Andy Steiner

The Mitch Pearlstein Experiment

Minnesota Law and Politics
August/September 2007

By Andy Steiner

People tend to form an opinion about Mitchell B. Pearlstein, president and founder of the Minneapolis-based conservative think tank Center of the American Experiment (CAE), before they’ve even had a chance to meet him.

At least that’s what his wife of 15 years, Rev. Diane Darby McGowan, thinks.

“When I started dating Mitch, I ran a homeless shelter,” says McGowan, an ordained deacon at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. “People in that line of work tend to be liberal, and I was often embarrassed to say what he did for a living. One day I was speaking at a church in Linden Hills and I told the group that I’d just gotten engaged. Somebody said, ‘Tell us about him.’ I hemmed and hawed a bit but eventually said something about the Center. One of the men there gasped and asked, ‘Does that mean that he works with that asshole Mitch Pearlstein?’ I said, ‘I’m engaged to Mitch Pearlstein.’” McGowan rolls her eyes, laughs and adds wryly: “Later, he and his wife came to our wedding.”

In person Pearlstein, 59, is polite, scholarly, affable. He’s smart — and confident enough in his opinions that he may at times seem ponderous and arrogant — but he’s anything but an asshole.

Rather, he’s a complex bag of contradictions: a fervent Second Amendment supporter who has never fired a gun; the eldest son of a liberal, Jewish, New York union organizer who argues that organized labor has been a drain on the American economy; a Ph.D.-holding intellectual who has hung out in as many coffee shops as any latté-drinking liberal; a committed city dweller and proud father of an adopted biracial child.

Pearlstein isn’t what you’d expect — and many who know him say that’s been the secret to his success.

“Once they get a close look at Mitch and the work he’s trying to do at the Center, the liberal establishment in this state hasn’t been able to write him off by saying, ‘You’re just a rich white guy and that’s what’s motivating you,’” says Kristin Robbins, former head of Minnesotans for School Choice, a school voucher advocacy program sponsored by CAE. “Mitch is living his ideals. He’s impossible to stereotype. He’s Jewish. He’s an intellectual. He and his wife don’t even share the same last name. Let’s just say he’s not the typical guy you’d meet at the Heritage Foundation.”

Joe Selvaggio, founder of Project for Pride in Living, has worked with Pearlstein on a number of CAE-sponsored projects (he also claims partial credit for introducing him to McGowan). He says Pearlstein’s commitment to honest discussion and the change it fosters has been key in advancing many important social projects in the state.

“I respect Mitch’s openness to dialogue,” Selvaggio says. “My wife is very liberal and she doesn’t want to engage in dialogue with people like Mitch, but he’s always been very intellectually open. He’s not afraid of debate. Unlike so many people who are wrapped up in politics, he actually respects people for having a different opinion.”

Another thing that stands out about Pearlstein is the old-fashioned civility he practices in what is becoming an increasingly harsh political climate. Republican activist and commentator Tom Horner, principal of the Bloomington-based public affairs firm Himle-Horner, says Pearlstein’s measured approach sets him apart from many of the state’s high-profile Republicans.

“Lately in Minnesota we haven’t had a lot of good practitioners of thoughtful conservative politics,” Horner says. “So much of today’s conservative debate gets defined by talk radio, and so that’s the image thoughtful conservatives are up against.” By countering that direction, Horner adds, “Mitch and the Center have brought much-needed philosophical underpinnings to conservative thought. Mitch has made the discussion of policy choices in Minnesota much more interesting, much more thoughtful and much more productive.”

To hear him tell it, Pearlstein has never been one to follow the expected route. In 1965, he flaunted his family’s political beliefs when, as a 17-year-old, he volunteered to distribute literature for conservative commentator William F. Buckley’s ill-fated New York City mayoral campaign.

“My family was hoping it was a phase I was going through,” he jokes, “but I simply found Buckley’s ideas very appealing.” Pearlstein, who even as a young man loved to read about policy and watch early political talking-head shows on TV, came to Buckley very much on his own.

