Bogus Think Tank "Third Way" Pops Up to Thwart Health Care Reform

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted June 30, 2009.

Third Way was launched in early 2005 to produce policy papers and messaging tactics for congressional Democrats, with a focus on Blue Dog senators. It was then, as it is now, drenched in corporate money and tangled in ties to big business. These ties stretch from the board of trustees, thick with hedge-funders and investment bankers, to its lone senior fellow for health policy, David Kendall, a former Blue Cross Blue Shield consultant.

The recently leaked health care memo isn't the first time Third Way has drawn cold stares from the left during a major battle in Congress. In early 2008, it came to light that Third Way was counseling Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on how best to advocate for retroactive immunity for telecoms that had colluded with the government in warrantless spying. Among the Third Way trustees with pasts and presents in the telecom industry was Reynold Levy, a former AT&T executive.

"We thought it would be a bad idea to allow these companies to be held legally liable for cooperating with the government," Third Way Vice President Matt Bennett explained at the time of the telecom debate. Just to make sure everyone understood Third Way's position on civil liberties, he added: "You want to encourage the cooperation of not just the telecom industry, but all other industries in the future."

Going back to Third Way's prehistory, most senior staffers were also on the wrong side of the Iraq debate. Not that many Third Way principals seem to know much about national security, war, terrorism or the Middle East. The only name listed under Third Way's national security program is Scott Payne. Never heard of him? Neither has anyone else.

The staff page on the Third Way Web site provides lots of info about the outreach manager, but Payne's bio page is curiously blank. Leaving the Third Way site to hunt down more information won't get you much further: an online search for "Scott Payne" brings you to the Web site of a Chicago food photographer. 

For an organization attempting to influence policy across a range of weighty issues, the Third Way brain pool is shockingly small and welterweight. How can it claim to know how Democrats should position themselves when it doesn't have any real expertise on the issues?

The result is depressingly thin progressive-policy gruel. In the measured words of beltway blogger Matt Yglesias, "There are a variety of issues that [Third Way] have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address."

Let's go back to that first question people have when Third Way rears its little gopher head: Who are these people?

Leading the way at Third Way is its 43-year-old founder and president, Jonathan Cowan. There is only slightly more information about Cowan available online than there is about his go-to national security guy Payne. What we do know about this would-be power broker is that he cut his political teeth as a staffer for Democratic California Congressman-turned-lobbyist Mel Levine. At 27, Cowan co-founded Lead ... or Leave, a mid-'90s curio of youth activism that raised hell over the deficit by protesting in favor of entitlement reform on the steps of the AARP's Washington offices. In the second Clinton administration, Cowan was a deputy director at Andrew Cuomo's Housing and Urban Development. He would later boast that while at HUD he worked to "blow up public housing," some of which was replaced with upmarket private condos. Cowan then went on to launch Americans For Gun Safety, a Washington-based gun-control advocacy group that briefly tag-teamed with the ascendant Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence.

It was at AGS that Cowan built a reputation as a messaging tactician for Democratic policies. Along the way, he networked like hell and hired Jim Kessler and Matt Bennett, both now vice presidents at Third Way.  

See more stories tagged with: health, clinton, progressive, third way, public option

Alexander Zaitchik is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and AlterNet contributing writer.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Health and Wellness! Sign up now »