RIght Cross

His résumé for the next decade included stints working with Kemp and as the chief legislative assistant for Iowa Republican Senator Roger Jepsen, who put Bartlett on the Joint Economic Committee of Congress; a gig at the Heritage Foundation think tank, where he wrote about tax reform; and a period working at Jude Wanniski's firm called Polyconomics, which advised Wall Street firms about economic and political developments on Capitol Hill. Then, in 1987, Gary Bauer, who was then the president's chief domestic policy advisor, invited him into the Reagan White House.

"Since I thought this would be the last opportunity I would have to work for Ronald Reagan, I took it," Bartlett says. But the gig in the Office of Policy Development wasn't much of one: Bauer had been hired by Reagan's chief of staff Don Regan, who was ousted in 1987 after the Iran-Contra scandal and replaced with Howard Baker.

"And Baker really had no use for Gary and pretty much completely ignored him, which meant there was nothing for our whole office essentially to do," Bartlett says. "I had a really nice office over in the Executive Office building, and I just had absolutely nothing to do. I would just watch TV and drink beer and just mark time until the end of the administration."

When George H.W. Bush took office, Bartlett moved over to the Treasury Department, where he served as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy--or, as he describes it, another job that involved sitting on his ass and doing nothing.

"What I was interested in, obviously, was economic policy, but Bush didn't have one," he says. Bartlett became especially aware of this after the president who promised "no new taxes" promptly raised taxes. "It was very depressing. I used to joke to myself that the only reason that they kept me around was because they didn't know any other conservatives."

George H.W. Bush got dumped after one term, and Bartlett moved back into the world of think tanks, taking his position with the NCPA in 1995. And, he thought, it was a good fit, working with a guy like Goodman, who was equally obsessed with the minutiae of economics. Then Bartlett did something he shouldn't have.

He went after his old boss' son.

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John Goodman will forever insist he does not care that Bruce Bartlett disagrees with the president. He proves this point by agreeing with Bartlett about the Medicare bill; after all, to conservatives the word "entitlement" is perhaps the most vulgar of curse words, just behind "Clinton." What he says he takes issue with is how Bartlett went after President Bush "so personally," by which he likely means Bartlett's description in Impostor of Bush as being "simply a partisan Republican, anxious to improve the fortunes of his party [but] perfectly willing to jettison conservative principles at a moment's notice to achieve that goal." It may sound rather benign--certainly, Bush has been called much worse--but to Goodman, it has the ring of name-calling.

"The problem is, what he's doing with that book is something I object to as a matter of style, but also it's something the board of directors also objects to," Goodman says. "I've done a lot of debates--used to do a lot of stuff with Bill Buckley, and going all the way back to high school I did them--and I think it's important how you debate with someone. I am the opposite of [New York Times columnist] Paul Krugman. I do not immediately assume that if someone disagrees with me, there is something wrong with their motivation--that they're evil." He laughs.

Even now, Goodman says he likes Bartlett and reads his columns whenever he has the chance. He even claims to have recommended him for a job at conservative think tank the Cato Institute. He says he didn't want to fire Bartlett but that he had no choice. He simply didn't deliver what he promised, which is a book on tax policy--the kind of book that wouldn't receive much attention in a newspaper like this.

But on the matter of publicity, this much is also true: Had Bartlett not been fired and had it not been announced in the Times, then perhaps the National Center for Policy Analysis, founded in 1983 in a leaky room at the University of Dallas, would have continued to operate under the radar, unnoticed by most, save for those who read the fine print at the bottom of op-eds or read newspaper stories about health-care issues and Social Security reform or tax cuts.

"They're more of a second- or third-tier think tank in the conservative movement," says Michael Dolny, who has been researching think tanks for a decade for media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "They don't get quite as much attention. They are part of the right-wing echo chamber...The right has been very good in spreading the wealth around to a diversity of voices, making sure you have many saying the same thing. The NCPA has been effective in repeating that message, but I am not sure how innovative they've been."

Dolny notes that until recently the NCPA "was invisible" when it came to think-tank references in the media. But in 2004 it leaped into the top 25 of the most-cited think tanks in the country. The topics ranged all over the place, from studies that ranked teachers' salaries to reports that concluded global warming wasn't man-made to editorials pushing the privatization of Social Security.

The NCPA may be a relative unknown, but it's a think tank taken seriously. Indeed, Goodman's known primarily for one issue--health savings accounts, or HSAs--but it's one issue that's gone from think-tank proposal to policy during the NCPA's relatively brief lifetime.