tanks advocate “free market solutions to public policy, with an emphasis on individual rights and responsibility.” While there are often different emphases, determined by the interests
of the leadership and the local situation, the think tanks share broad ideological agreement and nearly identical political agendas—primarily supporting privatization of most government services and advocating
“free market solutions” to public policy issues from health care to the environment. Most have a strong emphasis on school privatization. They favor deregulation of business and oppose organized labor.

Because the think tanks of the SPN generally reflect the business/libertarian wing of the GOP, some of them avoid dealing
with such social issues as abortion and gay rights, on which some GOP libertarians such as William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts, are often at odds with the Christian Right. Eight SPN think tanks,
including the Goldwater, Pioneer, and Heartland Institutes (but none
of the Family Policy Councils) reflect a specifically libertarian orientation through their “partnership” in Freemarket.net, an on-line libertarian
network sponsored by the Henry Hazlitt Foundation. However, the agenda of many SPN think tanks seems to mesh well with the Christian
Right, and others are indistinguishable from the Christian Right’s agenda. For example, the California Resource Institute described a 1999 bill in the California legislature (proposing that the states 140 “charter schools” be unionized like the rest of the publicly funded school system) as an effort to “squash the academic freedom of charter schools.” Such an anti-union stance reliably appeals to both the business and Christian Right wings of the Republican Party, and often generates popular appeal well beyond that base. The ideological differences among SPN affiliates
seem to originate in the circumstances surrounding their founding and funding.

Again, not a hidden association, but one that has never, to my recollection, been acknowledged in the AZ news media.

A while back I joked about Goldwater not having a position on gay rights or abortion because they were scared of Cathi Herrod. Now it’s clear why Goldwater and other SPN groups don’t articulate positions on those social issues. They let FOF groups like CAP drive the Republican base to the polls while retaining their libertarian cred. They’re all about their “classical liberal approach”. Well, except on immigration, where they suddenly remember that businesses need cheap labor uh Joe Arpaio is a racist thug.

Notice how silent CAP is on immigration? Remarkable that an organization touted as the most powerful lobbying group at the AZ Capitol, and that claims it looks out for Arizona families, has nothing to say about arguably the hottest and most contentious issue in this state, don’t you think?

I’m sure there’s a reason for it.

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