“My father was very much a social Democrat,” Pearlstein says. “He was a member of the Jewish fraternal organization Workmen’s Circle. Everybody in my family, everybody in my neighborhood, everybody I knew leaned left.”

Still, Pearlstein would say he’s no Alex P. Keaton. His political opinions have always been a result of careful consideration — nothing like the reactionary rebellion of Michael J. Fox’s famous television character.

“I’ve never been a joiner,” he says. “I’m more of an observer, an analyst. I make my own decisions rather than following the crowd. Back when I was going to college, I never acted like my peers just to fit in. I didn’t go to Woodstock, even though it was just down the road.”

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Pearlstein was active in the campus anti-war organization at his college, the State University of New York at Binghamton. “Many of the folks in the anti-war movement viewed American involvement in Vietnam as a reflection of American evil,” Pearlstein says. “I viewed American involvement in Vietnam as a well-intentioned mistake.” He now supports the Bush administration’s current war in Iraq.

After graduation, he worked on the congressional campaign of Democrat David Bernstein, and later as a reporter on the Sun-Bulletin, in Binghamton, N.Y., one of the newspapers Bernstein owned and edited. When he was in his early 20s, he was hired as director of public information at his alma mater; later, when his boss, president Peter Magrath, was hired to head the University of Minnesota, he followed him here. He married in the late 1970s, and a couple of years later divorced.

Pictures from his college years show a youthful Pearlstein with big hair and bell-bottoms. “I wasn’t walking around wearing a vest and a bow tie and smoking a pipe,” he allows, “but there was always a distinct distance between me and everyone else around me. Is there a good chunk of me that’s contrarian? Yes. Does that form my political opinions?” He pauses a moment to consider: “Very likely so.”

Lately Minnesota’s been hovering in the purple spectrum, and some say Pearlstein and CAE deserve credit for that, by helping conservatives reclaim some domain over touchy social issues that used to be strictly DFL territory.

Pearlstein explains that under his leadership, the Center has been focused on developing common-sense solutions to gut-level, or so-called “kitchen table,” issues — such as defending marriage, reducing out-of-wedlock births, discouraging divorce, improving education and encouraging traditional religious values. This contrasts, in Pearlstein’s world view, to how liberals take a “conference table” approach to solving problems, by focusing on “budgets and program rules and regulations.”

“I believe that, even though some of us shy away from it,” Pearlstein says, “conservatives are more likely to take on those issues publicly and offer solid solutions than people on the left.”

Pearlstein believes that his organization’s “traditional middle-class values”-based approach — rather than the liberal policies that he says are the underpinnings of much of America’s failed social experiments — can change the world for the better, and that a rising tide of prosperity will eventually lift everyone along with it.

Sounds idealistic, but try telling Pearlstein that. He squirms in his chair and practically rolls his eyes at the suggestion — perhaps it doesn’t sound intellectual enough for his liking — but when he gets talking about why he founded CAE, Pearlstein practically sounds like a starry-eyed AmeriCorps volunteer:

“It is easy for someone on the left to assume that someone like me would put together a conservative think tank to run errands for rich, nasty people. I assure you that has never been my interest. My conception of things conservative would indeed be of service to all groups, all income levels in this country. What gets me out of bed in the morning is trying to help a whole generation of kids who are doing just lousy right now. If all I wanted to do was make a lot of money, I wouldn’t be here.”

Many people who know Pearlstein think the idealist description is accurate. “He absolutely is an idealist,” agrees Robbins. “He’s not at all cynical. That’s the difference between him and a conservative like Karl Rove. He passionately believes this stuff and wants it in his life. He’s very much in it for the common good. He’s not about ‘I don’t want higher taxes so I can keep all my money.’ He’s a communitarian. He really believes the conservative way will help the world.”

Pearlstein and McGowan appear to be living the communitarian ideals he professes. Early in their marriage (they were engaged just three months after their first date), when McGowan still worked in a homeless shelter, Pearlstein supported McGowan through significant work-related injuries, and later during the lengthy ordination process. Pearlstein has worked hard to form strong relationships with McGowan’s three adult sons from her first marriage. The couple are deeply involved in McGowan’s church, a largely African-American parish in South Minneapolis. They care lovingly for their now-teenage daughter, who struggles with a number of significant emotional problems that are not terribly surprising, given her turbulent early years.

