In this Politico story, I found via Mickey, the Center for American Progress’s Jennifer Palmieri says:
“[CAP President John] Podesta’s and my experience was in the White House during the Clinton years, and we didn’t have a coordinated echo chamber on the outside backing us up,” she said. “There’s a real interest on the progressive side for groups to want to coordinate with each other and leverage each other’s work in a way I haven’t ever seen before.”
Maybe one reason liberals are so blunt about this sort of thing is that this is what you get when you copy the form of, say, the Heritage Foundation, without actually understanding the function. Places like the Center for American Progress (allegedly “the liberal Heritage Foundation”) were explicitly created to mimic what self-styled progressives believe to be the vast right-wing conspiracy (It was the same agenda that brought us Air America). In one sense, they were great at mimicking all this stuff, but like the aliens in Galaxy Quest they lacked a certain level of understanding of how this stuff works internally to these organizations. For instance, they don’t seem to understand that the purpose of institutions like the Heritage Foundation is to make the White House and Congress more of an echo chamber of Heritage, not the other way around.