With Tea Party darling Jim DeMint at its head, will anybody outside the conservative choir pay attention to the preaching of the Heritage Foundation?

I hope not.

Well, I guess the only positive thing is that he would no longer have direct political power, but I’m sure he will be pulling a lot of strings from behind the scenes.

This whole ordeal might actually strengthen the Heritage Foundation, because Jim DeMint’s supporters will probably now become supporters of the Heritage Foundation if they aren’t already.

We can’t simply call Jim DeMint insignificant, because he obviously has enough supporters to win an election to be a member of the House.

The fact that Jim DeMint was very partisan will have absolutely no negative effect on the Heritage Foundation, since the foundation was already very partisan to begin with.

As far is if anybody outside the “conservative choir” will pay attention, probably not, since they would most likely not be supporters of Jim DeMint anyway, and might actually be happy to see him leave congress.

I found it to be very effective from personal experience. I forward their articles allover. The feedback that I received was particularly in praise of the wealth of footnote references in each article and that each author was an expert (Ph.D title) as oppose to some blogging nobody. This was the reason that the well known biases of this site were not off-putting.

But democrats have their own think-tanks filled with Ph.D authors who counter opposing views. This one comes to mind, American Progress

Who else but conservatives listens to the Heritage Foundation? Do conservatives give a shit about what The Center for American Progress has to say? These days, everybody preaches to their own choir.

@marinelife As do I, but I’ve been disappointed in such hopes all too often.

@PhiNotPi I see Washington Pundits quoting Heritage Foundations publications all the time as if they are the next thing to a scientific law.

@emilianate Are there any think tanks that actually devote themselves to the old fashioned idea of thinking up solutions to problems rather than thinking up spin and justification for ideology?

@josie Too many pundits have.

All think-thanks are the same. They’re policy institutes. They research and provide solutions to problems. It can either come through implication by pointing out the flaws in existing/offered policies or a direct solution, or both. It’s just that one might not like that type of solution for X reasons.

@emilianate I’m an old guy, and I remember a day when think tanks really lived up to their name. Ph.D.‘s focusing on developing policy ideas to improve society or industry. Today, most seem to be glorified PR firms thinking up bumper-sticker style slogans and finding ways of spinning statistics to push policies already long since thought up. They are all to often just the sales agents pushing a preexisting ideology.