“Raising her is the most difficult thing we’ve ever done,” Pearlstein admits, adding that the girl is the biological child of one of McGowan’s former shelter clients. “It helps if you love your kid crazy. I just love her crazy.”

Vance Opperman, Democratic funder, venture capitalist and owner of MSP Communications (parent company of this publication), says that Pearlstein’s dream of bettering the lives of others is clear — even if you don’t agree with the way he wants to get there. “I admire Mitch a great deal,” Opperman says. “What I like about groups like Center of the American Experiment is that they bring real facts to the table. He cares about the issues as much as — or even more than — a lot of liberals. As a result, it elevates the policy discussion.”

Others must agree with the analysis that cerebral-yet-accessible think tanks like CAE are good for conservative politics. Nationwide, several similar organizations have been formed, according to Dane Smith, a former Star Tribune reporter who today is president of Growth and Justice, a St. Paul-based liberal economic think tank.

“Some liberal critics have said that groups like CAE are part of an orchestrated national effort to put intellectual underpinnings to the conservative movement state by state,” he says. It’s not yet clear if there are grounds for this theory, but, Smith adds, “I certainly wouldn’t agree with Mitch’s argument that conservatives have some advantage over Democrats on kitchen-table issues.”

Tom Stauber, vice chair of the Center board, believes that Pearlstein’s trademark idealism has had an influence on some very significant parties in our state.

“Part of what Mitch has done is make it OK to be conservative and idealistic,” he says. “You take a look at our governor. He’s a very idealistic guy too. Being idealistic is not a bad thing. Many of today’s high-profile conservatives are becoming more openly empathetic to a lot of things. It’s more of a direction that we as conservatives need to go in as opposed to being so far right that we are oblivious to some of society’s problems. We’ve carried that torch for so many years that people think conservatives are heartless. Mitch is proof that we all aren’t.”

Pearlstein’s 16-year tenure with the Center hasn’t always been smooth sailing. There have been a number of rough patches over the years, when board members and benefactors took issue with what they perceived as Pearlstein’s overly genteel and stodgy leadership style, the controversial editorials he published in the local and national press — not to mention the Center’s mounting debt. (At its height during his tenure it reached $312,000.) But the biggest — and most extensively covered — dustup of all came in 2004 when, after a highly contentious board meeting, Pearlstein was removed from his post as president and CEO and replaced with Republican party activist Annette Meeks.

For a little over a year, Pearlstein, with the new title of president emeritus, worked under Meeks’ tenure, writing, moderating events and fundraising and generally keeping a lower profile. Meeks’ staff, he says, mostly kept their distance, afraid, perhaps, that the stink of his downfall might rub off on them.

Then, in February 2002, in a stunning turn of events, the Center’s board of directors voted Meeks out, and reinstated Pearlstein at the organization’s helm.

Stauber, president of Edwards Sales, a Chaska-based distribution and construction firm, was board chair during the Meeks firing.

“We replaced Mitch because of some financial hardships,” he says, adding that during Meeks’ 14-month tenure as president, the Center’s debt rose to $360,000, and “Mitch was shelved and put out to pasture. He was never included in a lot of discussions. During that time, the Center went from being a conservative think tank to a political machine. Unfortunately, it took a while for those of us on the board to realize what was going on.”

Meeks’ firing — and Pearlstein’s reinstatement — was controversial among much of the center staff, five of whom signed a letter in support of Meeks. One of the group who signed the letter quit; the other four were summarily fired. Some key members of the Center’s board resigned in protest.

Many outside observers say that — for good or ill — the Center took on a more overtly political tone during Meeks’ tenure. “Annette Meeks is a political partisan,” Opperman says. “She ran the center like a partisan, which is something Mitch has never done.”

Smith of Growth and Justice first met Pearlstein 25 years ago when they both worked at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. While he praises Pearlstein and CAE for providing “an intellectual foundation for the conservative movement in Minnesota and perhaps nationwide,” he argues that, under Meeks, a leader he calls “also really sharp and intelligent,” the Center was making significant and important changes.

