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Chris DeMuth, Hack ExtraordinaireThe leader of President Bush's favorite think tank bids adieu.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007, at 9:31 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Note DeMuth's embattled opposition to a hopelessly left-wing mainstream press, the compulsory posture for any right-wing apparatchik. But in a valedictory op-ed published Oct. 11 in the Wall Street Journal, DeMuth warbled a different melody. "AEI essays," he boasted, "appear more frequently than those from other think tanks of all persuasions, not only in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal but also those of the New York Times and Washington Post." So much for the liberal media.

Under DeMuth's leadership, AEI demonstrated that a Washington think tank committed to the betterment of mankind is a market inefficiency. In the old days, tycoons bequeathed vast fortunes to nonprofits so that they might pursue research about and possibly even help to solve the world's problems. Some (notably, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) continue to follow this creaky model. Increasingly, though, corporations don't wait for their chiefs to start feeling sentimental about their accumulated assets. Instead, the corporations themselves invest "charitable" contributions in a different sort of nonprofit—a simpatico think tank dedicated to researching and possibly even helping to solve the corporation's problems, real or imagined, in the political arena. DeMuth didn't invent the new model, but he buffed it to a hard sheen.

(Full disclosure: Slate's D.C. office was once located, improbably, in the AEI building. This real-estate deal was midwifed by the late Slate contributor Herbert Stein, an AEI scholar of the old school, whom I never met. I did work in that office, however, and helped myself to the lunchroom's subsidized filet on more than one occasion. My interactions with the AEI folk, including DeMuth, were always pleasant and courteous, the only possible exception being the time Michael Novak—AEI's resident expert on faith, traditional values, etc.—shushed me in the lunchroom. I'd let out a joyous whoop on learning from my Slate colleague Jack Shafer, till then a lifelong bachelor, that he was engaged to be married. I wish to inform Mr. Novak that Jack and his wife Nicole are now the proud parents of two adorable girls.)

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
Photograph of Christopher DeMuth by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
E-mail Timothy Noah at .
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Remarks from the Fray:

I would like to think some of these Republican apparatchicks heading for the right wing exit are leaving out of guilt or shame or at least the desire to do less harm. In the case of someone like Warner, that may be true, but the idea men are looking for a place to retrench. DeMuth and Rove will be back, and until then will lurk like rats in the walls of corporate America, looking for a weak place to gnaw into.

The basic problem with modern conservative ideology is it emphasizes marketing over substance. This is usually called the Reagan Legacy, but he was all package and no product. People like Kristol and DeMuth and their mouthpiece stooges like Limbaugh and O'Reilly are the modern snake oil salesmen and more proud of their ability to convince people that less is more than of any real accomplishment.

That has been the problem with the Bush/Republican Congress era. They never thought they had to really do anything except convince people they were right. Whether they were right or not did not matter. They thought that "facts are stupid things" and easily manipulated through a pliable mass media. So they have failed, over and over and over until even the worst of them realizes it is time for a time out, like a celebrity entering rehab.

--Telemachus

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(10/13)

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