(Aug. 31 print edition) When 1,500 policy wonks from around the country gathered at the Sheraton New Orleans this past week, the next trendy legislative ideas surely were floating around the premises. The biggest beneficiaries of the State Policy Network’s annual meeting, though, may have been the city of New Orleans and state of Louisiana.
The SPN is an association of conservative think tanks concentrating mostly on state and local issues. Each state has at least one SPN member-organization; there are 64 in all. Louisiana’s Pelican Institute acted as host this year for the four-day meeting, which attracted not just those 64 but also representatives of more than 500 other organizations that push right-leaning solutions in the public square. In all, the conference featured more than 100 sessions on issues relating to education reform, artificial intelligence, state budgets, upward mobility, health care, energy and more.
SPN is “a ground-up organization that works for state solutions that lead to national impact,” said Brooke Medina, SPN’s vice president of communications. “States are the test labs of liberty.”
Harkening back to the long-cherished conservative belief that government and public policy are usually best handled at levels closer to home, the participants rarely mentioned Washington, D.C.’s political battles. Far more than a few, though, seemed concerned — without referencing any particular person by name — about the trend toward centralization of power in the nation’s capital and in the presidency.
And even though the event, by its very nature, almost exclusively featured conservative experts speaking to conservative audiences, a repeated theme involved the need to not just “preach to the choir” but instead to promote civil discourse among any willing constituencies not already “dug in” to far-left positions…..
Similarly, keynote speaker Arthur Brooks, the former president of the American Enterprise Institute and behavioral scientist who teaches courses at Harvard on leadership and the “science of happiness” (his website, www.arthurbrooks.com, does a thorough job explaining the brain science behind this), laid out a case for why “The free enterprise system is a happiness machine.”
[The full column is at this link.]