“I thought the group that came in after Mitch was doing some assertive and interesting things,” Smith says. For example, “they produced a pretty neutral, even-handed analysis of votes coming out of the legislature. The group was poised to be a little less of a good cop and become an open advocate of ideas and candidates.”

But bygones must be bygones, and Stauber notes that, true to form, even since climbing back to the top, Pearlstein has remained civil about being pushed aside.

“Mitch was so good, so gracious about not saying anything bad about what was going on at the Center,” Stauber recalls with a rueful chuckle. “I guess he didn’t want to call his own baby ugly, but it was a pretty ugly baby. It’s a little embarrassing that we allowed that as a board.”

Pearlstein himself can be critical of what was going on at CAE before the big shakeup.

“It is absolutely fair to say that the Center needed a kick in the pants three, five years ago,” he says. “Some people thought we were getting predictable. There was a sense that we needed to be more activist. But then, when we started sounding partisan and not sufficiently civil, it didn’t work the way some people thought it would.”

First on Pearlstein’s to-do list is to help dig the Center out of the financial hole in which it currently resides. Fully aware of his financial responsibilities, but also committed to his ideological goals, he walks a fine line between pleasing benefactors — while publicly taking stands, like his March 2007 Star Tribune editorial that criticized Ann Coulter’s acidic political posturing.

This was an issue, Pearlstein emphasizes, that was too important to ignore.

“Mitch’s role is to raise money,” Horner says. “He needs resources to keep the center alive and healthy. There are a lot of people in Minnesota who don’t take kindly to criticism of the Ann Coulters of the world. It was risky — but it was also quintessential Mitch Pearlstein.”

Pearlstein argues that he’s committed to bringing CAE back on its feet. (He reports that the organization’s debt has been reduced by $80,000.) He knows it will take a lot of energy on his part, and he’s happy to do it, even if there are times he’d rather be doing something else.

“When I’m meeting and greeting and speaking to folks, I really do enjoy that,” Pearlstein argues. “American Experiment wouldn’t have survived more than a day and a half if I wasn’t a pretty good fundraiser, but everything being equal I’d rather be hanging out at Caribou, drinking coffee and reading. That’s where I get my strength. I can be with other people and enjoy it, but what I really crave is being off in a corner by myself.”

---

On a cool early spring evening, Pearlstein seems about as far away from a quiet coffee shop as he could get. It is CAE’s annual dinner — the second since his reinstatement — and, wound tighter than a spring and clad in a snappy tuxedo, he is hard at work, pressing the flesh with a crowd of wealthy benefactors at the sponsors’ reception.

At his side is McGowan, smiling serenely and dressed in an elegant evening gown. She, too, is greeting supporters, touching one person warmly on the shoulder, looking deeply into another’s eyes. It’s hard to tell she ever has reservations about her husband’s politics.

Once they’ve been ushered in for dinner, the large audience of supporters — a virtual who’s who of Minnesota politicos — appears enthusiastic. After the singing of the national anthem and the presentation of the flag, Minneapolis City Councilmember Don Samuels delivers a poetic prayer, Governor Tim Pawlenty and his wife, Mary, are welcomed heartily, and headliner George Will delivers his speech smoothly, professionally, punctuated by cheers and laughs at all the appropriate moments.

Will successful events like this one further Minnesota conservatives’ faith in Pearlstein and his vision for the Center? Or will his distinctive approach to conservative politics once again be seen as too Minnesota Nice?

For his part, in the shadow of his seventh decade, Pearlstein says he could easily imagine being at the Center “for the rest of my working days” — at least 10 years into the future.

“I have a friend who says that before CAE, conservative politics in Minnesota meant ‘No taxes, no abortions and I want my guns,’” Pearlstein says dryly. “That comment was glib, but our very first public event was on poverty. It was no accident. I’m proud of our civility. I’m proud of our reputation. I’m proud of specific policy achievements we’ve been able to help engineer. Since CAE opened, the political environment in this state has been slowly shifting to the right. I like to think that we’re showing all Minnesotans that there’s more than one way to be a conservative.”