The NCPA’s Web of Funding

Four months ago, I defended the National Centre for Policy Analysis against the charge that they had fired Bruce Bartlett in retaliation for betraying the right wing establishment. Bartlett’s new book, Impostor : How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, has recently been getting more media attention, as has his firing. With that comes new revelations that cause me to reconsider my apology for the NCPA.

Consider this passage from the International Herald Tribune:

What happens if you’re a Republican commentator and you write a book critical of President George W. Bush that gets you fired from your job at a conservative think tank?
For starters, no other conservative institution rushes in with an offer for your superb analytical skills.
“Nobody will touch me,” said Bruce Bartlett . . .
In the interview, Bartlett said he had been fired because his increasingly critical comments about Bush, both in his column, in his book and in other publications, had hampered the ability of the research institution to raise money among Republican donors.
He also provided a copy of an e-mail message that he said was sent to him in August 2004 by Jeanette Goodman, the vice president of the research institution. “100K is off the table if you do another ‘dump Cheney’ column and 65K donor is having a rebuttal done, in a national magazine, to your attack on the fair tax people so that 65K may be gone also,” Goodman wrote about one of Bartlett’s columns about the vice president. “Do you have any ideas on where I could raise that amount quickly?”

If Bartlett’s account is true, and I have no reason why it should not be, then it reflects very poorly on the NCPA — and its donors.
But, the other side of the coin:

John Goodman, the president of the organization and Goodman’s husband, said in a telephone interview over the weekend that he did not know what his wife had said to Bartlett and that he did not want to say whether Bartlett “did or didn’t hurt fund-raising.” But Goodman added, “That’s not why he was fired.”
Goodman said he dismissed Bartlett because after reading the manuscript of “Impostor” last fall, he determined that Bartlett had reneged on an agreement not to personalize his criticism of the president or any other individual, in the Bush administration or not.
“He was supposed to write a book on policy,” Goodman said.

I found the denouement of the article to be really funny:

Bartlett, for his part, said he is fine financially but hopes his book is a best seller. In any case, he is tired of think tanks. “Some reporter called the other day and asked me about the budget, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about the budget anymore,” Bartlett said. “It’s just a boring subject. It’s never changed in the 30 years I’ve been working on the budget. But if I were still working for a think tank, I’d have to be up on that kind of stuff and ready to give a quote or some intelligent analysis, and I feel I can kind of ignore some of that.”